SOTS #37: Rocket Pool and the future of Staking Pools

Transcript

Welcome to State-of-the-Stake Episode 37

[Music] i'm superfiz this is state of the state episode number 37. there are a couple things i'm interested in talking about today and some of them are things that i've refrained from talking about in the past because as the beacon chain health coordinator my goal is to build bridges with all of the parties associated with staking whether that's implementation clients researchers staking pools um or even hardware producers like avato and dapnode my goal really is to build bridges and include everyone and because of that i've been walking

the Ethereum Due Diligence Committee (EDDC) will be launching soon with the goal of helping to navigate staking pool services

this really fine line with staking pools where i participate in the ethereum due diligence committee to help vet staking pools and i um at the same time i'm telling people wait it's too early to give your money to staking pools and then i've observed pools being slashed and i'm you know reiterating please it's not we're not ready let's wait till june and all this time i've there's been this undercurrent of super fizz's interest in rocket pool and i've tried really hard to sort of negate my own interest in the interest of supporting other pools and sort of

um kind of taking a step back and remaining impartial rocket pool has three features that sets it aside from nearly every pool that really caused me to be a supporter of it and be a part of their mission and one of the reasons i can support rocket pull so openly right now is they haven't launched they're not actually accepting funds to be honest with you when they do launch i'm going to step back and maybe even change course and urge um caution for six months and i'm gonna say you know we need to see how well this works just like i'm doing with the staking pools that are live on the network right now i don't think it's wise to give them your funds let's wait and see

check out the ETHStaker Community Call #14 w/ David Rugendyke of Rocket Pool where we discuss why they're on the right path

and one of the things we're seeing is that several pools are being slashed one pool has been slashed repeatedly and that's actually something we're going to discuss with the ethereum due diligence committee rocket pool isn't accepting funds so as a project and development it's easy for me to say hey i'm optimistic about this i think they can do a good job there are three things that cause me to be excited about rocket pool and if other pools implemented these things i would find it much easier to support them and what i believe is going to happen is in the future pools in general if the community is strong enough will tend toward these ideas rather than the black box pool staking that we have

View SOTS #32 when Superphiz outlines the 'good', 'better', and 'best' options for staking pools in relation to the health of the beacon chain

now the three things that rocket pool has that i would look for in other pools and if other pools had these it would be so much easier for me to promote them are open source code decentralized staking that means that staking occurs by small operators all around the world and they're not a custodian of funds they don't collect your funds and redisburse them later the funds go to a smart contract and from there they're distributed back to users when the merge goes live and so these three are what i consider to be cornerstones of a healthy staking pool network when other pools don't have these things

Rocket Pool is a non-custodial staking service meaning you own full rights to your ETH

i can't feign impartiality and suggest that they're just as good what i can do is work with the community to vet them and say they are safe or they are less safe now i'm not against any of the pools in fact i've developed friendships with some of the pool operators and i like them i'm okay if you feel like you're oh you're ready to stake with them that's something that i'm not going to take away from you but as the beacon chain health coordinator my goal is to help support the chain and help preserve user funds and with that in mind i'm looking at the options and i see that rocket pool has open source code uh decentralized staking

Watch the EDDC LIVE each wednesday on the ETHStaker YouTube page to hear how other staking services are evaluated

and no custodial funds and i think well that's the direction we need to be headed in with that out of the way and that's something that i've sort of held off on bringing up because i wanted to maintain impartiality and now i can say look i think rocket pool is going to be a great product i think there are some other staking pools that have merit but unless they're reaching for this standard they are not on the same playing field now i've talked about why i'm excited about rocket pool and let me tell you what i believe needs to happen before rocket pool launches in order to promote the health of the network there are two features right now at least in beta 2.5 rocket

pool supported prism and lighthouse and that's great prism and lighthouse are the two staking clients with the largest proportion of the network very recently an independent developer submitted a pull request to rocketpool to include teku and that's fantastic that is the thing that i want to see i want to see rocketpool able to run any of the validator clients and support the network uh from that perspective of this decentralization and so we're missing one nimbus has not been integrated into rocket pool and that's okay like i'm not upset about it but we are the community and developers will build

The more support for additional clients, the more robust and resilient the overall Ethereum network becomes

what the community looks for and as a representative of the community i'm sharing with you that the thing that we need next from rocket pool is for either independent developers or for nimbus to submit pull requests to include rocket pool into the default installer for their smart node client if that happens when rocket pool launches in whatever march april may they will be able to support any of the four genesis launch clients and at that point i would be ready to call them a fully featured staking client that's our dream of a one-click installer

A one-click installer is something that @Butta and others are working on for Solo Stakers. If you're interested in helping join the discord at invite.gg/ethstaker

but there's one more problem that one-click installer is based around rocket pool's smart node architecture and really what that's designed to do is to interact with smart contracts so that the node operator holds 16 eth and then collects 16 each from other depositors and stakes on their behalf that's great i am fine with that model but i'd also like in addition to the feature to add nimbus i also believe the other thing that needs to happen is as an open source community oriented project rocketpool should use its installation infrastructure which is open source and could easily be forked to integrate solo staking into their client that may not make

If you're new to solo staking and are interested, check out the guides on ethstaker.cc

sense to you why would a pool operator software include a single click installer for a solo client well because it's in the best interest of the community a lot of people want to stake but have difficulty setting up the node rocketpool has simplified that tooling so that setting up a node is very easy and right now that tooling is specific to their smart contract pool what i'd like to see is an option in that installer whether it be a fork or whether it be in the main release that allows people to stake solo with the recognition that they're not going to get the um the additional rewards and

essentially that it doesn't use the rocket pool um smart node software for anything other than solo staking i just think it's a great feature with all of that said there's there's one more layer that i actually know is is on the way and that would be a visual installer for uh the rocket full smart node that's not something i need to push because i know it's going to happen but my message today is rocket pool is a game changer it's decentralized it is non-custodial and it is open source it is the model for staking pools of the future but before it launches it

needs two additional features it needs to integrate all four genesis beacon chain clients and it needs to include an option for people who want to use that excellent tooling to do solo staking rather than snake staking with the pool and so the reason i say this to you now is we are the community um we may not have power as individuals but when we get together as a group of 10 000 people and say hey this is the thing we want then people are going to build toward that

Why we advocate for community

and if it if it takes a um any kind of support if if you need a bounty if you're interested but you need a team then reach out to eat staker let us help connect you by all means feel free to contact rocket pool i know that rocket pool and nimbus are heads down right now they have a lot on their table and so i'm not really asking you to make this their problem i'm suggesting that as open source software we the community people who are not otherwise engaged have the opportunity to build these tools and then just offer them up for use so yeah i'm i'm glad to be in this position to recognize

these needs and to share them with you let me know if it works for you and uh take care again my name is superfiz i am an organizer for the eath staker community you can find us at reddit.com our slash eaststaker uh or on our discord at invite dot gg eastaker thanks for your time take care