My educational background is in finance and economics, and I worked for a few years in the traditional finance industry until I discovered blockchain technology. In 2020, I decided to try my luck and built my first mining rig (8 GTX 1660 Super graphics cards) to share my computational power with a mining pool to add new blocks on Ethereum POW.
It worked so well that I decided to make it my full-time job until the Ethereum merge happened. I was initially more hardware-oriented, but after the merge with the new POS consensus, I had to transition to a more software-oriented role (system administration).
My brother and I invested in running our bare-metal server to operate multiple minipools on Rocket Pool. In terms of scaling up our operations, I felt that we hit a blockage because opening just one more minipool at a time involved depositing tens of thousands of dollars in ETH and RPL. Then I discovered DVT and the possibility of offering only the hardware and management to spin up an operator to assist validators with their duties without needing to stake ETH. Soon after, I discovered SSV Network and was impressed by their documentation, the community and their values, which aligned with Ethereum’s ethos.
For a while, I wanted to get more involved somehow in the Ethereum ecosystem but found it hard to do it on my own without direct support from other participants. That’s when I found the SSVdivers Program and decided to apply as an ambassador for the SSV Network.
Right off the bat, for my personal project as a prospect to become an SSV ambassador, I thought about setting up from scratch my Rock5b (a Raspberry Pi on steroids) to run an SSV operator on the Holesky testnet. Curious by nature, I like to dive deep into the mechanisms to understand how things work, so why not be an SSV diver? 
If I could do it from my house, I thought, why not share the knowledge with others and help decentralize the Ethereum network? To do that, in my candidacy form, I suggested that I could write a guide providing a high-level overview to help others set themselves up with a modest budget to run their own SSV operator.
Now, my Rock5b is all set and attests on the Holesky testnet as an operator in an SSV cluster. This will allow me to help troubleshoot issues that other operators may encounter and participate in the new development updates from SSV Labs (the team behind the development and maintenance of the SSV Network).
For my long-term goals, my brother and I are involved with SSV Network. We rented two dedicated servers and are currently running one operator on SSV on the mainnet. We are also about to start the Lido x SSV Simple DVT Testnet #4 soon. All the experience I gained with my SSV diver personal project is also providing tools to push further our project AXBLOX.
One of the greatest opportunities of being an SSV Diver is the networking possibilities that come with it. We had a community call to celebrate 1M ETH staked on the SSV protocol, and all the SSV ambassadors had the chance to be on the panel and participate in the discussion with other key players from SSV DAO, SSV Labs, and SSV Foundation.
Another time, there was a Twitter Space between SSV and InfStones, which gave me the opportunity to listen to and ask questions to the BD director of InfStones. As I set up the monitoring system with Prometheus to collect data from my SSV operator and display it on a Grafana dashboard, I experienced firsthand the complexity and challenges of doing it manually. This allowed me to fully appreciate the advantages that InfStones offers with their user-friendly UI and integration with SSV, which takes care of all the technical steps for the stakers. So yes, I learned new skills, and that journey helped me recognize the advantages that some protocols offer.
SSV Network is a community that grows so fast, and as an SSV Diver, I have to spread the word, which gives me the motivation needed to keep myself up to date.
Until now, with the motivation of my colleagues at SSV, and not without many hurdles, I have successfully completed my project to set up my Rock5b as an operator on SSV on the Holesky Testnet. I’m talking about:
- Booting Rock5b from NVMe
- Setting up SSH Reverse Proxy with Nginx and Cloudflare
- Setting up all these services:
- The Execution and Consensus Ethereum clients
- The SSV node
- The MEV relay
- The SSV-DKG
- Grafana dashboard with Prometheus
- Creating a new validator and distributing it on SSV Network
I published two guides until now:
I had the opportunity to manage the SSV Network subreddit, and I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished by ensuring the most important news from SSV is also available on the SSV Network subreddit. The average post received 150 views, which is good for SSV to have a presence on the popular Reddit platform.
Lately, I was thinking of writing a guide to explain how I used an Ansible Playbook (a YAML script that automates tasks and configurations across multiple systems) to fast-track the installation and setup of a node operator on the SSV Network. The first time I tried to set up my Rock5b, I had to change the SSD because the model was not able to sync the EL due to its latency and IOPS, which were not good enough. The second time, I used an Ansible Playbook to speed up the process.
My brother and I maintain a private GitHub repo with all the Ansible Playbook code, and I’m considering making it public with documentation to simplify the setup of a node operator on SSV.
If you are tech-savvy or more interested in the tokenomics and governance side of SSV Network, applying to the SSV Diver program could be your chance to join an ultra-dynamic community and find the motivation needed to achieve your personal goals.
SSV Network is truly contributing to the foundation of the Ethereum ecosystem. It’s not just a layer 2 or add-on service on top of the EVM, it’s a new infrastructure to improve the decentralization, fault tolerance, security, and flexibility of Ethereum’s core. Join the SSV Diver program if you want to contribute at the foundational level of the Ethereum ecosystem.