On Feb 9, 2023, one of the leading cryptocurrencies, Ethereum’s decentralized staking protocol, Rocket Pool, gained $1 billion in total value locked (TVL) as per the DefiLlama report. The event occurred less than two years after the launch of its mainnet. Lido, Rocket Pool, Stakehound, Stakewise, Stafi, Sharedstake and Stkr are contributing a total stake to Ethereum with a worth of $8.11 billion (USD) per the 2022 report.
Rocket Pool provides smart nodes where users can run their node or stake their ETH for free. Any losses from bad nodes for stakers will be socialized across the whole network to minimize impacts on any single user. Sigma Prime, Trail of Bits, Consensys Diligence and Immunefi Bug Bounty have audit the Rocket Pool. At press time, the protocol has 385,920 ETH staked and 2,075 node operators.
Ethereum blockchain, with a $48.6 billion amount of TVL, showed an increase of 29% from Dec 2022, as per DappRadar’s report. Lido, the largest Defi market share with 14.75%, recorded a 36.77% increase in its TVL reaching $8 billion. BNB Chain and Tron TVL, with $7.1 billion and $5.3 billion, secured second and third positions, respectively. As per the report, the top DeFi performer was the Optimism record, with a 57.44% increase in its TVL with $808 million.
Will Ethereum staking get through the SEC crackdown
The Ethereum developers believe that the upcoming upgrade on ETH ‘Shanghai’ will come online in March. For the Shanghai upgrade, Shandong will act as a testnet. This new Ethereum upgrade will help the users to withdraw their Ether staked from the past few years systematically and securely. As a result, many crypto analysts believe that Shangai will be a bullish event for Ether.
Matt Hougan, Bitwise Asset Management’s chief investment officer,said “Today, many investors who would like to stake ETH and earn yield are sitting on the sidelines. After all, most investment strategies can’t tolerate an indefinite lock-up.”
But the crypto market once again flipped from green to red amid US financial regulators’ actions in the industry. The leading cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum, lost their growth streak at the end of the weekend. The unanticipated price drop of crypto assets is due to the sudden announcement of an investigation on Kraken by the US regulator Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for breaching the nation’s security laws.
According to CoinMarketCap, ETH is currently trading at $1,542 down by 5.86% in the past 24 hours. The doubts have been emerging about the future of crypto staking with the tweet of Brain Armstrong. On Feb 9 2023 the CEO of Coinbase tweeted that the SEC would ban staking for retail investors.
