Ethereum needs you - to ensure decentralisation by Darren Langley

okay I'll start again so hello I'm langerz and I'm from rocket pool so rocketpool is a decentralized liquid staking protocol okay so uh you'll recognize this because we've got very very subtle branding um namely the orange uh so today we're going to talk about ethereum needs you to ensure decentralization it's kind of a call to arms for anyone who wants to run an ethereum node and help to to decentralize and to secure ethereum so we're going to cover today um what is ethereum staking how does rocketpool work why should you consider being a rocketball node operator what are the responsibilities and what does Shanghai mean for staking and then we have an important announcement at the end which I'll get to share with you Okay cool so what is ethereum staking so in since the merge in theory anyone with eth can actually stake that eth and participate in securing ethereum so when ethereum transactions get formed into a block that's actually ethereum proof of State validators actually building that block and staking their eth okay the stake is actually like a good behavior Bond if you do a good job and then you'll actually be rewarded with new ethereum if you in the unlikely event that you try to attack ethereum then your bond can actually be penalized or what we call slashed so you know how secure is ethereum so there's 16.7 million eth and being staked at the moment when I did these slides that was worth 28 billion dollars I'm not quite sure what it is today that could be could be a lot lower but anyway um you you would have to risk uh something like 18 billion dollars uh to pose a threat to ethereum so that's what we call Economic Security and that's how proof of stake works and that is what you'll be participating in if you stake your eat so in reality though there's actually quite a high barrier to entry for staking so first of all you need a fixed 32 eth per validator that you spin up this is around fifty five thousand dollars and there's also kind of like you need technical knowledge to be able to run an ethereum node as well uh staking currently at the moment is a one-way thing I'm quite surprised that there's 16.7 million eth being States considering there's only it only goes one way um so uh so but that that it all changes when Shanghai happens when the Shanghai hard Fork happens uh withdrawals will be in place and you'll be able to exit some of those um validators okay so how does Rocket pool work so it's kind of got like two sides so rocket pull matches eth with liquid stakers who can and basically they can uh stake with any amount they don't need to be a node operator um it's basically the simplest way to stake your Easter day you it's literally a token swap so we match uh or the protocol matches um eth from liquid stickers and matches it with eth from node stakers okay so we take 16 Heath from liquid stickers and we match it with 60 and East from a node Staker and we put that together to make 32 for um going to the proof of stake system then the node operator and also anyone could be a node operator in rocketpool the node operating you know Stakes the eth and generates the rewards and then those rewards are then shared back between the node operator and liquid stakers so as you'll kind of see um we originally you needed 32 East to be a an ethereum kind of validator with rocket pool you only need 16. so we've already kind of halved the the barrier to entry for that uh node operators um kind of stake their East and then they generate the reward they generate the the rewards on their own 16 eth but they also get kind of a fee on the amount that they generate for the poor as well and I'll come to that a little bit more in a minute um so that's basically them providing a technical service to um Reid stakers okay all right so with great power comes great responsibility so you know what do you what do you have to do as a node Staker so first of all you have to keep kind of security of your node so you need to safeguard the security of your node and to ensure the funds are safe and that you're contributing to ethereum security you also need to keep your node up online now to be honest ethereum is a very forgiving protocol right if you're offline it doesn't care too much because you just won't earn the rewards in that time okay so the penalties are very very mild for generally being offline unless you're offline with lots and lots of people Which is less less likely and so for infrequent downtime um it's not too bad but to be honest you want to maximize your returns anyway your rewards and so you want to try and keep your note up as much as possible the other thing is maintenance so obviously you've got to perform regular maintenance on your node you've got to update uh to new releases of the clients and all this sort of thing when when that kind of happens um to be honest running a node is actually a lot easier than people think um we've uh rocket pool we have a fantastic Community they have we've got node operators with very limited technical knowledge that have come into the community and have kind of upskilled through interacting with the community and they've kind of upskilled them to be you know really proficient node operators uh We've also got some extent to extensive documentation and so you can go through the process step by step we've also got a test net which enables you to um kind of you know essentially do it with fake money although really is actually slightly money now um but um so you can actually use fake money to to test it out all right cool so why rocket pool so we released in November or Easter mainnet in November 21 and it's gone pretty well so far we've got over 2 000 node operators operating in 100 different Geographic locations we're staking 400 000 over 400 000 eth which represents about 2.4 percent of all the East that's being staked today so some of the features of rocketball that are that are pretty cool so the first thing is the Smart node right the smart node is a piece of software that we we've kind of developed and it streamlines spinning up a node it's the easiest way to spin up an ethereum node today um it does all the kind of heavy lifting for you in terms of like setting up the connections between everything and you can basically spin up a node within about 20 minutes um you can choose which clients you want to use you can choose whether which Mev relays you want to use so you have the full control um the smart node is just a wrapper over the top of all of that stuff we've also included in the smart node is also some built-in dashboards and maintenance stuff to basically make your life as easy as possible so as well as the the smart note stack obviously we well as I said before we lower the barrier of Entry so we've lowered the router entry from 32 East to 16 eth and there we might might be some more news on that near the end Community Support so we have a community of 2000 node operators that have kind of coached hundreds of new node operators to onboard them into rocketball but not just rocket pool but on board them as ethereum validators and so you know contributing to the security of ethereum uh you'd actually be surprised that um being part of the rocketpool community is probably our most rewarding feature um I kid you not so then uh smoothing pool so rewards for proposing a block are extremely variable they can be you can get a block once every month or you can get a block once every year it's very very variable and you can be very lucky or you can be very unlucky essentially and also the amount that you get per block can be very very variable we've had 0.

01 with a 0.02 which is kind of like the average of it all the way up to 30 East blocks the 30th block is what we call a lottery block they're not very often so again very very variable in terms of those blocks the smoothing pool basically enables you to have a consistent uh basically have consistency so you kind of like pull your block rewards into that and so it means that oh you know over time everyone gets you know gets quite lucky and so um it means it Smooths that out for you so you get consistent um kind of Rewards uh the next one is uh the rocket ARB so this is actually a Community Driven um kind of um thing so the team we didn't do it but we did kind of look at the um the code so um node operators can actually benefit from RE being at a slight premium which it is at the moment and if reth is a slight premium then uh spinning up a validator through rocket pool you can actually kind of get an extra like bonus if you use this kind of Rocket ARB and that's because it does when you deposit it does like an Arbitrage and captures some of that premium when you actually deposit um so it's a check it out it's it's really cool and a big shout out to Romana for actually developing that yeah Romana um so then the next one is the the rescue node so if you're worried about your node going offline so for example um if your node has a problem and you need to resync the node it can actually take a while to resync uh particularly the execution client can take actually a couple of days depending on what Hardware you're using so if you're worried about that node going offline the rescue node is kind of there to save the day so again this is another Community Driven thing we the the team that we you know wholly support it but we haven't kind of we didn't build it it can't all come from the community this is why I point you to the Community Support thing and it tends to happen like this so the rescue node will save the day and a big shout out to Patches and pulpis for actually implementing and maintaining that yeah essentially what it does is uh you can use it as a fallback so if your node for some reason dies or has like a corrupted database or something and you need to resync you can just point your node at this fallback the rescue node and it'll continue running and perfectly fine okay cool all right so what does Shanghai mean for staking so Shanghai is a big deal it's so the merge moved us to proof of stake but we're not really complete until Shanghai Shanghai adds withdrawals so at the moment everyone's you know piling in and depositing into the the beacon chain but when we Shanghai happens they'll be able to access their rewards and they'll be able to exit if they want to um so then get their kind of like full uh full money back so this means that people are no longer locked kind of indefinitely running a node you can run a node and then withdraw at any time okay so Atlas so at East Denver we are officially announcing our Atlas release this is a big thing for Rocket pool so Atlas has been like a rocket pool wide effort for many many months now um between the team and the community um yeah as I said for many months so it is the result of a huge amount of discussion analysis research governance voting development testing and auditing all the stuff that's gone into Atlas basically we couldn't have done it without the community it's a very like joint effort between the core team who do most of the technical stuff and with uh with the community so a big thank you to everybody who's been involved in contributing to Atlas in some way so so I've talked I've talked that up quite a bit and but what does it include so it includes Shanghai withdrawals which is kind of one of the big things so it handles um basically these things called partial withdrawals which is the rewards that come back um so anything above 32 eth and gets kind of skimmed and sent to the node operator and so you can with this Shanghai of drawers it means we can kind of split that between node operator and liquid stakers it also handles full withdrawals so if you want to exit as a node operator you just send an exit message and then eventually all of your ether will come back and then again it splits it between our Earth holders and node operators eight eight East mini pools are probably the biggest thing on here um probably the most exciting so as I said before you need 16 each at the moment to be a node operator and to per validator with rocket pool um going forward with Atlas you'll need eight so we've kind of lowered that barrier of Entry again to kind of support that so that's a big deal for us because it means that we'll have a lot more capacity on our supply side but it's great for everyone else because it means that we're again lowering that barrier of entry for people who want to secure ethereum um we've also optimized our mini pool queue which is just a fancy way of saying we've made it just more efficient uh and so it means that each gets staked a lot quicker essentially the solo Staker migration is so solo stakers there's about 200 000 solo stakers who um have this thing called a BLS key and the at the Shanghai um hard Fork they'll have a decision to make and that is uh they have a one-time opportunity to migrate their solo Staker to Rocket pool now what that they'll actually be able to do is they'll turn their 32 East validator into four eightyth mini pause now that's kind of a big deal because the more validators you have the more chances you get for proposing a block the more chances you get for being in a sync committee which is quite quite good quite profitable and all of these sorts of things as well um so you actually earn a lot more by by doing that um the next one is gas reductions so we just made it more made it cheaper to spin up validators and the dynamic deposit limit and assignments that basically just means we can take bigger deposits um so that's really exciting for us just means that we can you know grow a lot quicker that is basically it um yeah April hopefully thank you um so if you want to find out more uh go to the website and that's rocketball.net um and we've also got a booth in the D5 section so come say hi we've got um the team or in Orange but we've got loads of kind of volunteers that are in black as well and they to be honest they they do me out of a job they're absolutely awesome so um yeah so yep that'd be great thank you foreign [Music]