Rocket Pool

Rocket Pool is the largest permissionless liquid staking protocol on Ethereum. Anyone holding 8 ETH plus a collateral bond in the protocol’s native RPL token can run a validator on behalf of stakers, which gives Rocket Pool a fundamentally different decentralization profile than Lido’s curated operator set. Users who only want to stake without running a node deposit ETH and receive rETH - a non-rebasing liquid staking token whose exchange rate to ETH gradually appreciates as validator rewards accrue (one rETH today is worth slightly more ETH than one rETH a month ago).

The economic security model relies on the RPL bond: node operators must put up 10-150% of their ETH deposit in RPL, which gets slashed first if their validator misbehaves. This means rETH holders are first protected by the operator’s own ETH and RPL collateral before any socialized loss touches their tokens. The trade-off is supply-side: Rocket Pool can only onboard new stakers as fast as new node operators come online with both ETH and RPL ready to commit. That capacity ceiling has been the protocol’s main growth constraint relative to permissioned alternatives.

Audits are extensive - Sigma Prime, Trail of Bits, Consensys Diligence - and the protocol has run continuously since 2021 with no contract-level exploits. rETH’s exchange-rate model is structurally less vulnerable to depeg than rebasing tokens like stETH because there’s no expected 1:1 backing to break; rETH is priced by the market against current redemption value, and the embedded growth rate keeps demand bounded above. Primary risk vectors today are oracle errors on the rETH exchange rate, RPL collateral value collapses during a broad crypto drawdown (which could reduce operator coverage below the protective threshold), and the standard Ethereum-wide slashing risk.