Abuse of Deposit-Bot

[Ahbaay]

Beginning

I have been following some operators for a long time. and I believe these operators are abusing the bot at a high rate.

First, I will forward the list of these operators, and then I will detail my research one by one.

• First quadruple:

Tatarop1, Tatarop2, Tatarmalai, Trkf

• Second quadruple:

Ozar, Alezz, Raptor47, FuntikNode

Let’s start with the first four.

Tatarop1

This operator did not participate in the first round of the testnet.
And the first validator to choose this operator chose it on February 8th.
Today is March 20 and there are 440 validators.

Active since February 8th.
So it is about 40 days.
and selected by 440 validators.
This is great work.

But!
Unfortunately it occupies the bot.

440 Validators / 40 days = 11 V/d

So it’s chosen by 11 validators a day.
Moreover, it does not have Verified status.

So how is it chosen? Is it natural selection?
No.
He is always chosen with the first four.

The photo below is from yesterday.
List of validators added in a row.

second operator of the first quartet:

Tatarop2

It’s a coincidence that it was chosen by a total of 440 validators
And did not participate in the first round of the testnet
On what date did the first validator choose this operator?
Similar! February 8

Third operator of the first quartet:

Tatarmalai

let’s examine!

How many validators do you think it has in total?
Exactly! You know
440!

Participated in the first round of the testnet?
You know that too no
On what date did the first validator choose this operator?
Similar! February 8

Last operator of the first quartet:

Trkf
The answers to the questions are exactly the same.

Did he join the first round?
No

First validator date?
February 8

Total Validators
440

Summary.
I named these 4 operators the first quad.
The reason is this:
If the validators chose any of these, they should have chosen the other 3 as well.

In other words, 440 validators selected these 4 operators at the same time.

Tatarop1, Tatarop2, Tatarmalai, Trkf

As the names of the operators suggest, we can say that a single real person manages them all.

An assumption is spoken on the discord channel:
The bot is not abused,
Operators agree and choose each other.

This assumption is not correct, yes there are those who do.
But what is happening now is the abuse of the bot.

Because up to 4 operators can negotiate with each other,
and all 4 can choose each other.
In this case, they will have a maximum of 4 validators per day.

But these operators, which I call the first quaternary,
Adds more than 10 validators per day.

Proposal

I believe these operators should be disqualified from all awards.

A more optimistic sanction:
These operators should not take advantage of the final round reward.

The rights of 10 people a day and 300 people a month are being usurped.

So they prevent maybe 300 new participants a month from joining the testnet program.

---

Let’s draw a line, and take a look at the second four.
Ozar, Alezz, Raptor47, FuntikNode

Ozar
Here the situation is worse.

The operator did not participate in the first 2 rounds.

And it has a total of 481 Validators

It was selected for the first time on February 22.
ie just 27 days ago.

481 Validators / 27 Days = 17,81 V/d

Yeah! This operator is chosen by 17 validators per day.!

second operator of the second quartet:

Alezz

Total validator:
491

Participated in the first two rounds,
and the first validator is January 27th.

Probably the main operator installed before the idea of exploiting the bot came to your mind

It doesn’t seem to be a problem for now. Is not it?

third operator of the second quartet:

Raptor47

Total validator 491
did not participate in the first round
The date of the first selection is February 9th.

491 validators in approximately 40 days…

Last operator of the second quartet:

FuntikNode

He did not participate in the first and second rounds.
It has a total of 481 validators.
was elected for the first time on February 22.

481 validators in 27 days.
17 validator per day!

---

I named these four operators the second quad.
The reason, of course, is this:

This photo is from today. about 2 hours ago.

If you take a look at the explorer, you can easily see it.

Conclusion

These operator groups, called the first quad and the second quad, have occupied the bot by taking more than 1000 deposits from the deposit bot in the last 1 month.

So 32,000 Goeth.

Assuming that 1 out of every 4 participants is a new member.

They prevented 250 new members from testing the project.
They did this in just 1 month.

I want to underline. none of these operators have verified status.

and as you can see from the statistics, it is selected by 17 validators per day.
Even verified operators are not selected that much per day.

My request:
These operators should be intervened immediately and sanctions should be applied.

They must be disqualified from the final round prizes, or all prizes.

And the sanctions imposed on these members need to be announced.
This will be a lesson for members who want to abuse the other bot.

Our daily deposit limit is 200.

30 of them are spent only for these two groups.

ie 15%.

15% of the 200 deposit limit is spent for two groups. I think it’s actually two people.

I think it has an appropriate percentage for abuse.

They only harm the project.

Kind regards.

[Ahbaay]

When I made this post, all operators in the first quadruple had 440 validators.

Currently 454.

The second quadruple had 481 validators.

Now 493.

The evening cycle has not yet begun. that is, 14 additional validators were added to the first group and 12 to the second group. only on the morning cycle. 26 of the 100 deposits in the morning cycle were spent for both groups.

[SpookyG]

Thank you for making this write-up @Ahbaay! Sure looks like abuse to me…

We need to show that this type of abuse is not taken lightly. I would support excluding them from all rewards.

[fod]

Great investigation, Ahbaay! Thanks for taking the time to do this. I agree that these participants seem to be abusing the rewards program and should be disqualified, and I agree that we should be sending a clear message that abuse won’t be tolerated.

[alezz]

Good time of the day! I read with great attention your reasoning about the facts that, in your opinion, indicate violations by the following operators: alezz, ozar, raptor47 & funtiknode. But apart from your assumptions and unfounded conclusions about violations, I could not find anything. I want to draw your attention to the fact that the owner of the wallet and discord account had the opportunity to create validators by receiving tokens from the bot once a day. In addition, the testnet rules did not impose restrictions on the number of validators created on one wallet. It follows from this that a small group of individuals, united by a common desire to participate in the testnet, could achieve such impressive results when creating validators. This is how our team worked, consistently and efficiently. Therefore, I consider your position not objective and unfair. I will take the liberty of putting forward my own initiative. I consider it fair if the members of the project team have doubts about the distribution of awards, conduct a KYC procedure for all testnet participants, and not organize a witch hunt. This measure will help to more effectively identify bots and participants who violated the rules. Good luck to everyone!

[fod]

Given that you were registering more than 17 validators per day, this means that your “team” consisted of at least 18 individuals?! Is that what you’re claiming?

Even if that is true, I think it’s still questionable behavior to gather a group of 18+ people to collude. In my opinion, that was certainly not in the spirit of the testnet. From the proposal:

Abusive behaviour of the network (e.g. getting a hold of big amounts of goerli to register hundreds or thousands of validators) will result in exclusion from the incentivization program, decided by the community’s ambassadors, DAO and/ or Blox.

Your team got a large amount of goerli ETH to register hundreds of validators.

[Hackworth]

I concur 100%. So much work was put into stopping this kind of abuse, it hardly makes sense to reward it when the result is staring you in the face.

[alezz]

I could explain how the structure and interaction of the team members is arranged, in which there are much more than 17 people, and the coordination of their activities depended on 4 main persons, including me. But I get the impression that this does not matter, because all my statements are a priori questioned. In addition, you are simply ignoring the fact that each testnet participant was in equal conditions from the moment when deposits began to be issued through the bot. It is always easier to accuse someone of breaking the rules than to be objective. In my opinion, passing KYC by all testnet participants could solve the problem of abuse

[Ahbaay]

You know very well that the abuse you are talking about cannot be resolved with KYC. A person who creates a group of 18 people for investment will easily find 4 people for KYC. and will actually abuse the KYC procedure as well.

The solution you suggested didn’t seem like a good and real solution to me.

[fod]

Sorry, my friend, but yes, I think colluding with a large group of people is clear abuse of this program, regardless of any KYC done. And it would be impractical to do KYC on everyone anyway.

[Lord_Rin]

hello friends!

I was very surprised when I read this article… I don’t really understand what kind of abuse you are talking about when you write about Raptor47, alezz, FuntikNode and Ozar. I have not been with the ssv.network project since the beginning, I joined at the end of January. I went through all the steps in the history of the project, creating the owner, my first validator. Spent all day in the ssv.network community chats, getting help from other members, and being given the opportunity to belong to themselves, I think, like all of you… I really liked the idea of ​​this project, as did my friends. We decided to participate in the project with our entire team and devote most of our time to this particular project. Yes, we are not few, and the number of validators that we have is the merit of our entire team, and not 1 or 2 people, and not even 20 … to get Goeth, the whole team spent as much effort as all members of the ssv.network community. It is out of the question that our team infringed on the rights of other participants, we did not violate the rules in the work of deposit-bot and were on an equal footing with the rest of the community. The participation rules do not specify a limit on the number of validators per operator, and there is no indication for the validator that he needs to choose a different operator each time … Our community is much smaller, for example NodesGuru or Huobipool , but we have it …

[fod]

The reason people are upset is because you got a large amount of goerli and created hundreds of validators. I understand that your interpretation was that since each member of your team was an individual, and since each individual stayed under the limit of one validator per day, you were within the rules. But you all seem to be missing the point. And I would even argue that any one individual that worked very hard to get goerli and create a validator every single day is also missing the point.

The purpose of setting the limits on the bot was to prevent abuse, not to create an upper bound on your rewards. And the purpose of the program in general was to help the developers, give something back to the community, spread the word, and motivate operators to perform well… not to encourage people to come in and squeeze out every bit of value that they could.

I’m sincerely happy that you all found this project and think it’s interesting. And despite all of this, I sincerely hope that you stick around. But I hope you decide to stay because of the immense value of SSV’s technology and the great potential it has to improve Ethereum as a whole… or at the very least, because you expect it to grow in value and wish to grow your investment in it. If you do stay, my advice is to be a part of the community—follow the project, engage, and contribute. Don’t exploit our generosity or stretch the boundaries we create.

We are trying our best to reward good members of the community, and there will be plenty of additional opportunities to come.

[trkf75]

Good day SSV guys!
Our team kept and keeps 4 nodes (operators Tatarop1, Tatarop2, Tatarmalai, Trkf).
We were unpleasantly surprised by the fact that, according to some subjective assessments, they decided to deprive us of our awards. Some participants probably envied our efficiency. And for some reason now we have to justify ourselves and prove that we really did our job with high quality - we fully participated in the SSV testnet. After all, there were and are certain rules that we complied with and the SSV team cannot change the rules after all the work has been done by us, it is unethical and undermines trust in the future to fully participate in testing SSV, since in the future you will also be able to change regulations.
You all know very well how hard it was to be constantly (almost 15 hours a day) near the computer and these 2 months were very difficult for us. We achieved almost 100% performance with our operators, instead of INFURA we installed and worked on our own ETH nodes. We explained, attracted and organized the work of many of our friends and acquaintances.
It is unpleasant for us to make excuses, but we consider your decision to deprive us of rewards to be unfair, if only because we did not violate any rules that were known during the testnet period. It’s not fair to change the rules retroactively and you can’t make decisions based on someone else’s subjective opinion. It is unfair to change the rules retroactively, and decisions cannot be made on the basis of mere assumptions and subjective opinion.
Our entire team is mostly newbies, and they are all at a loss and disappointed both in cryptocurrency and testnets in general, and SSV in particular
We really hope that you will change your mind and we will receive honestly earned rewards. We also look forward to further cooperation. Thanks.
Sincerely, Sergei.
Discord Sergo#7276

[satbalwyn]

why not propose a vote to let all the community decide.

[fod]

They can try, but it is extremely unlikely to pass. There were a large number of people involved in this decision, and I think the vote was unanimous to disqualify them. Those are the same community members that do most of the voting on snapshot, so the outcome will be the same.

[Ahbaay]

There was already an open discussion channel on discord for about 10 days for the appeal. and it was decided that it was abuse.

[trkf75]

I think that this issue should not have been discussed at all. Only one thing is important here - whether the established rules were violated or not.
And it doesn’t matter that whoever was there in the discord gathered and discussed this issue, the truth is important. And who are the judges? We did not look through all the channels in the discord, and without our participation, someone met somewhere, discussed something with someone and decided without us, great! Is that how democracy works?
I ask (demand) the SSV team to provide evidence of our violation of specific points of the rules, if they concluded that the rules were violated. In the meantime, at the moment, the decision to deprive the awards was made from a mixture of conjecture and assumptions based on subjective assessments and conclusions.

[fod]

Again, as I wrote above, you did clearly violate the rules. You colluded with a group to get a large amount of goerli ETH and register hundreds of validators. Quoting from the rules in the incentivized testnet proposal:

Abusive behaviour of the network (e.g. getting a hold of big amounts of goerli to register hundreds or thousands of validators) will result in exclusion from the incentivization program, decided by the community’s ambassadors, DAO and/ or Blox.

The “judges” were the ambassadors and Blox, as stated in the rules. The “evidence” is everything above, which clearly shows that you registered all those validators. You all made your case, and the larger community had plenty of time to discuss and comment, both here and on discord. The overwhelming consensus was, and still is, to disqualify you. Sorry, but there’s really nothing else to discuss here.

[trkf75]

Dear representative of SSV Fod. Thanks for your reply.
Sorry, but if not here, then what other platform can we choose to discuss this issue with the involvement of more people?

1. Your rules say “hundreds or thousands of validators”. “Hundreds” is a number that means several hundred, that is, 2 hundred or more.
   A team of more than 20 people young and interested in crypto projects were trained and took part in the SSV testnet at different stages of the project. In total, approximately 480 validators were created by common efforts - this is only 24!!! registered validators per 1 user for the entire testing period, this is 2 months. It is not clear by what methods you calculated such a number of “hundreds”, there are no hundreds, and even more so thousands.

2. And what does the remark (it looks like an accusation) about “You colluded with a group” have to do with it? In such projects, all participants are always trying to unite, what is wrong and forbidden in this? also, there are no such definitions and provisions in the participation rules, and this cannot form the basis of any statements and accusations.

The rules do not prohibit purposefully choosing certain operators.
The rules do not mention any groups and that groups can or cannot participate in the project, and if so, how. Moreover, there are operators who have 1000-2000 validators each, and I highly doubt that they achieved such results not by a group of people, but for such reasons, the SSV team for some reason deprived us of the honestly earned most of the remuneration.
On this forum, some people also wrote that your accusations and conclusions are not logical.

In summary, we unequivocally believe that your decisions are not fair to us, your rules do not contain sufficiently precise definitions and specific grounds to unambiguously determine the parameters of the violations you refer to, and blockchain, the world of blockchain, like mathematics, must be absolutely accurate and certain.

We hope for a positive solution to this issue.
Sincerely, the small team of the Crypto Commune.
Discord: Sergo#7276

[Ahbaay]

just look at this picture.
This is called abuse.

Have a team of 20 people active at the same time of day and start adding validators one after the other?

and this happens every day. No one from the 20-member team was late. All ready at the same minute every day. You must have a great team. they are quite punctual.

and this team of 20 people get together at the same time every day to add validators, but none of them follow the discord channel.

A channel called Potential Abusers was created on Discord and remained active for 10 days.

It was discussed there for 10 days. Has anyone seen that channel from this team of 20 people? Why didn’t anyone object?

Or if they saw the channel, why didn’t they report it to you? I think you should blame your team for that. Because you weren’t there during the appeal period. and none of them told you. and announced on this announcement channel. At the very least, it will be enough to follow the announcement channel.