Rocket Pool - Medalla Beta Concludes
Hello Rocket Poolers! Well, what an amazing effort by all of you in our first public beacon chain beta that is running on Medalla right now @ beta.rocketpool.net
We are so proud of all of you who contributed to it, either just by throwing some Goerli ETH quickly into the front-end and getting some sweet tokenised staking happening with rETH, or by going the extra mile and firing up a smart node in the Rocket Pool network, to help it generate rewards for those rETH holders.
With Rocket Pool aiming to become a community-owned staking protocol for Ethereum 2.0, we have to give a quick shout-out to some very special community members who stepped up for this beta to help educate others.
While there was many of these great members who helped out others, a few stood out. From our Discord, we’d like to give huge props to: YorickDowne (he/him), Pieter, Kron and Eskp for all the help and guidance they gave new stakers and node operators. I think the community would agree, they did an amazing job.
We also recently did this interview with Bankless. If you’re new to Rocket Pool or would like a detailed overview of how we work, this will fit the bill just perfectly. It’s a great introduction to us, so if you have a spare 30 mins, dive right in and start learning!
A tale of testnets
Our Medalla beta launched on 6th of October, 2020 00:00 UTC and has been a great experience. We’ve improved numerous aspects of our smart node stack, which makes running ETH2 validators in a decentralised network a smooth and buttery experience.
As great as it has been though, we will shortly be ending the beta on Medalla due to its imminent demise. Fear not though, brave node operator or staker — we’ve decided to move the beta to the new testnet Pyrmont which will be replacing it soon and is expected to have a life span of several months at least.
Medalla Stats
One of the most impressive things from the Medalla beta was the stats that the Rocket Pool network churned out in just 6 weeks. Here’s a quick recap:
- ETH Staked: 500,000 ETH (approx 27.5% of all ETH staked on Medalla)
- Node Operators: 665 in 85 timezones across the world.
- Validators: 15,484 (95% of the amount required for mainnet genesis).
- Medalla Finality: All rETH holders didn’t lose any value over a 2 week period where Medalla network lost finality. This is an amazing accomplishment and is proof of the value which redundancy brings to a decentralised network.
- Smart Node Updates: We released 5 smart node updates that made running a node in the network easier with every release.
- Etherscan Guildwarz: Was a contest launched by the well-known block explorer Etherscan to help bring validators back to Medalla and recover from losing finality. Rocket Pool’s node operators won this contest comfortably, and only a small fraction of them participated — a huge kudos to them!
Medalla Rewards
If you participated in the Medalla beta, either by staking and receiving rETH or running a node, you’ll be entitled to a share of 10k RPL rewards as outlined in our beta guide article several weeks ago.
The end date to be eligible for these rewards is 20th November, 2020 00:00 UTC.
- To be eligible for reward bucket 1, you must successfully deposit ETH into Rocket Pool at beta.rocketpool.net by this date.
- To be eligible for reward bucket 2, you must successfully register as a node via the rocketpool CLI with rocketpool node register by this date.
- To be eligible for reward bucket 3, each of your node’s validators must: a) have been activated on the beacon chain; b) have a balance of at least 24 ETH; and c) still be active on the beacon chain at this date. Validators can safely be exited after this date and still be counted.
Originally we had the reward threshold for bucket 3 of the rewards set to 32 ETH, so if any of your validators finished with > 32 ETH, you’d be able to collect rewards from this bucket proportionally to their success. However, due to the extended finality issues Medalla incurred, we felt this was a bit unfair, so we’ve dropped the minimum threshold for this bucket to 24 ETH. If your validator finished with > 24 ETH, you’ll be able to collect some of these rewards now.
We’ll be deploying contracts for participants to collect these rewards in the coming weeks, with another announcement article detailing how you’ll be able to do this.
- If you staked and received rETH during the beta, you’ll need to use the account you staked with to claim your rewards.
- If you ran a node during the beta, you’ll need to export your node’s ETH1 account before you take it offline. You can do that by running
rocketpool wallet exportfrom the rocketpool CLI, and then importing the private key displayed on screen into MetaMask. You can find more information on the export command in our documentation here.
Pyrmont Launch
The new Rocket Pool beta on the Pyrmont testnet will open on 26th November, 2020 00:00 UTC and feature another 10,000 RPL giveaway for participants!
We expect this beta to run over the Xmas period and into the new year. It is expected that it will be replaced by a final beta next year, which will include our tokenomics aimed at making the network more resilient, and take the first steps towards becoming a full-fledged staking network under the governance of a DAO.
To participate in this beta, please follow the original Medalla Guides.
POAPs
Since both testnets are relatively similar, we’ll distribute the POAPs at the end of the Pyrmont beta for users that participate in either the Medalla or Pyrmont testnets. Instructions will be provided then on how to collect these special NFTs.
When mainnet?
We get asked this question a lot, and it’s one we’re approaching with three main considerations in mind.
The main feature we are aiming to launch alongside on mainnet is the ability for an ETH1 smart contract to receive a withdrawal from the beacon chain. Currently, services which pool ETH together for staking are unable to perform withdrawals in a trustless way.
This feature has been anticipated by us for some time and was actually proposed by Vitalik not so long ago. In order to be a decentralised AND trustless staking protocol, this is a must-have feature for us. It is currently in the process of being outlined by the Ethereum Foundation and we’re hoping for it to be included in the first hard-fork after the beacon chain launches.
Another of these main considerations is just as important and that is our security. We will be getting multiple audits after the above feature is implemented to ensure all of our smart contracts are as secure as they can possibly be.
Finally, it’s important to take time and make sure the software you’re using to validate with is stable and secure. The current ETH2 client teams have been fantastic in responding to issues with prompt fixes, but the beacon chain clients are still very new. As such, when a 32 ETH deposit is on the line, you should approach mainnet with caution in mind and not FOMO in using software you’re not experienced with. We’ll most likely be supporting 2 clients at launch which are demonstrably secure, then adding others over time once they reach the same level of refinement. We’ll be keeping a close eye on them after the eth2 mainnet launch, leading up to our own Rocket Pool mainnet launch.
With all that in mind, we are hoping for a Q1 2021 launch if the stars align :)
Rocket Pool DAO + Tokenomics
Yes this update is still going, it’s a big one! We recently launched the Rocket Pool DAO forums where you can monitor our most recent tokenomics post that outlines the work currently underway to underpin a DAO to run a community-driven staking protocol — aka Rocket Pool. Feel free to read over the current topics and let us know your thoughts.
Questions or just say hello!
Well 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 chat room that anyone can join. If chat rooms aren’t your thing, we’re also on Twitter!
