Development Update — 12th August
Hello Rocket Poolers! Since our last major announcement on our changes to Rocket Pool 2.5, we’ve been super busy! So, in today's development update, we’ll be covering not only how those changes have been brought to life and the challenges that came with them, but also our plans for the rollout of the next beta on the newly created ETH2 Medalla testnet. We’ve even thrown in some pretty screenshots for good measure.
We’ll also be using this update to cover some of our early plans for a Rocket Pool DAO to govern the network in the future and how that might look. We’ve also recently introduced a new Rocket Pool Improvement Proposal (RPIP) system which has been rolled out to our Discord room. This new system helps us gauge community sentiment and feedback on big new additions to Rocket Pool before they are rolled out. Be sure to jump in and check out the first one!
Medalla Beta
In our last update we introduced “Tokenised Staking” to the world using our new rETH token, which represents a staking deposit and the rewards it gains over time in the Rocket Pool 2.5 network. It can be held, sold, traded or all of the above long before Phase 1.5/2 of the ETH2 rollout occurs and provides our users with liquidity during this time in which all staking deposits are locked on the beacon chain.
Over the course of the next few weeks, we’ll be finishing up many of the v2.5 changes talked about above and will be announcing when our next beta will occur. We can say it will naturally be on the Medalla ETH2 testnet and will be a rolling beta, this way we can focus on certain aspects of Rocket Pool one at a time, rather than throwing the kitchen sink at everyone all at once.
“What’s a rolling beta?” I hear you ask. It’ll be a beta where we progressively roll out aspects of Rocket Pool so that we can monitor them individually — this will allow for much easier debugging and patching if needed. The beta itself will hopefully run non-stop for several months, but if we do need to take it down and relaunch it for any reason, we’ll give everyone plenty of notice! It’s a beta, so anything could happen :)
We’ll have details about the beta rollout process with the beta announcement in the coming weeks, so stay tuned. We’ll also be giving away a hefty bounty of our RPL tokens to everyone who participates as usual, so stay tuned!
Beta Website
For those of you who just want to stake with whatever amount of ETH you have and have no interest in running a node, the beta website will be for you!
For this beta, we’ll be providing faucets so users can easily get whatever testnet ETH they need to try out ETH2 staking. There will be a few other features, such as a network map that displays the general locations of nodes running in the Rocket Pool network (should they wish to appear).
We’ll have much more info about the beta and how it will be progressively rolled out soon, so for now, here are some screenshots of the WIP beta site.
For the beta we’ll be supporting MetaMask and Ledger wallets initially. Ledger support is fairly advanced and allows for custom HD paths or more general path support from MyCrypto, MEW, Ledger Live and more.
When a node operator registers themselves with the Rocket Pool smart contracts, they can optionally provide their general location. If they do, it helps build this map which shows how distributed and decentralised the network is. The location used is very broad so as to provide peace of mind for those security-conscious operators.
Of course, this wouldn’t be much of a beta if we didn’t supply you with some testnet ETH to have fun with, so faucets will supply ample ETH and RPL tokens for all users to easily try out ETH2 staking.
Stay tuned for more info about the beta soon!
Rocket Pool 2.5 Updates
In our last update we introduced “Tokenised Staking” to the world using our new rETH token, which represents a staking deposit and the rewards it gains over time in the Rocket Pool network. This was a major change for us and we’ve been hard at work implementing this new style of effortless staking since then.
With these v2.5 changes, Rocket Pool will act like a base application layer for staking, connecting the rewards offered by ETH2 back to the ETH1 chain, through rETH and our network of decentralised node operators. This also means Rocket Pool can be very easily built on, and allowing this to happen will be a focus over the course of the ETH2 rollout.
Rocket Pool Integration
For those developers out there who are interested in building dApps on Rocket Pool or integrating it into existing platforms, we’ve recently updated some of our repos in line with the v2.5 changes.
You can use the JS lib to build front ends that interact with the contracts, or even use Golang to write some server-side apps which interact with them.
- Smart Contracts — https://github.com/rocket-pool/rocketpool
- JavaScript Lib — https://github.com/rocket-pool/rocketpool-js
- Golang Lib — https://github.com/rocket-pool/rocketpool-go
ETH2 Clients
On top of those changes, we’ve also brought our ETH2 client integrations up to date. Our long-term goal is to implement all stable ETH2 clients into Rocket Pool and give our node operators the choice in which client to run.
For our initial Medalla beta, we’ll be offering up Lighthouse by Sigma Prime and Prysm by Prysmatic Labs, with our sights set on other clients as the beta runs over several months.
You might be wondering how we are integrating these bleeding-edge ETH2 clients already, and that’s a great question! Integrating ETH2 clients into the Rocket Pool stack is done using a middleware layer which interprets the request from our smart node software into a request that the selected ETH2 client can understand.
The Rocket Pool smart node stack currently operates like this:
This middleware layer can hopefully be phased out over time as the different clients converge on API standards for beacon chain communication and other interactions.
Of course, while the above diagram might look daunting, the entire Rocket Pool Smart Node stack comes bundled with all these components working together out of the box, in an easy to install package.
Rocket Pool DAO
While busy working on all of the above, we’ve also been setting in motion early plans for a DAO to help govern the network and help it thrive over the next few years.
RPL will be the primary governance token behind the DAO and will allow it to perform upgrades on the smart contracts, change settings (min/max commission rates for node operators etc) and more. This will allow anyone to propose changes to the network and remove us as the primary guardians.
We’ll be providing more details on this in a future update and what changes might flow through to Rocket Pool’s tokenomics as a result, so stay tuned!
Questions or just say hello!
Well this turned out a bit longer than expected, 10 points to you for making it this far! If you have questions or want to know a bit more about us, why not swing by for a chat and say G’day! You can view our website or have a chat with us in our Discord room that anyone can join. If chat rooms aren’t your thing, we’re also on Twitter!
