# Validator Beat

> A free, client-side self-assessment that scores Ethereum validator setups **Stage 0, 1, or 2** across six single points of failure. Nothing is stored or sent to a server; results are shareable via six-letter codes. Built by Obol as a public good, in partnership with Lido.

Staking earns roughly 2% APR; slashing can take far more, and correlated failures are penalized super-linearly. Validator Beat makes a validator's resilience legible: six banded questions, each mapping to a green/yellow/red (or "not sure") "pizza slice", rolling up to one Stage.

## Stages

**Stage 0 — Getting started**: a safety slice (Key Custody, Client Diversity, OS Diversity, CPU Architecture) is red or not sure. One failure could get you slashed.
**Stage 1 — Safety**: every safety slice is green or yellow, but not all six are green. No single failure can get you slashed.
**Stage 2 — Liveness**: all six slices green. No single failure can take you offline.

Colors mean the same thing on every slice: red = one failure could get you slashed, yellow = one failure could take you offline (or a partial safety gap). Provider Diversity and Geographic Diversity are liveness slices (green or yellow only) and block Stage 2 but not Stage 1. "Not sure" is treated as an open gap.

## The six slices (in canonical order)

1. **Key Custody** — Concentrated private keys are a single point of failure — one compromise lets an attacker sign slashable messages with your entire stake.
2. **Client Diversity** — If a supermajority client forks onto a wrong chain, validators that follow it face mass correlated slashing; refusing to attest on disagreement turns that into mere downtime.
3. **Provider Diversity** — One hosting provider's outage or compromise can take every validator hosted there with it.
4. **OS Diversity** — An OS monoculture is a supply-chain risk: one poisoned update or zero-day could reach every node — and every key — at once.
5. **CPU Architecture** — A CPU-architecture monoculture is a hardware-level supply-chain and side-channel risk — one flaw can reach keys on every machine you run.
6. **Geographic Diversity** — Nodes concentrated in one country or region share exposure to grid failures, natural disasters, and local policy shifts.

The infrastructure slices (provider, OS, CPU, geography) assume the validator runs active/active — several cooperating nodes backing the same stake, with key shares split across them — so diversity translates into uptime and key safety, not just redundancy.

## Share codes

A result is encoded as six letters, one per slice in the order above: `G` (green), `Y` (yellow), `R` (red), or `U` (not sure). OS and CPU have no yellow band; Provider and Geography have no red band. Example: `https://validatorbeat.com/GYYGGY` — a stable URL with an Open Graph preview card and a README badge at `https://validatorbeat.com/badge/GYYGGY.svg`. All 1296 valid combinations exist as static pages.

## Docs

- [Methodology](https://validatorbeat.com/methodology/): scoring rules, the active/active assumption, nuances and limits
- [Take the assessment](https://validatorbeat.com/assess/): six questions, ~60 seconds, runs in the browser
- [Agent skill](https://validatorbeat.com/skill.md): how an AI agent can run this assessment conversationally
- [Source code](https://github.com/ObolNetwork/validator-beat): Apache-2.0; the scoring rubric lives in `lib/rubric`