Rocket Pool

Rocket Pool was founded in 2016 by David Rugendyke in anticipation of Ethereum’s transition from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. Rugendyke sought to organically reduce entry barriers for participating in PoS consensus, including the minimum staking requirements and hardware demands. Likewise, he sought a solution to the illiquidity tradeoff of stakers waiting until withdrawals are enabled before accessing ETH staking capital and rewards. Rocket Pool allows users with as little as 0.01 ETH to maintain custody of funds and stake towards any node operator while mitigating the centralization risk of Staking-as-a-Service (SaaS). This is achieved by allowing users to possess private validator and withdrawal keys.

Rocket Pool first launched in the Beta phase across three main versions, V1 (July 2018), V2 (August 2019), and V3 (March 2021), before its eventual mainnet launch in November 2021. In the same month, Rocket Pool announced the migration of the initial RPL token contract to a new token contract. This was to incentivize protocol participation from node operators via RPL rewards derived from inflationary emissions.

In August 2022, preceding the September 2022 Ethereum Merge, the Rocket Pool mainnet undertook its first major upgrade (termed Redstone). The Redstone upgrade enabled the distribution of priority tips from node operators to stakers that began following the Merge. Redstone also improved the gas efficiency of the inflationary RPL token rewards system. Lastly, Redstone introduced an opt-in Smoothing Pool feature for Rocket Pool minipool operators. Because validators on the Ethereum Beacon Chain are randomly chosen to propose blocks and thus receive priority fees, the reward rate can vary dramatically between validators. The Smoothing Pool solves this by collectively pooling the priority fees of all validators that have opted in. Priority fees are then distributed evenly to all participating validators, which significantly improves the rate and predictability of rewards.

On April 18, 2023, following the implementation of Ethereum’s Shapella upgrade, which enabled staking withdrawals on the Beacon Chain, Rocket Pool underwent the Atlas update. Atlas lowered the requirements for running a Rocket Pool minipool from 16 ETH to 8 ETH. Users that were already running a 16 ETH minipool were able to migrate to an 8 ETH minipool and use the additional 8 ETH to create a second 8 ETH minipool.

As of Feb. 4, 2024, all Rocket Pool protocol features are available on mainnet, including (i) Staking ETH in exchange for rETH, (ii) Operating nodes, (iii) Participating in governance using RPL tokens, and (iv) Participating in the Oracle DAO by verifying minipool activity and the RPL:ETH ratio. As of the same date, users can redeem rETH for the underlying staked ETH on Ethereum directly through Rocket Pool or trade rETH for ETH and the accumulated ETH staking rewards on any exchange supporting rETH-based pairs.

As of the same date, there are 3,530 node operators running a total of 26,794 validators (~2.92% of all validators on Ethereum), according to Rocket Pool’s website and Beaconcha.in. In addition, a total of 860,544 ETH has been staked with Rocket Pool.

On Aug. 29, 2023, the project team revealed possible future protocol releases grouped under the names “Houston” and “Saturn” via Discord. On Nov. 8, 2023, the Rocket Pool team published further details regarding its intended Houston and Saturn upgrades. The releases included in each are listed below:

Houston

Saturn

On Jan. 16, 2024, the project team stated, “Work continues on post-audit activities for Houston, including audit triage, fixes, & documentation, plus testing.” A commercially reasonable search found no disclosures from the project team regarding an intended launch for Houston or Saturn, though Houston is intended to be released prior to Saturn.

Notably, each feature must be approved by governance before implementation. As of Feb. 4, 2024, some of the above-mentioned intended features have been approved via Snapshot and are awaiting implementation (RPIPs 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, and 35).

Of note, some information regarding the intended Houston and Saturn upgrades was only discussed in the project's Discord and not in its official documentation. To view the message link, one must have joined the Discord channel, which can be done here.

On Jan 30, 2024, the Rocket Pool Grants and Bounties Management Committee (GMC) approved a bounty for development to enable Rocket Pool node operators to join the EigenLayer network.