Rocket Pool Token Presale
In my many years working as a developer, there’s few instances where I can say I was truly excited about the project I was working on; some were just fun; some were just challenging and some were just a part of a regular days work. Now though; it’s different, it’s exciting, it’s challenging and could truly be hugely beneficial to the very ecosystem that it’s built on — Ethereum.
Work originally began on Rocket Pool when Ethereum was priced at around $10, during the late stages of 2016. It was then brought out of the shadows in late May to much surprise, applause and some disbelief. The Rocket Pool alpha was the first working implementation of a Proof of Stake pool designed to work with Casper, the new consensus protocol that Ethereum will transition to in 2018. It features several first to market features; such as load balancing across multiple cloud hosting providers using smart contracts, minipools, widow addresses and deposit tokens. Rocket Pool isn’t just a whitepaper, it’s actual code.
The future
To put forward that old cliché one more time, I’d really like to see Rocket Pool become all it can be. While being its creator and someone who loves a challenge, I’m also very pragmatic and realise that while I’ve gotten it this far, it’s time to look forward into expanding Rocket Pool with additional resources; such as bringing on additional skill sets; team members and building out its base smart node infrastructure. To accomplish this goal, Rocket Pool will be conducting two crowdsales for its RPL protocol token.
The presale will be the first with a minimum buy-in for participants who are after a specific amount of RPL and the public crowdsale will follow in October which is open to everyone with no minimum buy in. Unfortunately due to regulation uncertainty in this sector, we cannot offer these token sales to anyone who is a citizen or entity of America or Australia.
The RPL Token
The Rocket Pool Token (RPL) is a protocol token that is the life blood of the distributed staking network. It serves several purposes in the network, described in detail in the whitepaper. For those of you new to Rocket Pool though, I’ve added a quick summary below:
Each node in the Rocket Pool network is required to have a deposit of RPL in it equal to the amount of ether (1:1) that node is capable of staking. This gives anyone, including the network, the ability to easily observe the staking limits of each node, acts as a security token for new nodes being registered in the network, allows each node to directly check on the status of other nodes in the network using token routing without going through the main contract and offers scalable partial compensation for users in case of node failure or penalties incurred from Casper by under-performing.
There is a total of 36 million RPL tokens. Rocket Pool will be retaining 15% of tokens for future use by our smart nodes.
The Presale
To assist Rocket Pool in expanding, we’ll be offering up 85% of these tokens for sale over two different crowdsales. The first will be the presale; it will be capped at approximately 5,250 ether at current USD prices and will start on the 9th September 12:00am UTC 2017, finishing two weeks later on 23rd September 12:00am UTC 2017.
There will be 40% of the total tokens assigned to the presale and it will only be open to registered participants; early Rocket Pool supporters and backers will get priority entry. The presale has a bonus of approximately 20% more RPL per ether than the following public crowdsale, but features a minimum buy in of 50 ether due to demand. If you’d like to participate in the presale, please contact us or join our growing community of Rocket Poolers in our slack. We can’t guarantee everyone a place, but we will do our best. For those that miss out, do not fret, our public crowdsale which will follow features a new distributional method that guarantees everyone who participates at least some tokens regardless of the amount or time you contribute.
How to participate in the presale
If you’ve contacted us and we’ve included you in the presale, here’s what you’ll need to do to collect your RPL tokens when the time presale begins on the 9th September 12:00am UTC 2017. You’ll have two options for contributing your ether and instantly receiving your tokens.
MyEtherWallet, Ethereum Wallet, Ledger
If you don’t have your registered wallet account available in an Ethereum browser, you can simply send your registered ether amount to the presale contract address displayed on the Rocket Pool Presale page. Make sure to allocate at least 250,000 wei for gas when contributing, do not send from any exchange wallet. If you send less ether than you’ve been reserved, your transaction will fail. If you send too much ether than you’ve reserved, you will receive your RPL tokens and a refund for the excess ether sent.
Important: Before sending your ether, verify the address displayed on this page with user @darcius in the Rocket Pool Slack, the presale contract address will be published 3 days before the presale begins in the slack. Do not trust any contract address published anywhere else or by anyone else.
Ethereum Browsers/Extensions
If your registered presale ethereum account belongs to any kind of Ethereum browser such as MetaMask, Mist or Parity, you’ll be able to use the Rocket Pool Presale page to easily see how many RPL tokens are reserved for you before the presale begins and then when the sale begins. When the sale begins you’ll be able to contribute your ether directly using the website.
MetaMask — A great chrome extension that makes any webpage able to interact with the Ethereum blockchain. Make sure you have selected the ‘Main Ethereum Network’ in the top left corner of the plugin before loading the presale page.
Mist — A very handy Ethereum browser that compliments the main Ethereum Wallet. If your registered presale account is part of your Ethereum Wallet, you’ll be able to navigate to the Rocket Pool Presale in Mist, then select your registered presale account and contribute your ether directly following the instructions on the page.
Parity — Simply start Parity, wait until it syncs completely with the main Ethereum Mainnet, leave in running in the background, then proceed to the Rocket Pool Presale page where your Parity wallet accounts will be accessible.
You can see if Rocket Pool picks up your accounts at the bottom of the page. Simply click this bar and select the account you used to reserve your tokens with, then you should see the following screens at the bottom of the page.
View Your RPL Tokens
Once you’ve contributed your ether to the Rocket Pool Presale contract, you can view your newly minted RPL tokens instantly by entering the RPL Token Contract address. There’ll be more information on that here once the contract has been deployed.
RPL Token Address: Coming Soon
Support
If anyone has any inquiries about become a participant in the Rocket Pool Presale or has questions about claiming and viewing their reserved tokens, please feel free to contact us anytime. You can either contact us at our website or in our slack channel, we’re happy to answer questions any time.
