The problem Friendly Staking solves

Home staking is super hard! You have to run a node on powerful hardware, monitor it constantly, make sure it stays up-to-date, and even if everything works fine, you end up worrying about it anyways. That's why most stakers trust in staking pools, like LIDO, Rocket Pool, or even fully centralized providers. However, their market dominance is a serious threat to Ethereum's security. It can also be seen as a serious capital misallocation, as 1ETH sent to LIDO results in much less marginal security compared to giving it to a home staker. Last but not least, they take high fees.

Friendly Staking combines the best of home staking with the best of staking pools. It's based on the premise that while almost no one wants to run a node, almost everyone knows someone who does. Friendly Staking allows groups of friends to easily and safely pool money and automatically split the rewards. Through social pressure, the group still has political influence on the node, making friendly staked ETH more valuable to the network compared to traditional pools.

Challenges I ran into

Testing this was hard. Not only is GoerliETH hard to come buy in large quantities (unless you want to pay for it), but once it goes into the Deposit Contract it takes a while to get out of again. For Gnosis' Chiado testnet, while integration was generally surprisingly pleasant, there was the additional challenge that it is not open for independent stakers. My solution was to deploy "fake" deposit contracts that have the same interface, but allow immediately withdrawing deposited funds.