Rocket Pool

David Rugendyke began Rocket Pool in December 2016, two months after Vitalik Buterin’s Mauve Paper outlined Ethereum proof of stake. A public alpha and explanatory article arrived in May 2017. The project had to design a staking market years before Ethereum users could actually validate on the live chain.

Mainnet finally opened on 9 November 2021. A bug-bounty researcher had found a staking vulnerability shortly before the planned October release, so the team delayed and staged deposits rather than treating the calendar as immutable. Rocket Pool’s first production act was therefore a postponement made to protect deposited ETH.

An ordinary depositor sends ETH and receives rETH. The wallet quantity stays fixed while the protocol exchange rate incorporates pooled consensus rewards, priority fees, MEV, commissions and losses. Direct minting charges 0.05%, and direct redemption depends on ETH being available. A market swap can exit sooner, but at the market’s price.

A node operator takes the other side. The operator bonds ETH and runs validator keys and infrastructure. RPL is a third position: it is neither the deposit receipt nor a claim on the validator’s 32 ETH. Under current rules it must be staked to an active node before it can vote or receive the voter revenue share.

Redstone enabled rewards and withdrawals in 2022. Atlas cut the entry bond to 8 ETH in 2023. Saturn 1, launched on 18 February 2026, stopped new legacy minipool deposits and gave each operator one Megapool contract for many validators. Each validator currently requires a 4 ETH operator bond and uses 28 ETH from pooled deposits.

A smaller bond is not free capacity. Saturn’s accounting tracks who owns the capital and records penalties or a shortfall in returned borrowed ETH as Megapool debt. Rewards, exited capital and unclaimed operator funds service that debt before free withdrawal. Current documentation calls any staked RPL secondary collateral against slashing, yet Saturn 1 permits ETH-only operation and imposes no minimum RPL stake.

Saturn 1 splits the return attributable to borrowed, pooled ETH: the default shares are 86% to rETH, 5% as base operator commission, 9% to vote-eligible RPL staked in Megapools and 0% to the pDAO treasury. The operator separately receives the return on its own bonded ETH, so these percentages do not divide all validator revenue. They are live settings, not permanent coupons. The pDAO can alter bounded parameters, and operator performance still determines the underlying reward pool.

Eligible RPL is capped at 150% of a node’s bonded ETH value. Current inflation remains near 5% a year and is distributed in 28-day rounds, with RPIP-25 allocating 50% to node operators, 47.5% to the pDAO and 2.5% to the oDAO. The verified token contract mints through the registered rewards path, not through an unrestricted owner mint.

Houston arrived in June 2024, and onchain pDAO voting followed in November. Rocket Pool later permanently disabled the old guardian. That did not erase every specialized role: an elected Security Council can react to emergencies, and the oDAO reports oracle data and participates in delayed upgrade execution. Decentralization here is a division of powers, not the absence of operators.

Saturn 2 is still not deployed. The current living RPIP-86 prioritizes protocol withdrawal requests and underperformance ejection, plans to reduce annual RPL inflation from 5% to 2.5%, and ends issuance rewards to node operators. It identifies a 6 ETH Megapool bond as a separate draft and says the earlier 1.5 ETH reduction is not the current plan. These choices may still change before code reaches mainnet.