Bankless - Decentralized Ethereum 2.0 Staking with Rocket Pool | Darren Langley & Dave Rugendyke

Episode Date: December 1, 2021

Rocket Pool is live on mainnet! Slowly rolling out its staking pools, Rocket Pool is opening up its decentralized ETH staking product to the world. Core team members Darren Langley and Dave Rugendyke join to talk about the past, present, and future of the protocol. Rocket Pool allows ETH holders to stake without needing to run a full node, which requires hardware, maintenance, and 32 ETH. Abstracting away those requirements helps to decentralize Ethereum's Proof-of-Stake, which is expected to arrive with the merge in the first half of 2022. ------ 📣 OPOLIS | YOUR CRYPTO CAREER https://bankless.cc/Opolis  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🍵 MATCHA | DECENTRALIZED EXCHANGE AGGREGATOR https://bankless.cc/Matcha  🔐 LEDGER | SECURE YOUR ASSETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger  🧙‍♀️ ALCHEMIX | SELF-PAYING LOANS http://bankless.cc/Alchemix  ------ TOPICS COVERED: 0:00 Intro 7:00 Launching Rocket Pool 15:50 How We Got Here 23:38 Why Decentralized Staking? 28:37 What the Numbers Say 34:38 A Public Good 39:40 The Community 47:11 Centralization Risks? 49:25 rETH 56:04 Democratizing ETH Staking 1:02:39 DeFi Integrations 1:06:30 MEV 1:14:25 Operating a Node & ODAO 1:22:02 RPL Token & Incentives 1:32:02 What's Next? 1:38:20 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES: Darren on Twitter: https://twitter.com/langerstwit?s=20  Rocket Pool: https://rocketpool.net/  Node Map: https://stake.rocketpool.net/network  RPL Investment Thesis: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/m3pug8/the_rocket_pool_investment_thesis/  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Hey, Bankless Nation, welcome to another State of the Nation episode. We're super excited to host this. It's been a long time coming. It's with our friends at Rocket Pool. Rocket Pool. David, why don't you tell folks what Rocket Pool is? Yeah, Rocket Pool is a decentralized staking as a service system. And Rocket Pool has been around for a really long time.

I remember paying attention to Rocket Pool back during the ICO crazy ICO days. And Rocket Pool has just been laser-focused on one thing and one thing alone, which is providing a decentralized staking pool system to further democratize and decentralized access to providing security for Ethereum. So we're going to dive into what that means and the story thus far for Rocket Pool. And also, most importantly, their main net launch,

which is why we're having them on right now. Their main net just launched. So congratulations to the Rocket Pool community and the Rocket Pool team and Dave and Darren who have been through it all throughout the bear market and then finally got through the other side of the bear market, waiting for all of the Ethereum 2 devs to actually ship proof of stake. And now that is finally here, Rocket Pool is following along in the footsteps of Ethereum at large.

So I think this is probably the next best thing to staking on your own validator. In fact, it's probably the best thing for a lot of folks because staking in your own validator still requires 32Eth. That's a lot of money, man. Like 32th. So if you don't have 32Eth and you still want to stake the decentralized way, Rocket Pool is providing an answer to that. And so we're going to talk to the team today all about it. We're going to talk about the wider eith-staking ecosystem too. So we hope you hang out for this

conversations can be great with David and Darren from Rocket Pool. Before we get in, we got to tell you about OPLUS. I think this is one of the last days that we're going to be talking about this. Opolis is a Dow that supports self-sovereign workers, basically. These is the new creative class of worker that David and I are super bullish about, right? So if you've ever, and I hear people say this all the time. They're involved in multiple Dow's and they're like, I would quit my corporate job in a heartbeat and go work for a Dow, but I can't because I live in the U.S. And I need health insurance. I need my benefits. I need like payroll taxes done for me. That's what Opelis does. So it is a Dow that supports self-sovereign workers in this new economy, provides them

health insurance options. And you've got to go check them out because right now, if you do, there's a special bonus for listeners to the bankless podcast. You get a thousand work tokens and a thousand bank when you join OpLIS by January 1st. And at the year, now's the time we be thinking about your benefits,

what you're going to be doing in 2022, whether you still want to work at that soleless corporate job that you work at right now, whether you want to take the dive into a Dow, this is a good time to investigate it. So click the link in the show notes, and you could chat with a membership steward at Opolis today. David, some other things going on in the Bankless Nation, man.

We're dropping some hot podcasts recently. So there was one on Monday. That was with Polygon. What was that all about? Yeah, Polygon, which is what we've been calling the Swiss Army knife of scaling solutions. There's been a bunch of drama recently about abandoning Ethereum because Ethereum abandoned its users. Not around here, sir.

The Polygon team disagrees. And so we brought on Mihalo and San Francisco. deep of the Polygon team to just unpack really the Polygon vision and what it means to have a vibrant layer two ecosystem rather than having a single monolithic chain. So that was fantastic. And then also that what came out this morning is also a layer zero with Tim Beiko. Tim Beko, who's the new all-core devs lead, managing the core devs of Ethereum, kind of coordinating everyone and make sure they're on the same page. Tim Beko really came onto my radar when he's really pioneered EIP 1559. So We unpacked what it's like to be at the deepest levels of Ethereum development,

what it's like to actually push changes to Ethereum and just a lot of lessons about the dynamics of clients and client diversity, which is also going to be a bit of a subject here today on the show with Rocket Pool as well. Well, now that is an individual who works for a Dow, right? Ethereum being sort of one of the original Dow's for sure. So that'll be an interesting story. I haven't caught up with that podcast yet, David, but it's in my cue. Let me start with the question I ask you every single state of the nation.

is the state of the nation today, my friend. Yeah, the state of the nation is sinking, which is kind of an interesting word. But for longtime Bankless listeners, you might be reminded of the Protocol Sync thesis, which I think it really underpins a lot of what we talk about here at Bankless. The Protocol Sync thesis in a sentence is that the most credibly neutral, the most protocolized components of Ethereum,

sink down to the bottom and allow other people to build on top of that. And the more and more we can find things that are more credibly neutral are just more protocolized, less governance. Things like Uniswap, for example, are deep in the protocol sync. Things like ENS are deep in the protocol sync. Many, many things are built on these things. And Rocket Pool is really a piece of infrastructure that is at the deepest level of the protocol sink.

Very core to Ethereum. And when something like Rocket Pool comes online, we all get to go a little bit deeper down the protocol sink. So Ryan, today we are sinking. Sinking, but in a good way. This is a sinking that makes, our systems more robust and more decentralized and is a core part of the bankless thesis that we've been talking about so much. So we will be back to talk all about that to get into the Rocket

Pool story with Darren and Dave. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Living a bankless life requires taking control over your own private keys, not your keys, not your crypto. That's why so many in the bankless nation already have their ledger hardware wallet, which makes proper private key management a breeze. But the The Ledger ecosystem is much more than just a secure hardware wallet. Ledger is the combination of the Ledger Hardware Wallet and the Ledger Live app. And if you're used to seeing all of your crypto services and favorite Defy apps all in one spot, Ledger Live is where you want to be.

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And if you're a user, keep an eye out for your favorite Defy apps being built on Arbitrum. Many DeFi applications on the Ethereum L1 are migrating over to layer 2s like Arbitrum, and some are even skipping over the layer ones entirely and deploying directly. on layer 2. There's so many apps coming online to Arbitrum. So go to bridge.arbitrum. .io now and start bridging over your ETH or any of the tokens listed and start having the defy or NFT experience that you've always wanted. Hey guys, welcome back. This is our episode on super staking, super staking ETH with our friends from Rocket Pool. We have Darren, who is the general manager at Rocket Pool. Also Dave,

who is the CTO of Rocket Pool. Darren, Dave, great to have you guys back on bank lists. How's it going? Good, good. It's great feedback. I think last time I had a chat with Dave. It was probably a bit over a year ago now, I think. Yeah, yeah. It's crazy. The content's already a year old. Yeah. I'm surprised he hasn't tried to recruit you into David Dow yet, Dave, as in heaven though. Well, a matter of fact. I was just talking about it previously. So, yeah, I shall be in there, in there, surely. Apparently, there's over 200 Dave's in there now, which is... Oh, my gosh. I just set up your show, David Hoffman. Thank you.

doing shit that. And how's it going, Darren? No, is there a Darren Dow yet or do you focus on rocket pool still? There is, there is not a Darren Dow. It won't be a friend of the law, I think. That's great. Well, it's fantastic to have you both on. We've been wanting to do this for a while, particularly post-launch. And I know, look, this has been the year of East staking, a massive year. I think tomorrow it'll be a year since the beacon chain launched and East Staking was available. And I remember a year ago at this time how all of us were very worried about issues with the beacon chain like with the launch go successfully and then if it does launch would we get the the amount of stake necessary to actually fire up the beacon chain and everyone was worried will we get you know

I think it was like how much was it 500,000 we were looking for, ETH staked was sort of the threshold. Now we are well beyond that. Okay, we have left 500,000 behind and I know Rocket has been a part of the ETH staking story from the Inceptions. And two weeks ago, Rocket Pool launched on Mainnet, which is huge. Because I know you guys have been working to launch this right, working to optimize for decentralization. I'm going to shout out a few stats. In the first two days of operation, Rocket Pool registered 237 node operators across 42 global locations with a thousand over a thousand ETH stake. that's huge. I know it's been more than two days now, but I just want to say,

congrats to both of you on behalf of bankless. Congrats to the rocket pool team, the rocket pool community. How does it feel to be on the other side of a major launch? Honestly, after this long, it still doesn't quite feel real because we've been building to this now for so long. We were probably the only platform that existed for the previous version of staking, which was a smart contract over three or four years ago. So trying to get through that, get through launch, get through the ability for smart contracts to receive the draws, which was a key part to rockable pool being truly decentralized for the 3-2 staking. Yeah, it's been a ride, but I'm absolutely stoked like we are launched now.

So it took an absolute ton of work. Our community has been absolutely amazing through that. Like, huge shout to those guys because they've been backing us 100%. Like there's been delays. We've had, you know, like if you can, our test out, we've had five betas up to this point. which is an absurd in our data for any project to have. And, you know, we've been through multiple rounds of audits. So, yeah, the patience with our community as well,

and their support is kind of really driven to get through this kind of successful launch. So, yeah, huge shout out to them. And basically everyone else that's kind of wrapped us and backed a decentralized solution to staking today because, I mean, that is necessary for the ecosystem at large. I mean, we've seen a large amount of exchanges kind of, you know, centralizing a large portion of staking. So now hopefully we can kind of counter that with a balance to our current client diversity at the same time.

Darren, you feeling that too? You feel in that energy? Yeah. How does it feel in your side? It's been a very exciting ride, to be honest. We would kind of heads down, getting the development done. And now that the, now that the, it's actually launched, it's kind of fantastic. Actually, a little update on the kind of numbers.

So we're at 25,000 each at the moment being staked across rocket pool. Sorry. Yeah, does that ring every time someone adds more east to the pool? That's all right. I am going to turn that off completely. Yeah, Darren, you're front running us on the numbers. 25,000 eth's data. How many noted operators do you have now?

So 450. 450 node operators across 59 59 global locations. So yeah, so it's really kind of going well. It's actually been, so we've actually only really been operating for 10 days. Yeah. Kind of full bore. The rest of the time we were kind of going through a staged launch.

And so we were kind of staggering out our launch. we've only really been operating for 10 days. So to get that far in then we're kind of blown away. So now, just to be clear, there are no governors on. There was previously some caps in terms of, I know when you first launched how much it could be deposited, but now all of those governors are gone. It's completely open for anyone to stake their eth. There's no cap or governor on top of it.

Is that correct? That's right. Exactly. We have a deposit pool size limit, but that's baked into the protocol as a kind of a safety mechanism. So beyond that, that's 2000-Eather. So, yeah, if the deposit-pore ever kind of gets that maximum amount and there's no NIDO-PROD is coming online, then the commission rate for new Noddorprudor's stake the Eder

that goes up significantly to kind of incentivize them to come on. So that's the only kind of real cap that we have at the moment, but it's actually part of the protocol. Right. It's a resource management part of the protocol, right? Exactly, exactly. So the more ETH that's in Rockport that isn't staking kind of drags down the for our eighth users. So we can't have too much of that, which is why we kind of limit it to

2000, which is a pretty, pretty hefty amount, but still not so much it would drag down, it would add idle ether to the, to the protocol, just something we don't want too much of. And listeners who are familiar with the dynamics of eth staking might notice that this is actually kind of a fractal off of how eth staking works, where the more and more eth supply that's supplied to the Ethereum protocol, the more total ether is issued, but the less ether is issued, but the less ether is issued on a per individual unit basis. And Rocket Pool is managing the supply in a similar way. If more nodes need to come to Rocket Pool because the Rocket Pool has plenty of

eth staked, more RPL will be issued to nodes to incentivize them to spin up more nodes. So it's kind of creating an equilibrium based off of the available resources that needed to be added to the Rocket Pool Network. Is that all correct? Yeah, that's pretty close. So we have, we essentially cater to two main user groups. And we have users that want to kind of stake, doing a liquid staking with the R8 token.

This is basically a token that you hold that games rewards over time based on the average performance of all the validators in the Rockpool decentralized network. So these are guys that would, you know, typically not want to run a no, would just be happy to kind of sit on, you know, a token that gains rewards over time based on the performance of a decentralized network.

The other half of the audience is, obviously, the node upgrades that need to do the staking. So these are the guys that are really kind of backbone the network and they have the most to gain by participating in Rockapool. So they could stake their own other outside of Rockapoor. But if they come inside Rockpool, they also earn an additional commission and also RPAO awards on top of that to incentivize them to join the protocol and, you know, kind of help out with decentralized staking. So we actually have so much to talk about with, we want to talk about our ETH because the market for staked ETH derivative tokens, I think is going to be really, really big. We definitely want to full.

unpack the RPL token. But before we go in and talk about all the subjects all at once, I actually want to back up and kind of just give listeners a quick little history lesson about Rocket Pool and how it came to be and why, what was the motivation for designing Rocket Pool at all? So can you guys just kind of speed run us through the last like three to four years of Rocket Pool history and how you guys have gotten to be where you are? Yeah, I can probably start at that. So back in about mid-2016, there was was a, oh, there was kind of on the roadmap for Ethereum that time was, you know, the proof of stake.

A previous stake back then was actually done through a smart contract. The beacon chain, as we know today, didn't exist back then. It was all going to be deposits into a smart contract and whatnot. And back then, these deposits originally started out at 32Eath. Then they kind of realized that the scaling involved to have a smart contract kind of doling out rewards and all that would basically clog the network. So you need, in order to kind of get around that, they've really, raised the staking cap to I think it was a thousand ed up per validator, which is by today's

standards, it would just be absolutely assing line. So yeah, obviously back then they realized that was a huge issue. I was kind of looking for a project. Personally, I'd been in the blockchain scene since about 2013. And I was, you know, well aware of Ethereum, I was kind of looking for a project to kind of sink my teeth into learn about smart contracts. So I was insanely interested in them at time. I thought it was an absolutely amazing concept. But yeah, so basically came up with the idea, you know, it's such a high amount of ether, whether it's 32 or 1,000 back then, you know, people would obviously need to kind of combine their other together in order to earn rewards.

So, yeah, I started on prototype of Rocket Pool way back then based on something called the Move paper, which is a paper that Vitalik put out. I think it was in mid to late 2016. And this basically outlined the functions that would be embedded into this early smart contract version proof of stakes. allowed me to kind of write rocket pool to plug into that because we already had a pretty early definition of how the functions would work so anyway fast forward about another nine months after that um i think it was about mid 2017 released the alpha version of rocket pool um from there it got it

absolutely massive liquid reception uh on reddit and few other the busy Ethereum hubs at the time um yeah and since then we've basically just gone through um we obviously we obviously did a token uh 2017 that happened about three months before the bear market did so we um that was timing wise it was interesting but we basically got away on a pretty compact team for the next year until around 2018 when we released our first beta the same week they announced they were pivoting to the beacon chain so so we still went ahead with that beta anyway i think we were the only the only project to ever actually use the previous version of proof of stake for Ethereum so you could kind of

say Rocka Cool was operating a proof of a couple of years before it was even available. David, can we just pause there, Dave, for a minute? Because, like, I just want folks who weren't there in 2018 to realize this. So, like, I remember this very clearly. And proof of stake was going to launch in 2018, that smart contract proof of stake version on Ethereum. In fact, it was, like, written into some of the clients. I believe the code was ready.

The code is prepped. And then I recall some kind of meeting of the minds with Ethereum Accordevs and researchers. And they did like a complete rug pull on it is what it felt like to be a member of the community at that time. Like I know there were good reasons for it. And it totally makes sense retrospectively. But for someone working on staking for the previous like 18 months, two years, how did that feel? And like, why did you stick with Ethereum during that time, guys?

Well, personally, I was always pretty massively into Ethereum. I just, like I said, I love the concept of smart contracts. That wasn't really available anywhere else at the time. So I pretty much embedded myself in the Ethereum ecosystem. And a lot of people I met along the way were super nice and lovely people as well. So it was just a pleasure to kind of work in that environment. At that time, though, when that did happen, I mean, that was a pretty big shop. We actually heard rumors maybe a week or two before it officially landed that that was possibly what was going to happen.

So that was just a rumor at the time. I know Langa's you were around then as well when this was kind of going down. So yeah, basically once that happened, we pretty much just had to take a really close look at the new proposed system, see what elements of Rockpool would carry over to that one. Luckily, most of the core concepts, the way we kind of organize deploy. it's into mini pools, which is our version of validator. Most of that still, you know, carried over quite, quite well. Obviously, we weren't baked into, you know, a layer one kind of system as much

because now we had to do depend on two different chains, the beacon chain and the layer one chain. So that required a couple additional fixes. But at the time, it was, yeah, it was a little hairy. And, yeah, honestly, it was a bit disappointed because, I mean, when you put working to something for two plus years. And you don't really get an official heads up before the main announcement comes out. Yeah, that was a little bit of a gut punch.

But, you know, we rolled with it. And, yeah, we're still here. So Langers was actually around then too. So if you want to throw in your time. And I think, yeah, well, I think once the shock had worn off a little bit, the realization, especially when you dig into what was produced at that point, but why they were doing it, what the new beacon chain would look like and that sort of thing.

From somebody who is kind of quite deep into it, it made so much more sense. And the design that we've ended up with is so much better than it would have been. So it kind of made it bittersweet, I guess. It was definitely much better. Worth the weight. Worth the weight. And this is why I think the rocket pull story, I think is just a fantastic, just like, again, fractal off of the larger Ethereum story,

where the Ethereum story is like, man, we really got to figure out this proof of stake thing. Let's start building it. Oh, no, we need to go in a different direction. Meanwhile, you have the Rocket Pool team, like, you know, waiting for the Ethereum proof of stake to actually, like, exist so it can build its thing, right? And so, like, trying to be running and developing in parallel with Ethereum while Ethereum's trying to figure its stick out. and then once Ethereum actually does commit to one specific roadmap,

well then now that the rocket pool community can actually inject the energy into the finalized, you know, solidified foundation. And so like where, like, all the Ethereum people were like waiting for proof of stake, proof of sake, all of the rocket pool people were waiting for rocket pool who was waiting for proof of stake, right? It was just like this fractal of these communities just playing off of each other. Yeah, that's very much it. I think being on the edge is a lot of fun,

as long as you do it fall off too many times. But it's definitely fun, we're kind of working at that bleeding edge. And definitely one of a similar motivations, like people stuck to Ethereum because they believed in Ethereum, and you guys stuck to Rocket Pool because you believe in Rocket Pool. But let's back up and just articulate for the listeners, why it was so obvious that something like Rocket Pool would need to be built so early in Ethereum's lifespan?

Like, Dave, you're looking at Ethereum, you know it's committed to proof of stake, and all of a sudden you realize that, like, oh, this thing called a decentralized staking pool must need to exist at some point in time. Why did you know that that was true? And what is the Rocket Pool vision? So basically, at the time, yeah, around 2000, mid-2016, when I kind of came up the concept, But Bitcoin was obviously, you know, the king at time is still to some degree. But back then, it was pretty much concentrated around a couple of mining pools.

I mean, that was kind of the trajectory that Ethereum was going to head on with proof stake as well if, you know, a decentralized solution didn't quite present itself. So that's what really kind of made me put my head down and kind of kind of come up with the initial concept of how it would work. It's taken a long time to get here. So it wasn't an easy thing to produce, but yeah, it's, I mean, as far as Rockerpool itself goes, I think the main thing I'm probably, you know, proud of is obviously the decentralized nature of it and also the client diversity, because that's something that we really kind of need to promote

within Ethereum itself, especially with the staking, because currently there is, it is centralized around kind of one main client. And again, that's not a healthy thing for the ecosystem. We are pretty much all about kind of, you know, enabling Ethereum to be a healthy ecosystem and not too centralised around any central aspect. So that's kind of what we've been commoding, essentially. Darren, anything to add on to that? Yeah, so I think, I mean, we've only really been in operation for a little while, so it's difficult

to tell. But we are already kind of seeing a bit of an effect on the client diversity. we've implemented in our kind of the way that you install our software. We have a thing that essentially suggests if you choose Prism, we suggest you know, you can still choose Prism if you want to because we're not going to censor clients, but we suggest you choose another client. We're already kind of seeing that in some of the proposal numbers

from the rocket pool proposes that Lighthouse is definitely popular, but other clients as well are very popular. So Nimbus is very popular and TECU as well. And Prism is kind of a smaller percentage of our kind of node base so far. That will obviously change over time, but we're already kind of seeing that, which is really nice to see. And of course, a big part of the rocket pool story is actually reducing the barriers to entry for eith staking, right?

Once again, like Dave said, once upon a time, it actually was required to have a thousand ether to stake in order for proof of stake. That has since changed down to 32, but then also 32 ETH has moved from, you know, where it used to be a $10,000 up to where it is now, where that over, I'm not going to, on the fly math, but over hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yeah, 320K, let's just say that. Let's imagine a world where ETH is 10K already. I'm living in the future, David.

Ryan's hiding the fact that he can't do quick math either. But so, yeah, so like $130, 320,000, like, or, you know, this is, it's too much for one person. But also, that's not only, that's not only the whole story either, because the cool thing about Rocket Pool is, if you don't have ETH, you can bring a node. And if you don't have enough nodes, you can bring your ETH, right? And so, like, which are the resources do you want to bring to the network? because Rocket Pool can matchmake between the node suppliers and the ETH suppliers. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I think of all staking-as-a-service providers out there, I think the next highest one is only coming in at like 13 individual nodes,

where Rocket Pool is clocking in over 400, and also doesn't have any constraints on the total number of nodes that can be contributed to the overall network. Is that right? Yeah, that's correct. Yeah, so it's obviously built in the protocol that we incentivize these node operators to join, and it works we don't restrict anyone party. Pretty much if you can register a node with our network with the protocol, I should say,

then, yeah, you're free to join. I mean, everything's balanced within Rockville pool through incentives built into the protocols. We don't need to enforce any kind of restrictions on location or anything. Everyone should work in everyone's best interest based on the kind of tokenomics and mechanics that are in the protocol. So it's permissionless for nodes to join the network. I want to maybe share some metrics here. This is on the Dune dashboard on Dune Analytics dashboard on Rocket Pool. So just making sure that everybody listing kind of understands some of these numbers here. So the total ETH amount staked is over 24,000, as we mentioned. Total ETH submitted to Rocket Pool. Is there some ETH like that's pending in a pool? Because this number is 27. over 27,000. What does this number tell us?

Yeah, so there's a deposit pool that is, actually I need to double check where those numbers come from, but there is a deposit pool, yeah. So there's a, you deposit into, R-Eth Stakers deposit into a deposit pool, and then that gets matched with 16Eath from other operators. And then we have 450 registered node operators. So these are,

individuals or, you know, companies or groups, whatever, these are individual nodes inside of the network. Do each of these 450 represent an independent entity or do you have any way of knowing whether they do or not? We pretty much only require a node address to be registered. So we can't tell, we don't hold any specific information about any node operators or anything. It's part of being a permissionless kind of our protocol. So they are free to. register from wherever they are. But one thing we do provide is when they do register, they have the option to also register their time zone. So this kind of gives us a really good, and this is auto-detected from the system. So if you do register your time zone,

and it is auto-detected, yeah, we have a network map, which builds out, which shows you how diverse the actual node operator base is. So if you actually go to our website, you can view a network map where we display this out for everyone to see. So you'll basically see nodes from all across the world. So yeah, it should be a stake.rocketpool.net. State.rockpool.net. Yep. And this will show, let's see, I'm just pulling this up here. Now, if you go to the side there, that little side menu, and you click on, yep, should be a network map. Yeah. So that's the network map. Yeah. So that's built out of the nodes that have registered

on the protocol. So the only thing we record, and this is optional, like you can see down the bottom there's a hidden section. So if you don't want to reveal your time zone as a node operator, that's perfectly fine. We're not going to force you do that. So yeah, this shows you a pretty broad general map of all the node operators, their location,

the kind of ether that's being staked in that location. So you can see if it's centralised around any one kind of area. And this is a very broad kind of map too. It is actually broken down into much more individual time zones, but obviously to show this on a map, we need to kind of grip them together as well. So for those who can't see this or maybe listening in the podcast, we'll include a link in the show notes, but we're looking at a world map and we're seeing nodes across all of the different continents.

So we've got 240 North American nodes, 119 European nodes, 20 Asian nodes in the Pacific as well, Australia, South America. Some are hidden as well, and this really spans the entire globe. And I guess that is the big distinction with Rocket Pool, right? Like to date, no one has produced a staking pool network where it's permissionless to join as a node operator. And you guys have 450 node operators so far. That is the big distinction here. Is that correct?

Yes, yes. That is definitely correct. What is mini pools? What does that mean? That's our version of a validated back. So that's Rock Pool validated, which is made up of 16 other 4. from a node operator and also 16 ETHR from the protocol itself. So the protocol gets its ETH from the deposit pool,

which is what people send ETH to when they wish to receive our RE liquid staking token. So they're basically staking themselves for free. So we don't charge the node operator, it's the stake in the network. So but and they also earn a commission for staking that. Other 16 ETH that comes from the protocol from these Reth users.

So it's kind of a unique balancing opportunity where you balance deposits from people will come in, they want to do liquid staking, but not run a node with those that do want to run a node and earn a high commission than they would staking solar or basically through any other way currently available. I think Rectual would be the most profitable way to stake with a node currently. And there was another number there that we're going to talk about later. These are ODAO operators, right? So it's like the Oracle network, which we'll come back to you later. But I wanted to show this chart. I don't know how old this is. This is, you know, something I've seen before. But this is

current, it's a pie chart of all of the ETH staked. And this is kind of grouped by entity. I'm not sure if this is completely up to date, but it gives you a representative view of ETH staking, at least in the last couple of months. And you can see some of the consolidation. As you're saying earlier, Dave, like you didn't, when you were starting rocket pool, you didn't want it to start to resemble Bitcoin mining pools, right? Where it's just like centralized among a very few set of providers. And, um, We're starting to see maybe a little bit of that with ETH staking, right? We have Cracken with potentially 11%. And that is definitely a custodial exchange that is providing a staking service. We have

Binance who's up there. I don't even see Coinbase on this list. That shows me that something is sneaky with their addresses. Yeah, okay. So something is missing here. Like, Coinbase should definitely be here. We have LIDA, which is spread across like 13 different validators. But anyway, I guess I want to ask the question, do you think that ETH staking to date is overly centralized? Like, do we have a problem here? Or do you think more that this could be a problem in the future? And that's why we need rock a pool.

Dave, what do you think first? Yeah, I think it is heading in that direction. I mean, you can see that best thing on this chart the way it is currently. And we also, like you said, Coinbase is sneaking with their addresses as well. So, yeah, it's basically going to become a competition to win the central providers who can, obviously of the most kind of the lowest fee to stake with them.

So I do think over time you will see that, you know, centralise even more. But hopefully with Rockpool now kind of on Maynett, that won't be an issue as much. And hopefully it will be minimized in the long term as, you know, potentially other decentralized second services come along to. Yeah. Where are your thoughts on that, Darren? Yeah, I think it's definitely centralizing. and we need to go in the other direction.

So hopefully that is where we come in. And the idea is to get R-Eath in as many places as possible, to integrate it across the whole of D-Fi, in every wallet, and all of that sort of thing. And a lot of people have been reaching out about that. A lot of protocols have been reaching out. So it's to try and make R-Eth as ubiquitous as possible. The last thought of this is...

So that everyone has access. Last question for you guys. It's kind of the vision for Rocket Pool is, do you see Rocket Pool as kind of like a public good? We're like veering in that direction, right? So, you know, we've recently seen ENS launch a token, do an air job, for instance. And that is more skewed towards the public good side of the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem, right? So, like, they don't view themselves as another kind of identity defy type. Ethereum applications so much as they do themselves. Yeah, they're not a startup. They're more a public

good. And I've heard you even talk about some things that you care about, like, client diversity, which is interesting. And of course, people in Ethereum, you know, on the ETH2 team will recognize that there are multiple ETH2 clients. You know, there's Prism, there's Nimbus, there's many others. And it's kind of a public good to try to balance out the client usage and to make sure that one client doesn't dominate over the rest, that we don't put all of our eggs in one basket, and you care about that as well. So what are your thoughts on this? Is Rocket Pool like a public good, or is it veering that direction? Or, you know, what do you think of that concept, Dave? Yeah, I definitely think we are veering in that direction, if we're not there already.

Pretty much the goal from day one was to make a decentralized protocol that helps the ecosystem that it runs on. So it's pretty much a positive feedback look where the bigger decentralized they can get, the better the ecosystem is, the better client diversity gets, and so forth. So we are trying to be as kind of hands off from a kind of custodian kind of point of view

where we don't have direct control over the protocol. It's all run in it through incentives, basically. Incentive drive the protocol itself. So we don't really, we can't say, you know, this will happen here, this will happen there, it basically just all kind of drives itself through incentives. So hopefully that does work in, you know, the larger Ethereum protocol over the long term. And I do think it will have positive influence.

And that's kind of what we're going to try and kind of, yeah, do going forward. Darren, anything bad? They've covered it quite well. On the spectrum, on the spectrum of things, we are definitely on the kind of protocol, decentralized end, trying to be as kind of neutral and, yeah, as decentralized as possible, essentially. I'm going to use this word at least four more times during this podcast, but just like how this industry is a industry of crypto-economics, Rocket Pool is a crypto-economic fractal off of,

that was the word, fractal off of Ethereum. And so, Ethereum uses crypto-economics to sustain itself. It uses incentives to encourage people to buy and stake ether to secure the network. And Rocket Pool does the same thing, but with a more usable, more adaptive layer on top of Ethereum, that is a decentralized staking-as-a-service system. And I think that people have definitely tapped into this particular angle that you guys are approaching, the decentralization maxi angle, and the one, the application layer of Ethereum, where the application actually resonates with the core protocol itself.

E&S comes to mind, as Ryan said, but also Uniswap 2. Some things just about in the Ethereum app layer just resonate more deeply with the Ethereum protocol. And that's definitely something that I found in the Rocket Pool community. So I want to do a quick dive into the Rocket Pool community. Who are they? And what's their vibe? What do they really care about?

And how did you guys garner such an engaged community in the depths of a bear market? this is going to be a landmine question i'm going to have to walk around careful because i'm going to cop a lot of stuff i see anything um yeah no obviously we are we have very passionate community um we pretty much always always have and i think that is driven from the previous question where you're working uh towards the benefit of the protocol itself um trying trying to instill good in the thing that you're building on top of uh so i do think that kind of comes through in the community um we have a lot very passionate. Some incredibly talented people too, like a lot of stuff that is being

built for Rockapool so we have a metric dashboard by VGR which is really good. We have a bot in our Discord which reports any events in the Rockpool Network done by Visible Civil that was really good as well. So like we have time of metrics

ourselves. We can kind of see what's going on in the Rockpool Network at any time but now thanks to our community efforts in our Discord any event that happens in the Rockpool Network is immediately reported by this bot. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I mean, we have people that do, you know, like various bots for reporting, you know, RPL ratios, prices, stats, all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, it's just been an insane. Obviously, I'm going to have to mention the trading channel because this is pretty much the core kind of passion of the ID Discord does show on through this channel. And it is actually one that I created a few years ago to kind of like just put all central trading talk into the one spot because at the time a lot of discords didn't allow trading kind of price talk but i mean that that's going to happen anyway so there's no point in trying to kind of outlaw or ban it so i just created the trading channel uh snuck it down the bottom with the discord at the time and just wanted to coin to know that talk huh well i mean it's gonna happen

anyway and now it's just so much more than a trading channel it's it's just passionate people that that analyze every aspect of the protocol like if we make the smallest change it gets analyze and analyze. So it's grown beyond the trading name now. It's the watering hole for it's a lot of it really is. And we have the absolute ton of other channels too that go a lot over more technical stuff like smart contracts, smart nodes, a whole bunch of other stuff. And the people that participate in these channels obviously extremely some extremely talented people. So if we do ever look like we're going to put a foot wrong, I'm pretty sure we're going to get cold out on that leads ahead before it ever hits a magnet. So we definitely get to listen to the

community as much as we can. Just for the listeners that are not watching. this on YouTube. You know that the listeners are tuning in when they also start going hashtag training in the YouTube chat, trading in the YouTube chats and also channel trading is the new general. So like the the rocket pool community is here. And I really think it's the nature of how Rocket Pool came to be that really is emblematic of something that was really conducive to create a community around it. Rocket Pool was not this system that was going to generate this massive company with this massive vision. It was a very small set of core believers that let the community come around it, right? And again, love the word fractal here. There's a lot of

organizations like this in Defi, like kind of with me and Ryan and with bankless. Like we didn't want to make a massive big bankless corporation. We let the Dow be the system that scales the message, right? And that really seems to be what's going on with the rocket pool community, where it's the rocket pool community that's taking the reins and just leaving Dave and Darren and the few other members of the rocket pool team to actually be like the guys to build out the system. But how has, what is the rocket pool community

like stepping into the shoes of? Like are they doing things that are just beyond what you guys are doing at the rocket pool like org? Like what are they up to? Yeah, actually a lot of things that, well, first of all, their feedback is invaluable. So any time that we put out any sort of research or we put out any code or anything like that, their kind of feedback is invaluable in that.

But the other thing, so things like we have a huge list of integrations that we're aiming for across all of DFI and wallets and all that sort of thing. And so our community is kind of playing a part in that outreach to reach out to some of these protocols. to get information about these protocols, to explain some of the protocols to us, because DeFi is expanding so quickly that sometimes we need to catch up on that as well. So, yeah, they're kind of, I think every step of the way, they've been kind of building Rocket Pool with us, so it's been fantastic.

Do you guys think that Rocket Pool falls into the responsibility category in the same way that ENS and kind of get people lumping Gitcoin into, where RPL is a responsibility token since it manages the economic resources of a public goods. That's an interesting take. I hadn't heard of that one for it. Oh, really?

Yeah, no, I think that's pretty close to the point, actually. I think who was it, Brantley from ENS, who coined this phrase? Responsibility, yeah. Yeah, after the ENS drop, he said, you were an airdropped money. You were airdropped responsibility. It's kind of like, hey, you're holding a token,

but this token is key. to you, you know, an important public good for the Ethereum ecosystem, take it seriously. Like, do your job actually govern this protocol and make responsible decisions? Does that resonate with the RPL use case in your community? Yeah, well, ours is baked into the protocol as an insurance mechanism, essentially, for Node operator. So obviously, if you're depositing in the front end and you're getting RE that our liquid second token, its value is driven by the performance of the node operator.

So basically having built insurance is critical for that aspect. I mean, if you're going to have a decentralized liquid staking token that is abundant in the defy ecosystem, you need to have its value backed, you know, responsibly. So this is done by the node operations who stake a certain amount of RPL themselves, which if they, you know, ever mess up massively, this gets practically slashed, then auction sold, that is then given back to the protocol to kind of make the R.E.

users whole. So that is an absolute critical part of their infrastructure at the moment. to make sure that our liquid second token is pretty much always going to have, you know, its value remain and not be slashed, not have any kind of issues happen to it through a node operators fault. So that is definitely a critical part of our infrastructure. And a big responsibility for node operators to make sure if they are staking a lot, they need to kind of stake a lot of at the same time to make sure their insurance is adequate. And that they are rewarded for this, the more insurance that they basically give the protocol in the form of staking RPL,

the more APL they earn through inflation protocol, which is also backed into it, that is given to them as a reward for putting up this insurance bond. So it is absolutely crucial. And I would say it's the more after you stake in the NAGOPPAO, the more you're kind of doing a good service to Rocket Pool. So one question that's coming in from a core community member, I would say Superfiz is say Rocket Pool is maximally successful. actually just becomes too successful.

What happens if, like, more than 51% of all ether is staked via rocket pool? Is this a centralization risk? Or is that kind of antithetical? Yeah, that's a really interesting one. I would say it's almost antithetical. But at the same point, you know, we are a smart contract-based protocol, which does come with risk as well, which everyone should kind of take on board when they participate. So, yeah, having more than 51% of, you know, validators,

going through Rockpool, which also goes through smart contracts, which, as I said, have their own kind of risk. So that would be a worry for me if we did ever get kind of that big. I'm sure there's ways that we could mitigate that at the time. But obviously, since we are working towards, you know, being healthy to the ecosystem, that's something that we probably wouldn't want to happen. And we'd probably try and head that off at the past before it did happen in some way. I'm yet to think of, but I'm sure we could come up. So, I mean, one, one thing to bear in mind about that though is so so rocket pool doesn't actually have any influence over your your validation duties so the the only the only point at which rocket pool really comes into play is on deposit and

withdrawal so that they're the two points at which we would you know there there there there could be some sort of influence but more in terms of but because we're decentralized you know that's mitigated. So that's the, that's the, that's the anything. So we don't have to have, have any kind of influence over your validation duties necessarily. So all things being held equal, if we could just somehow just eliminate the world of smart contract risk, there is no way where Rocket Pool could have some sort of outsized control over the Ethereum network because it's not actually controlling the notes.

Is that the answer? Yeah. That's, that's it. So we have, yeah, like 450 node operators right now. So, yeah, that's definitely the only. We're not running 450 nodes ourselves. I can assure you that. It's definitely, yeah, other people.

So I want to ask about R-Eth. So let's go into the very basics of R-Eth, and we'll kind of talk about the game plan for getting R-Eth integrated into D-Fi. But R-Eth is the staked Eth derivative token. So when you come to Rocket Pool, you deposit your ether, you get R-Eth in return.

But R-Eth is means that it's supposed to capture the Eth-derivatives that are generated by ETH's So can you guys unpack the dynamics behind how R-Eath actually goes up in value and capturing the actual ether issuance that's issued by Ethereum? Dave, you want to take that? Yeah, so with the R-Eth token, so it's designed a little bit differently to some of the other liquid-staking tokens that are at this point. We actually came up with the idea of liquid stoking almost two years ago, and you can go through all our blog post on this. But we spent a lot of time designing the mechanics the way Arif would work.

Originally, we came up with the idea of perhaps doing a kind of a rebasing token where the value of your token is increased pretty much whenever it's moved. This creates kind of an interesting situation for various tax issues, depending on your country. So I won't give you any tax advice, but if you are receiving, you know, constant rebasing on a liquid-staking token, this can make tax very, very kind of, hard to manage and it's also kind of treats it as an income tax whereas the way are it's design

is we created a token where um once you get it um then it won't rebase it's just an erc 20 token it's just perfectly normal but the amount you get uh changes over time if you were staking through the front end of rock balls if that makes any sense so it's treated more or less as a kind of a capital gains tax issue when you want to redeem your are eighth forever uh so that creates a single tax event So that's something that we're very mindful of. It also makes integration with L2, layer two things, are much easier from the R8's perspective because it is just an EIC 20 token.

It's not constantly changing value or anything like that. So that's kind of what we went for at the time. We put a lot of thought into that. But yeah, the way it kind of works, the way since you're not getting this token, which is constantly rebasing and, you know, you can see a number going up, essentially. The way it works is through a different mechanic

where if you stake, let's say you, stake through Rockpool on day one that they were open. You might get, say, you know, one a R8 per per ETH that you stake. So that's a one to one. Let's say you come back a week later, if you stake then, say you stake one other, you might get 0.995. And so the amount of R8 you get when you stake ETH changes over time. So this is kind of, it's a relatively simple dynamic,

but it is more of a difficult one to wrap your head around initially, but it works so simply and so efficiently for many different. perspectives. That's why we put a lot of kind of thought into this. The way that changes in value over time is based on the performance of all the decentralized node operator. So this is where it gets interesting. So you have, you know, say we have 450 node operators right now, staking, you know, various validators and whatnot. The performance of their, the average performance of their validators is essentially what's dictated in how much are you get when you deposit in the front end of a Rockapool. So it's a little bit of a hard dynamic to understand at first. But once it, once it clicks,

it's, it's so simple and it's so efficient for many different reasons. I can go into it more than that, but I'm probably already making people confused. Let me ask a question. Is there anything? Well, let me ask a question, make sure I understand, Dave. So this is the Rockapole homepage, right? And so as, as you're saying, at first, maybe it was one to one, right? One ETH and you received one our eath. But right now, if I stake one eith, I would receive 0.993.9 and then a trail of other digits are eath. Now, I would expect that our eth price to go down relative to eith. Is that correct? Meaning it is game value. That's great. Basically, yeah, the performance. Yeah. So we might expect the protocol like another month from now, this to be like 0.999 or.

something and then like eventually it gets to 0.98 and then it keeps going down. Is that correct? Yeah, one way of looking at it is if you press the the two arrows that are straight and not that one the one above. This one. Yes, that's it. So actually this twist way of looking at it is probably a little bit more. Ah, okay. It's helpful. So we're actually doing some redesign at the moment. So one R-Eth is actually worth 1.006 because it is accumulated that since we've been kind of alive. So as kind of the, so essentially what happens is the value is that your R-Eath is redeemable kind of goes up over time. And that's essentially how it works. And I just keep going up and up and up and up.

Up only, right? as long as the protocol. It's monotonic. It goes up. And the beautiful thing is this is just a regular old ERC20, so it can be ported anywhere. It could be collateral for a maker loan. It could be put on any layer two. You can use it the way you use any other ERC 20.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's correct. And importantly, over time, one R.Eath will, if you buy one R.Eth in one year, you will still have one R.Eath, but in one year, you will be able to redeem one R.E.th for more ether. And the amount that you can redeem it for more ether is a function of what Dave is saying as the uptime of the Rocket Pool Network. Is all of that correct? That's correct. Yep. And I see what you're saying. And I see, so the tax optimizer now sees what you're saying as far as like, you know, the tax events in the system, right? Because

you only get the tax events when you're kind of transferring in and out of the REath. Yeah, so obviously, tax is very specific to what country is. So we're trying to give general advice. But, I mean, it was apparent at the time when we could design this to create, to minimize any of those possible events as much as we could. So that's exactly, that's exactly right. So the only time you're, if you're in a tax paying, you know, capital gains nation,

then, yeah, when you're trading your IRA back to ETH, that's the only time that you need to worry about that. So you keep it in the REath for like 10 years if you wanted to. If you want to, yeah. And something I really want to highlight is that this actually democratizes access to eth staking well beyond just the ability to just deposit your ether into Rocket Pool because you can go buy R-Eath on Uniswap. And that is kind of in an indirect fashion contributing towards the R-Eath staking or

eth-staking inside of Rocket Pool. Because if somebody just wants like, well, I don't want to stake my node, I don't even know what Rocket Pool is, but I've heard that I can go and buy this R-Eth token and it is a token that tracks ether, but also with the distributions from Ethereum staking. And that is just a token that's available on uniswap. And so you can just buy our eth on uniswap and have all of the dynamics of eth staking

just hidden in the background. And any sort of demand for our eth will create some sort of arbitrage opportunity for people that want to, maybe there is like an arbitrage opportunity because the value of our eth is 2% higher than the ether value, and so somebody can take their ether,

deposit into the rocket pool, receive newly minted REath, and then sell that into Uniswap and collect that 2% arbitrage. And so in addition to Rocket Pool, decentralizing access to actually providing ether to nodes and also allowing nodes to be matched with ether,

you also can just stake your ether by buying our ethon uniswap. It's basically the same thing. Yeah. Any comments on that? That's very well put. Perfect. And then also...

That's exactly. That's exactly. the only thing I'd add to that is, so again, just because of our fantastic community, so they're actually LPs on Uniswap on layer one. There's also on arbitrium and on optimism. So you can buy Rath any of those places. That's exactly where I was going next. And we all want, no, it's perfect.

We all want things like Coinbase, Gemini to allow users to deposit their assets right on the L2. that's where the users belong. And so access to staking and ETH staking, the new risk-free rate of the internet is just going to be at people's fingertips as soon as they get all their money over to L2, which users need to do anyways. That's a cool sentence, David.

The risk-free rate of the internet. I love that, man. There's an internet bond. Yeah, that's good, man. I don't think I've heard us say that before. Can I ask you guys another question? because so we all very much don't want Ethereum the network to collapse into sort of a delegated proof of stake type model, right?

We've seen some proof of stake networks just already collapse into that. And this could be somewhat the fate if all of the state goes to centralized exchanges. Okay. So I'm wondering how Rocket Pool combats this. Like how do you guys compete against the central? I don't mind some centralized exchanges. getting their cut of the steak. In fact, I think that's fine.

I think that's a good thing. But if it's like 70, 80% is not fine. It's a bad thing. And these are very well funded. I mean, like the Coinbases and crackens of the world, God bless them. They're doing good things for crypto. But we don't want them to eat the world, but they're incredibly well funded. They have massive resources.

They have all the connections, you know, tons of employees. and they can offer amazing things to some of their customers. How does a rocket pool compete against that? I see RETH is maybe one way to compete against that. Are you guys doing anything with MEV, getting some additional yield into RETH, and how else do you compete against the centralized exchanges and give users a reason to use rocket pool

rather than just stake inside of their cracking account? Yeah. So like I mentioned earlier, so currently, if you're a node operator, stake within Rockpool is already the most profitable way to kind of basically stake your ether. And also, as you mentioned, Ryan, R8, getting integrated into the ecosystem large and far would be an absolute, you know, game change of Rockapel itself to have decentralized liquid staking token as part of the, you know, as part of the ecosystem, almost a native element. So that alone, I think, would enable us to kind of really compete with these large entities.

Not to mention, currently R-EH probably has one of the most attractive return rates from liquid staking token perspective currently. This is based because the way the protocol kind of operates. So hopefully the built-in mechanisms, incentives into the protocol are already making it competitive and will continue to make it competitive going forward on top of having R8 integrated into many kind of decentralized applications going forward. So one thing with our MV, we are looking at that going forward. The merge is probably going to be our next focus in order to make sure no-do operators, anyone running validators in Rockapool, can kind of share, you know, some of the rewards through the new mechanics that are going to be present after the merge.

So this would enable our in return to gaining value quicker and be worth more itself. So, you know, us building extra things into the protocol to enable note, operators to perform better to share, you know, certain awards post-merge, has an indirect effect on REIT, which would then hopefully be, you know, propagated throughout the ecosystem. So I think we're in a very good position to be quite competitive going forward. I guess one of the things R-Eath can say is that you're kind of betting on part of the bankless thesis, which is the protocol sync thesis, as David alluded to, which is the most, you know, decentralized, risk-free staking, ether-staking bond will win in D-Fi.

kind of the bet, right? Rather than having a crack-in version of Stake-Dath and a coin-based version of Stake-Dath where it's kind of like USDC, right? It's like you're dependent on this trusted third party in order to protect it. You guys are betting on the Protocol Sync thesis and that R-Eath is just adopted inside of the D-Fi ecosystem. And then you're also making sure that R-Eath has a really competitive, maybe the highest staking reward out there, right, through various mechanisms and then adding MEV in the future. So this is kind of the bet that that rocket pool is making and what you guys are banking on. Is that correct? Yeah, that's, that's, yeah, that's pretty much on the money. So I think I can speak for Ryan here when, Ryan and I say that top, like over the grand scheme

of things, if we re-roll the cryptocurrency experiment a hundred times, one chain will kind of of dominate because of the nature of money. Money generally converges onto one money and then other monies kind of lose out. Do you guys also consider that true for the staked eth fight inside of Ethereum? Do you kind of think it's kind of a winner-take-all fight for who has the most...

Winner-take-most fight for which has the most adopted Staked-Eth token? Yeah, I would probably agree with Brian and I think winner-takes-most would be the more apt. I don't think they'll every would be one truly only dominant kind of liquid-staking coin. So I think there will be, you know, there'll be ones that gain a large market share. And those are the ones that they can be basically built into other protocols, you know, other decentralized applications. And as far as as IRA goes, being a decentralized liquid-staking token, it matches naturally with a lot of these

kind of applications already. I mean, if you have a, if you have a decentralized protocol that relies on a centralized liquid-staking coin, it kind of defeats the purpose. But if you use a decentralized one, a perfect fit for you. A hundred percent. So what's the, what's the game plan for getting R-Eath into all the defy apps? Or is that something that you guys are leaving up to the community? We do have our own plans itself, but the community, as usual, is charging for doing some of this for us. So we have people, you know, providing liquidity. Some people, you know, working on building R-8, or actually doing proposals for R-Ath to be integrated in things like Maker and whatnot. So we have our ever-present and

passionate community helping us out with that while we kind of concentrate on a few other things as well as doing that ourselves. But we've got our hands in a few different pies at the moment. Guys, this has been fantastic so far. We have a lot more to cover in particular. We want to talk about the RPL token economics that the token price has been on a tear recently. Also talk a little bit more about business development for Rocket Pool, the total addressable market size of staking, where Rocket Pool is going next as far as product roadmap. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Masha, everyone's favorite deck aggregator, has just launched an open beta for gasless trading.

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and join the Discord to keep up to date with Alchemics V2 and to get involved in governance. All right, guys, we are back with the Rocket Pool team. And I want to tie off one bit of a conversation before we go any further, but there's so much left to talk about. We brought up the conversation of MEV, and just for a TLDR, MEV is called maximum extractable value. It's what validators and also minors can get by the power of being able to reorder transactions. They can reorder transactions and submit their own transactions in order to extract some value out of that power.

This is a very big conversation. We've done a ton of podcasts on this in the past. It's like a 501 level conversation. And so lots of previous content, so we can't really go into the dynamics here. But the point is that e-staking allows to extract more value out of the power to order transactions, and validators have this power. And so part of the value of our Eth as a staked ETH derivative token, part of the value of R-Eth comes from the ability to capture the value of M-E-V.

But I just want to pin this question down. Who's responsible for actually capturing M-E-V? Is it the individual node operators? or is it Rocket Pool? And if it's the individual node operators, aren't some node operators going to be better at capturing MEV than others? How does MEV dynamics play out with Rocket Pool?

Sorry, I'm terrible at picking out names. Yeah, there, I want to take this one. Yeah, yeah. So node operators will be collecting MEV. So in actual fact, it'll be the execution client operator, which would probably be the same person as the node operator. but to be specific, they will capture the MEP. So we're actually kind of announcing today

we're part of the flashbots that are to working group to kind of make sure that MEV ends up being a healthy aspect because it's going to happen anyway. and so it needs to be really kind of a healthy aspect. So yeah, they control it, but what we will be doing is implementing a way. So essentially they will be sharing it with the ARETH users. And so we can kind of do that. So that will be part of the next version of Rocket Pool or the continued development of Rocket Pool.

It's still quite early days in that discussion, but that's where we're going with it. This is kind of the reason that Dave opened the trader channel in the Rocket Pool Discord, right? Because it's going to happen anyway. These are economic systems that we're dealing with. And MEV is absolutely going to happen. And it could make a big difference, right? Could increase yield from 4% on Rocket Pool or 5% on Rocket Pool to like 10%. And so if Coinbase or Cracken is doing MEV-type stuff and Rocket Pool isn't, well,

Rockapult is not going to be able to offer the highest yield, right? And so the FlashBots thing, if I understand it, this is just a rudimentary understanding, but FlashBots seeks to sort of democratize MEV. And so if you incorporate FlashBots into sort of what the Rocket Pool node operators have to run, then you can kind of democratize MEV across all of the node operators and then share that, basically share that back, pull that together in our ETH, right? So essentially, our Eth gets the full advantage of whatever FlashBots is getting from an MV perspective. And so long as FlashBots as kind of an MEV public good is doing its job and extracting close to the maximum amount of MEV possible, this should work out fine.

Is that a correct way of understanding it, Darren, or are there some more subtle things here? No, no, that's exactly it. I mean, there's also, it actually benefits node operators as well. And so one of the features that we are looking at, it's not a given yet, but it's certainly a feature that we're looking at, is essentially a smoothing pool. So, M-EV is very spiky. It's chopy, yeah.

You get, you get kind of very big kind of proposals, or very big bundles, and you get smaller ones. So it's very spiky. So one of the things that we're doing is putting this moving pool into place so that Nodeop parade is actually get kind of share that MEV amongst themselves or amongst everyone so that essentially they get a much higher return than potentially they would do if they if they would kind of because essentially it's a roll of the dice. Each time it's a roll of the dice and whereas this kind of evens it out and gives them a kind of a smooth of the return.

So is there an incentive alignment issue here? Because if I have, if I'm running a node, I'm the one ordering their transactions, I'm the one collecting MEV. Do I have to give that over to the REath holders? Or is there an incentive misalignment issue here? There is. And that's why we put out a kind of post a little while ago. Because it actually has it with priority fees as well.

So by kind of particularly with priority fees, if note operators aren't sharing that, because half of the money, essentially, half of the east that is their staking is not theirs. So it's essentially kind of a moral incentive kind of gap where we need to be able to kind of fill that in. So we have a mechanism where we can kind of, particularly with priority fees, we can definitely protect that. So I definitely detect that with MEV as well. That's what we're working with flashbots to be able to kind of detect that as well. And then we do we do have a one of the incentive is the smoothing pool. So we have kind of a carrot stick. The incentive is the smoothing pool.

And then we have a disincentive, which is essentially a kind of penalty. And so if they do the wrong thing, then we have a penalty in there as well. So is that, does that mean that this is a political choice? right? Because when you say about the morals of giving out the ETH, you're actually just determining that as part of what the network should be constructed. And you're saying that this is a fair construction. And I think other people will also think that this is fair. Therefore, it should be designed like this. But it's still subjective at the end of the day, right? Like, hey, I think people will adopt Rocket Pool more if we distribute MEV rather than the node operators collecting it. Is that right? Yeah, and we get a lot of feedback from our community on this stuff as well. At the moment, we do play a kind of shepherding role and being kind of like the core and deities, but we're kind of moving out of that on an ongoing basis. So now that we have the O'Dow set up, that that's kind of moving along those lines in terms

of decentralizing that kind of part of that governance, and we'll be doing more of more of that as we go through. very cool so you said odow and odow is about running a node for rocket pool and that's what is about to come at the end of this next conversation but at the very start of this conversation is the question if i'm a solo staker i have my computer i've got my 32 eth why should i stake with rocket pool what's the incentive for me to do it through the network um so if you're a solo staker obviously staking within rockerpool um is is more profitable i mean that's that's pretty much the main incentive i mean if you stay within Rockpool, you will get a commission for stating on behalf of the protocol that are the 16 other that comes from the deposit pool. That's a big one. You also get RPL rewards, depending on how much you kind of put up an assurance promise in the way of collateral, RPL collateral. But I mean, if you are also, you know, working within another protocol. So if you're more risk-adverse and you want to keep sticking solid, that might, that trade-off might be worth

sticking solo, just for, you know, for the help of the network as well. So if you're It really comes down to your individual node operator and what they're kind of, yeah, their kind of stances on, you know, operating within a protocol and getting more, you know, more income or operating without just, you know, purely because they're not, you know, risk adverse in any way what we shape or form.

So Dave, what does a node operator actually have to run as far as, you know, software? What are kind of the requirements for a node operator to jump into the network? It's pretty easy, It's pretty straightforward. So we have something called our smart node stack. So this is a stack that you will basically download as a node operator.

It'll get you up and running really quickly, conspumbled with an F1, F2 clients. You know, you can choose which one you want. And as we touched on earlier, you know, if you choose an F2 client, then might be Prism. It will kind of hopefully steer you in the direction of another client just for the help of the network.

And this is all a super simple package. So like you can try it on our pro test net. Obviously, you don't need to run one straight on main net. We have a test net on Prater, the Gorelli slash Prater testnet. You can do that quite easily. All you need to do is download the stack, you know, have a Linux box or something set up. Pretty hardware components are pretty low. I mean, obviously if you're running in F1, we do provide the option to use light clients for F1,

so like infuri and stuff like that as well. But if you do want to run Get locally as part of this stack, that option is there. And you would need, you know, a fairly large SSD to kind of keep up that and probably you know 1.5 terabyte something like that um just for future proofing as well um but the stack itself is super simple to get up and going it's probably one the easiest ways you can stake as a solo node operator or as part of the rock pool protocol um outside of rockerpool that might be another incentive uh for you know an external stake to kind of join rock pool is the simplicity of this software how it gets set up uh it's all command line based um but it is it is super

very easy. I mean, I don't know if anyone's tried to start up a, you know, staking through, outside of Rockapool themselves. It can be a little daunting and there's a lot of different facets to go to it. But our package is all kind of rolled into one, easy to go, one that makes registering with the Brooklyn smart contracts and interacting with them are also pretty easy on top of that. I think Bitcoin maximalists are in disbelief there, Dave, when you said a node and Ethereum node is actually easy to run with Rocket Pool. But I can attest, we're actually running one ourselves. So we're going to talk about the O'Dow network ourselves.

And bankless, the entity is part of the ODAO network where we're supporting Rocket Poolness. This is an image of a Raspberry Pi in an undisclosed secret bankless location. One of our DevOps friend, yeah, one of our DevOps friends has set up for us. And this is validating on the Rocket Pool network as an Oracle node. and it's running the stack that you're talking about. So it's running the Rocket Pool, you know, smart stack. It's also running a Geth node. It's also running, I think we're running the Nimbus client

because that was kind of a minority client that we wanted to prop up. So look, man, it's running on a Raspberry Pi, Bitcoin Maximilus. This can be done. We can run an eth node, okay? It's not impossible. And Rocket Pool has definitely made it easier. Can you talk about that for a minute?

we mentioned O'Dow. What is kind of O'Dow and, you know, what are their responsibilities? Okay, so the ODAO is what we call the Oracle DAO within Rockabool. So this is something that kind of enforces checks and balances within the network. It's an actual on-chain DAO made up of various members ourselves, bankless. We have a bunch of the client teams in there as well, their two client teams. You know, both the main block explorers, ETHSKELSK, scan, beacon chain as well. So it's a down made up of, you know, people in the ecosystem

who have the, oh, have the ecosystem's best interest in mind. So yeah, that's, that's it just there. So what this is, this is an on-chain sort of nodes within the Rockapool Network. They operate, like I said, in a true on-chain down. Members can be invited. Members can be kicked if they misbehave. You know, members must place a bond to basically join. And their main purpose is to relay data back from the F2 chain to the F1 chain. So the beacon chain is separate from the F1 chain and we need to kind of keep track of the performance of all the validators within the Rockpool network. These guys do that and they also report back to our smart contracts so that REth balance can get updated daily. So they're very important and they operate through a

consensus mechanism. So any data that gets reported back from the beacon chain to the main chain requires at least 51% of these node operators to agree. So no single ODO node operator can kind of go rogue and stop reporting back, you know, insane balances to throw up the R8 ratio or something. It's all done through a consensus mechanism. And they also are in charge of enforcing something that we came across recently was the ability to submit a deposit to the beacon chain

using different credentials, then the smart node will provide you essentially. So it's kind of a way to, basically cheap the rock pool system and almost still a deposit. So what we've done to kind of enable this is these ODAO nodes perform certain checks and balances to make sure signatures for deposits are valid. If they're not valid, then you essentially get a whole bunch of other stuck on the big chain and can only withdraw that when withdrawals are enabled.

So they provide enforcement, but most importantly, they provide reporting, which is what they call Oracle notes. So they have a whole bunch of important duties, but those are probably the two most important ones. And yeah, so they operate in their own DAO and you might see new members come and go based on invitations proposed by current members. So we are not in control of this DAO, we don't have the majority. So it's a true, true on-chain DAO that we've designed for Rockapult. True to the nature of DAO's Rockapult becoming more of like a collection of micro-warker. organizations resembling one larger organization.

And somebody in the YouTube comments is making it very well known that the documentation for downloading a Rocket Pool node is fantastic. And so if you want to both join a Dow and a community and also learn how to run your own node, maybe Rocket Pool is the place for you to go. Guys, thank you so much for coming on and giving us some of your time. We just have a few topics of conversations left. And Dave, you've been talking about some of the dynamics behind the RPL token. And I want to formally flesh out that conversation here.

RPL, it's a token that is used as you've been saying, insurance. Can you talk about, can you just illustrate again what the role of the RPL token is in the Rocket Pool Network and how it gives you the crypto economic sustainability that all systems need? Yeah, absolutely. So like I touched on earlier, insurance to make sure node operators perform is a big one. Because we don't know who these node operators are. We don't know if they have a good setup, they have a bad setup. you know, it's permissionless.

They can just join if they can, you know, perform the duty. So in order to ensure they perform these duties, they need to basically stake in insurance promise in the form of our RPL token. If you put up a big, you know, kind of insurance bond to say, all right, I'm confident in my node operating ability, here's a big stake of RPL. If I mess up, you can slash a bunch of that

and that will automatically get sold at auction by our smart contracts. That ether that is basically earned through that sale is then given back to R8 users, or it's basically inserted back into the deposit pool, which enables R8th users to continue earning reward. So this is all part of the tokenomics building a rocket pool. That's just one aspect of RPA.

So it actually has a couple of use cases beyond that. It's utility-wise, and it's extremely valuable to the protocol. Basically, like I mentioned earlier, with the Oracle notes, if they detect an invalid deposit signature through any of these validators that are created within the Rockball Network, you know, it's basically someone trying to cheat the system. It will basically, yeah, get rid of some of your RPL as well that you put up.

Also, for the smoothing pool that Lange's touched on early, we're going to the MEV. Yeah, that's an enforcement mechanism. They're kind of a carrot stick approach where if you don't basically afford on these extra rewards that are in the way of MEV, you know, a few of the other aspects of that, we can almost slash your RPL based on that kind of road behavior where you're not participating in the protocol's best interest. You're trying to cheat the RF users out of their fair share of the rewards because you're staking half for their ETH as well.

So that's a couple of it. We also have the Oracle D.R. So the Oracle D.R. Bond is in RPL as well. So this is a bond to make sure these node operators within the ODAO perform their duties correctly and don't try to cheat the system anyway. If members kind of see, you know, one of these nodes is going rogue or, you know, just plain up not reporting. They've disappeared or somewhere like that. These members have the option to kick that member with an optional burn to their original bond.

So that's kind of another characteristic approach to make sure that you are working in the proposed best interest through financial incentives. So there's a multitude of reasons. And it's probably more than I actually haven't touched on right now. but that's pretty much a large part of our token. Oh, I should say, sorry, I almost forgot such one. RPL belt into Rockball is inflationary. So in order to drive, you know, these players to all work in each other's best interest, they get a certain proportion of this inflation.

That then gives them a financial centre to make sure the protocol keeps on operating the way it should. So ODA nodes, get a proportion of this. Regular node operators, as I said earlier, get a portion is based on the amount of insurance that they're putting up, and so forth as well. So it's, it's,

yeah, it's a multifaceted, uh, token at the moment that plays a pretty key part, uh, in the protocol. Um, because our tokenomics will work on by a fire eyes and us over quite some

time. So it's not something we just slapped together overnight. It's a very kind of thought out system. So let me, let me see if I can regurgitate the gist and see if this is, this is correct. Ethereum as a protocol incentivizes alignment by making you stake your ether to Ethereum, and then if you validate transactions correctly, then you get

ether rewards. If you do it incorrectly, then you get slashed. Rocket Pool is a layer on top of Ethereum, and so you, as a node operator, can come to Rocket Pool instead of with 32Eth, you can come with the minimum of 16Eth. But my question is, since Rocket Pool already enforces 16Eth on the node operators, isn't that the insurance for honest behavior? Because you guys don't don't allow somebody to bring a node with zero eth, they have to have at least half of the eth, which incentivizes the alignment behind the node operators and the depositors of eth.

And so, first question is, isn't that already the thing that incentivizes alignment? Actually, I'll let you answer that question before moving on. Yeah, so to a certain degree. So beyond a mass slashing event, that will pretty much decimate any kind of node deposit beyond that. And as I touched on earlier, also the ensuring that playing in the protocol's best interest

through MEV, through ODAO, yeah, and basically depositing correct withdrawal credentials. So, yeah, there's a whole bunch of facets going to that. But yes, so if a node operator does perform just minimally badly, it's taken from their other because we don't need to sell that adoption. If it's a mass slashing event, then beyond what they put up at that 16 other, And if we ever want to reduce that for any reason in the future, we kind of need that uphill there to back up that other amount in case it's not sufficient for the penalties incur.

And the penalties are getting worse on the beacon turn as well. They are increasing these gradually. I think you'll see the few slightly events that have been so far, haven't been that sphere, but they are ramping up the severity on that based on the maturity of the beacon chain. So since Rocket Pool is a network on top of a network, rocket pool is on top of Ethereum, there are just additional behaviors that can,

the additional surface area that can be attacked. And so you guys, the rocket pool system just uses the RPL token as kind of a universal plug of the attack surface areas. Is that kind of a way to describe it? Yeah, that's pretty good. So, yeah, and obviously, incentivizing correct behavior

to not try and exploit any of those avenues yet. So one critique I've heard of the RPL model is that it's a capital-intensive, where it's, you can, if you have 32-Ether, you can go and stake 32-Ether. You could either run your own node, or you could just do it with Coinbase or whatever, or you could do it with Rocket Pool

and try and get some of the RPL rewards as well in order to maximize your returns. But in order to do that, you actually have to bring more than 32-Eth to the table. You have to bring 32-Eth plus the sum of RocketPool that you also need to bond. So does this token model make the Rocket-Pool system capitally intensive?

Well, most of our note was required to bring 16 ETH to the table plus 1.6 ETHER of APL based on the minimal insurance bond. So if you had 32 ETHR, outside of that, you could obviously take that to common base or somewhere else and stay true to them.

If you bring it to Rockafool, you can actually have, you know, create two validators and W. Entreatensers of Geng proposals as well, which is another financial kind of incentive to that on top of things. So, yeah, I mean, yeah, it really come down to the node operator, but I mean, 16-netter is still a lot, and we are definitely

looking at other ways to kind of reduce that in the future and still keep node operators incentivised to perform. So the reason why we do 16-eather down the middle at the moment is because if you have as much online as the protocol does. So if you mess up any kind of small way, then the protocol, do you suffer as much as the protocol does? Because your rewards are ultimately based on your performance as a validator in the Rockpool protocol. So I want to get a, you know, Trader Channel Discord for a second here. What is up with the RPL price here lately, guys? It's been absolutely incredible.

So year ago, market cap is like 50 million and now here we are like 850 million. You know, it's this part of, I know there was a token economic redesign. Do you think that played a role? Do you think it's just like market sentiment around, hey, beacon chain launched and the thing shipping? Or do you have any other explanations for this? Or should we just head to the trader channel or Discord and hear their theories instead? Yeah, you could definitely get a trading channel for that.

But I mean, for me personally, obviously, it's been a project which couldn't really be realized into who smart contract withdrawals were enabled on the beacon train. That was something that only happened around February this year. So I don't know where that coincides with the price of things. But obviously, once that was a... announced into the spec for Ethereum 2, that mean Rockapool could be truly decentralized. Around that time, we're also going through audits and whatnot, and we went through

three rounds of audits with some of the biggest in the industry to kind of make sure the protocol was safe to use, was efficient in what it did. So I think a culminative of those events kind of leading up to our launch. Yeah, I think that's it. I mean, we've been around forever, So people, and we also never really overly tried to push the token price of it. I mean, that's not really what we're here for. We're here to build a protocol. And our success in building a decentralized protocol would be reflecting the price, but we don't try to overly push price or anything like that.

That's the trading channels, guys. You know, I just love the RPL community because somebody, again, from the YouTube comments is saying, the strongest cat alive saying, we don't watch the US dollar price, Ryan. we watch the ETH ratio when it comes to RPL price. And so that's how you know. That's how you know. Oh, my God. Yeah.

What are RPL holders more bullish on, ETH or RPL? Probably. It's going to be hard for them to pick, though. So as we come to the close, guys, I want to ask you a couple questions about maybe the Rocket Pool roadmap and then the Ethereum roadmap. But, Darren, can you talk about the rocket pool roadmap? Like, what's coming next here? Is there a plan to expand into? you staking for other chains, or do you guys intend to be sort of like

Ian-esque style Ethereum only? Tell us a bit about the roadmap. So in terms of the kind of chain discussion, we're not really against other chains, but we certainly, we want to do one thing well. And Ethereum has enough for us to do, if you know what I mean? There's a lot to unpack it, just in the Ethereum ecosystem. And to be honest, we are kind of, Ethereum. Are you going to use the M word?

You're about to use the M word? No. We just align with the ideals. There we go. And we love the community and the ecosystem as well. So I think that's the real thing there. So we probably won't see other chains soon. But we're not ruling it out, but that's where we are at the moment.

In terms of the roadmap, the big focus is on integrations. So wallets, the query leady pools, block explorers, lending protocols, oracles, data feeds, and all that sort of thing. So we're rolling those out as quickly as we can so that we can get RE's everywhere. The other things are on the roadmap, obviously very close is the merge. So we definitely have some work to do around that. we're trying to leverage L2 as much as possible. So that's definitely something that we're keeping on as well. So yeah, it's going to be a very, very busy next few months.

Yeah, is the merge going to be a big left for you guys? Is this going to be a pretty massive undertaking? And when do you think that's coming? Do you think this is really going to happen first half of next year? Or given all of your roadmap experience with Ethereum, do you think it could take a little bit longer? I don't think it's good for us to speculate. I think we'll leave that up to the core,

just to put a date on that. But yeah, we're definitely excited about the merge. It's a game changer really for us because it means that validators are, you know, first-class citizens in Ethereum. So it'll be a very, very good time for us. Well, guys, closing questions, then we asked about the roadmap for Rocket Pool. Now, let's talk a little bit about the roadmap for Ethereum in this kind of

final question. I've gotten a sense throughout this discussion that the thing that keeps you guys going is like this decentralization maximalist kind of ideology in alignment with the values that are so core to Ethereum. Maybe can you talk about that a little bit? like, why does Ethereum align so closely with your values? And what are those values? And also, like, what do you think about Ethereum's roadmap at this point in time?

Like, is Ethereum going to make it? Are you in your cycle of being bullish or, you know, kind of worried about Ethereum? Where are you in the cycle? Maybe let's start with David. So values. And then what do you think about the future of Ethereum? Yeah, as far as values goes, I'd like to think our work so far kind of speaks for itself in that regard.

Working for, you know, almost close to five years on Rockapult at this point to kind of bring decentralized staking to Ethereum. Yeah, I mean, obviously that's a massive, massive commitment. And we put in the time. Personally, I just, I think it's, I just, I love that kind of aspect of creating a fair and equal system rather than having kind of everything centralized around one entity. And yeah, that's just for me. personally, as far as the Ethereum roadmap goes and whatnot, that's, we've had a lot of experience with that in the past.

So, but yeah, I mean, I won't speculate on their, they're kind of, you know, where they're headed with things and whatnot. But I am definitely on board with theorem 110% always have been since I pretty much got into it. So I'm not going to use that word either, but, yeah, I'm very much, yeah, a kind of a one-chain guy. I can't see any touch word. I can't see anything replacing Ethereum for a long, long time. Probably the most bullish factor for me is the fact that they're constantly evolving. And they're constantly looking at ways to improve things. I mean, if you get scared of change, it's just going to stagnate your chain and whatnot.

And eventually someone will come along with something better and replace it. But Ethereum is constantly evolving. I mean, they've done some absolutely amazing things with the protocol to date. and I think once we see the merge happen and whatnot, it's just going to get even better. So I'm 110% on board, yeah. Darren, how about from your perspective, Ethereum roadmap and the values?

Yeah, I think I get really excited about these kind of participation value networks and the kind of open source nature of Ethereum itself and also that then that's essentially what kind of rocket pool is. So they're the things that I kind of get me excited about the whole thing. I like the fact that, as Dave said it, I like the fact that they're ever evolving and all of that sort of thing. Yeah, I think that I'm very, very excited about seeing what the future of Ethereum looks like. More and more, I'm surprised at what's going on in the ecosystem, how bigger things are, how, you know, more.

mainstream is paying attention. That's, that's, this, this year is, it's been kind of amazing. So, yeah, so I'm really, really keen to find out what happens. Darren, David, thank you guys so much for guiding us through Rocket Pool. And thank you for your work. It's a fantastic network to be part of and looking forward to hearing more, looking forward to the merge.

We appreciate you hanging out with us and bankless. Yeah, our pleasure, guys. Thanks for having us on again. And yeah, always happy to have a chat. Thanks, guys. We appreciate it. Action items for you, bankless listeners. First of all, you can go stake on Rocket Pool if you so choose at rocketpool.

Pick yourself up some earth-eath when you do that. Also, we'll include in the show notes a link to an RPL investment thesis, Reddit post, that we saw recently from a community manager. You're looking to get an overview of the token economics and the bullcase, maybe some of that Discord trader chatter. You can check out that post and get some of the thesis. Of course, risks and disclaimers. RPL is risky.

ETH is risky. So is ETH staking. All of crypto is risky, guys. This is DFI. All right, you could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone.

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