This repo aims to have in one place all the research around decentralized staking pools for eth 2.0.
The backbone of decentralized staking pools is in distributing the control of the keys that control the validator and its withdrawal key. You can think of it as a giant multi-signature setup with some M-of-N threshold for signing attestations, block proposals and withdrawal transactions.
A good starting point could be this presentation.
Adding a consensus protocol that rewards and punishes pool participants, controls withdrawal and on-boarding then we have a full protocol for an open decentralized staking pools network.
The key word here is open as in autonomous and open to join by anyone.
Conceptually a pools network can be thought of as a 3 layer stack.
Layer 1 - Every pool is a collection of 32 ETH validators represented by a public BLS key.
Layer 2 - Every pool's public key has a corresponding distributed private key controlled via an SSV group of operators.
Layer 3 - All pools (and their SSV groups) coordinate via a consensus layer which also deals with rewards, penalties, slashing, creation/ liquidation of pools and more.\
The network has 2 actors: block producers (BP) and staker.
A BP is a bonded actor (staked) which has the responsibility of executing top consensus (attest to blocks, propose blocks and more) and local SSV group assignments (mostly eth2 network duties).
A block producer is economically incentivized to run a pool node, participate in the network and more. The block producer's collateral is also staked.
For more information regarding network economics see CDT2.0.
A staker that deposited ETH into a smart contact to stake in a pool will, in return, mint a fungible ERC-20 token representing his stake + future rewards. At deposit time the amount minted of that token will be 1:1 to the deposit amount, as time goes on and the network as a whole gains reward the user's ERC-20 token balance (and so for every other user) will grow relatively.
The ERC-20 token creates instant transferability, detached from a specific pool liquidation.
Pool liquidation is an event that is triggered by an ERC-20 token holders specifically requesting to convert back to ETH. This is also dependent on phase 1.5 of eth2 to complete, see discord discussion