Rocket Pool is the first ever truly decentralized trustless staking protocol.
That’s an amazing accomplishment, but it also meant that Rocket Pool had to launch much later than other staking services.
The reason for that is when it comes to launching a trustless protocol successfully, there are a lot of important factors to figure out in terms of tokenomics, security, economics of scale, auditing, and other factors that are of much less significance for custodial or semi-custodial services.
The developers were playing the long game, and it has definitely paid off.
Rocket Pool Staking Statistics
The protocol is currently ranked #2 of Ethereum staking providers, trailing only Lido. The Rocket Pool staking protocol currently holds just around 120,000 ETH locked in total value (which breaks down to around 82,000 ETH and 3,000,000 RPL tokens).
When looking at total Ethereum staking numbers, Rocket Pool currently holds 1% of all staked ETH.
However, to overtaking Lido will take a long (long!) time, with the liquid staking giants holding $8.1B in total value locked, which means that the trustless Ethereum staking protocol will have to grow its $300M TVL about 27 times and for Lido to not move an inch during that time.
Rocket Pool is slowly creeping up on the 1,000 node operators mark as well, currently sitting at 744, with 70 different geographic locations around the world.
Most of the node operators are locking the maximum rETH collateral in order to receieve the 20% commission on their validators.
Helping Ethereum Client Diversity
One of the most significant things that Rocket Pool is accomplishing is contributing to client diversity.
It’s a known fact in the Ethereum staking eco-system that there is an issue of client centralization, with too many staking providers using Prysm. This is a significant issue which could create a significant problem for Ethereum staking in case there’s a significant bug in Prysm or if something happens to the client.
Rocket Pool helps combat that, by improving client diversity, thus creating a healthier Ethereum staking environment.
Rocket Pool Roadmap for 2022
Rocket Pool is not done, not even close. Despite everything that they have achieved since launching in late 2021, their plans for 2022 are quite ambitious, they include:
* rETH integration with DeFi protocols, wallets, and DeFi trackers
* Node operator reach and onboarding
* The Merge and MEV (big one)
* Leveraging layer 2
* Node operator RPL claim optimisation
* Governance and funding of community initiatives
To read the protocol’s full roadmap plan for 2022 visit their announcement post on Medium.
