On February 9, according to information provided by DefiLlama, the Ethereum staking service Rocket Pool surpassed a total value locked (TVL) of one billion dollars. This development takes place a little under two years following the introduction of the mainnet for the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol on November 9, 2021. Rocket Pool, which offers what is known as a liquid staking solution for Ethereum, gives customers the option to either join an existing Ethereum decentralized node operator or to operate their own node.
Users are able to run their own node with just 16 Ether (ETH), as opposed to the network-specified 32 ETH, and another 16 ETH comes from a pool of users who join a decentralized node operator. This is a significant improvement over traditional staking solutions, as the capital requirements are significantly lower. The latter has a far lower minimum deposit requirement of only 0.01 ETH. In return for their ETH, depositors are given a liquid staking token known as rETH. This token serves as evidence that the user is eligible for staking rewards over time and accumulates yield.
Rocket Pool node operators are eligible to collect up to 7.26% annually in compensation for verifying transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. Stakers, however, are eligible to get 4.68%. Both of these rates are subject to change and are dependent on the demand and supply of nodes on the Ethereum blockchain in addition to the total number of transactions. Alterations in the price that ETH is selling for on the market may either make incentives obsolete or make them more valuable.
At this time, there are 385,344 ETH invested in the protocol, and there are 2,068 node operators. The smart contracts used by Rocket Pool have been examined by Sigma Prime, ConsenSys, and Trail of Bits respectively. In addition to that, Immunefi is in charge of running the project’s bug bounty program. The creators of Ethereum have said that the Shanghai update to the blockchain would most likely become operational in the month of March. Since the network made the successful switch to proof-of-stake in September 2022, users will be able to withdraw any ETH that they have staked as well as any prizes that they have accumulated.