Week in DeFi: Frax Leads LSD Race, MetaMask Hops on the Bandwagon

What to Do With Your ETH After the Merge: a Deep Dive Into Staking

## What Is Rocket Pool (RPL)?

[Rocket Pool](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/rocket-pool/) is a decentralized [Ethereum](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/) staking pool offering up to 4.33% APR for ETH2 [staking](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/staking). Users can join the Rocket Pool with its decentralized node operator network or run their own nodes with only 16 ETH. In the latter case, they can earn a commission from staking ETH and earn additional RPL rewards from providing RPL collateral, amounting to up to 6.36% APR for ETH and the additional RPL rewards.

Rocket Pool provides liquid staking, meaning users benefit from an increasing exchange rate instead of adding on to their initial staked collateral, which would be a taxable event. Furthermore, Rocket Pool offers smart nodes: a custom node software allowing anyone to run a node on its network. With losses from bad nodes distributed across the network, individual users minimize their risk of facing penalties. This is supported by the pool’s open-source and audited smart contracts, which guarantee fully [non-custodial](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/non-custodial) staking and a maximum degree of decentralization. 


## Who Are the Founders of Rocket Pool?

Rocket Pool was launched by David Rugendyke, a senior developer with a computer science background who started designing Rocket Pool in late 2016. He is supported by General Manager Darren Langley, an executive with over 18 years of commercial experience in managing and mentoring development teams, designing application architecture, and delivering exciting digital products for government and financial services. The team is complemented by three blockchain and Solidity engineers with a combined 40 years of experience. 


## What Makes Rocket Pool Unique?

Rocket Pool essentially offers anyone to participate in ETH2 staking, regardless of their capital investment or level of technological sophistication. Its core premise is to enable the trustless staking of ETH to a network of decentralized autonomous nodes that are underpinned by RPL collateral. 

Rocket Pool sees itself as a complement to staking-as-a-service providers. These providers can choose to maximize returns by joining Rocket Pool and running a node, which they receive rewards in ETH and RPL for in return. In this manner, even a big player like Gemini could use Rocket Pool by creating nodes that stake 16 ETH each. This is where Rocket Pool’s staked ETH wrapper rETH comes into play.

rETH is a tokenized version of the staked ETH in Rocket Pool, which allows stakers to engage from 0.01 ETH to up to 32 ETH. By staking their Ether, users receive rETH in return, which automatically accrues staking rewards based on the performance of the entire network of node operators. The value of rETH is protected against slashing through insurance mechanisms, with node operators staking RPL on nodes as collateral for any penalties they incur.

The second way of interacting with Rocket Pool is through Node Staking. Users can deposit 16 ETH and are assigned an additional 16 ETH from users who are depositing ETH and receiving rETH. In essence, you stake your own 16 ETH and 16 ETH on behalf of the protocol. Rocket Pool automatically adjusts its commission rate based on the supply and demand of node operators and available ETH. With this model, node operators are rewarded for providing insurance for stakers in case they are penalized or slashed. Furthermore, node operators must deposit a minimum amount of RPL as a collateral. 


## Related Pages:

Check out [Terra (LUNA)](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/terra-luna/) — a popular layer-one blockchain.

Check out [Chainlink (LINK)](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/chainlink/) — an oracle for blockchains.

Read our [Intro to Bitcoin](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/an-intro-to-bitcoin).

Get the latest crypto news and latest trading insights with the [CoinMarketCap blog](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/categories/blog).


## How Many Rocket Pool (RPL) Coins Are There in Circulation?

RPL follows a different approach than most fixed-supply [DeFi](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/defi) tokens and introduced a 5% annual inflation. The protocol argues that any value-generating protocol will need to reward its participants. A fixed-supply model would result in this value being generated at the expense of its users. 

The newly issued RPL tokens will be emitted as follows: 



*  Node Operators staking RPL as insurance collateral (70%)
*  Oracle DAO members providing various oracle data (15%)
*  Protocol DAO Treasury to fund decentralized development (15%)

This model is designed to incentivize the protocol’s key stakeholders and funds further decentralized development. The Oracle DAO members consist of node operators, ensuring that [oracle](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/oracles) data is reported correctly to the protocol, while the Protocol DAO governs the protocol’s treasury. At the time of writing, the supply of RPL is just over 10 million. 


## How Is the Rocket Pool Network Secured?

RPL is an [ERC-20](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/erc-20) token on Ethereum. Rocket Pool has been successfully audited by three separate firms: Sigma Prime, Consensys Diligence, and Trail of Bits. It also runs a bug bounty program to incentivize keeping its protocol safe. 

Furthermore, [governance](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/governance) of Rocket Pool is split across its Protocol DAO and Oracle DAO. The Protocol DAO is responsible for settings like RPL inflation, rewards, and auctions, the staking requirements and commissions for nodes, and deposits. The Oracle DAO bridges the [smart contracts](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/smart-contract) between the Beacon Chain and the ETH1 main chain. Members of the Oracle DAO are several big ETH2 staking clients like Lighthouse, Nimbus, Prysm, ConsenSys Codefi, Blockchain Capital, Bankless, and others. 


## Where Can You Buy Rocket Pool (RPL)?

RPL is available on [UniSwap (V3)](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/uniswap-v3/), [Hoo](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/hoo/), [BKEX](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/bkex/), [XT.COM](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/xt/), [Hotbit](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/hotbit/), and [Bvnex](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/bvnex/). If you want to learn more about how to start buying cryptocurrencies, you can [read more here](https://coinmarketcap.com/how-to-buy-bitcoin/) in our guide. 


Binance

Rocket Pool

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Welcome to Rocket Pool's Community channel aggregated by CoinMarketCap.

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Gekko HQ

The Frax Protocol is the first fractional-algorithmic stablecoin system. Frax is open-source, permissionless, and entirely on-chain – currently implemented on Ethereum (with possible cross chain implementations in the future). The end goal of the Frax protocol is to provide a highly scalable, decentralized, algorithmic money in place of fixed-supply digital assets like BTC. The protocol incorporates the following concepts:

Fractional-Algorithmic – Frax is a unique stablecoin with parts of its supply backed by collateral and parts of the supply algorithmic. The ratio of collateralized and algorithmic depends on the market's pricing of the FRAX stablecoin. If FRAX is trading at above $1, the protocol decreases the collateral ratio. If FRAX is trading at under $1, the protocol increases the collateral ratio.

Decentralized & Governance-minimized – Community governed and emphasizing a highly autonomous, algorithmic approach with no active management.

Fully on-chain oracles – Frax v1 uses Uniswap (ETH, USDT, USDC time-weighted average prices) and Chainlink (USD price) oracles.

Two Tokens – FRAX is the stablecoin targeting a tight band around $1/coin. Frax Shares (FXS) is the governance token which accrues fees, seigniorage revenue, and excess collateral value.

Before Frax, stablecoins were divided into three different categories: fiat collateralized, overcollateralized with cryptocurrency, and algorithmic with no collateral. Frax is the first kind of decentralized stablecoin to classify itself as fractional-algorithmic ushering in the 4th and most unique category.

Frax Share

Lido DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) which provides staking infrastructure for multiple blockchain networks.

Most notably, the platform provides a liquid staking solution for Ethereum, allowing users to stake their ETH and receive stETH (Lido staked ETH) tokens in exchange, which represent the user's staked ETH and staking rewards.

Lido DAO is secured by a mix of decentralized governance, audited code and smart contracts. The Lido protocol runs on Ethereum with help from smart contracts that process user deposits and distribute staking rewards, among other functions. Several third-party security firms have audited Lido’s smart contracts in order to identify and address potential vulnerabilities.

The platform’s native token is LDO - which also serves as the governance token for Lido DAO. Holders can participate in governance proposals and vote on key decisions such as board adjustments, new integrations and platform updates. LDO holders have the right to determine the development and operation of the platform.

Lido currently supports staking for Ethereum and Polygon only with the recent sunsetting of Solana.

Lido DAO

Gnosis is a collective of aligned projects revolutionizing payments infrastructure to make decentralized financial tools accessible and usable for all. The Gnosis ecosystem is underpinned by Gnosis Chain, a highly secure, resilient, and decentralized EVM Layer 1 network and also includes the venture-building arms, Gnosis Studio and GnosisVC, the developer, investor, and incubator of a host of leading decentralized solutions.

These projects are creating a radically inclusive infrastructure helping bridge the gap between blockchain technology and practical, everyday applications/use cases.

Gnosis

GMX is a decentralized exchange (DEX) for trading perpetual cryptocurrency futures with up to 50X leverage on popular cryptocurrencies like BTC, ETH and more. The platform launched in September 2021 as Gambit Exchange. To date, GMX has a total trading volume of over $130B and 283K total users, making it the leading derivatives DEX on Arbitrum and Avalanche.

GMX runs on the Arbitrum and the Avalanche blockchain. These ecosystems are connected to the exchange via Synapse — a cross-chain bridge.

Convex Finance is a DeFi protocol that allows Curve liquidity providersto earn a share of trading fees on Curve without staking liquidity there. Instead, LPs can stake with Convex and receive boosted CRV and liquidity mining rewards. This provides CRV stakers with better capital efficiency and positions Convex Finance as an important player in the Curve wars.

Convex has entered a competitive race to obtain as much control as possible of the Curve Finance stablecoin exchange. The more CRV tokens a protocol has, the more influence it has over interest rates on Curve, which is the largest DEX in the world by TVL. Consequently, the “Curve wars” are an ongoing race for influence over what is probably the most important protocol in DeFi.

Convex Finance

Maker (MKR) is the governance token of the MakerDAO and Maker Protocol — respectively a decentralized organization and a software platform, both based on the Ethereum blockchain — that allows users to issue and manage the DAI stablecoin.

Initially conceived in 2015 and fully launched in December 2017, Maker is a project whose task is to operate DAI, a community-managed decentralized cryptocurrency with a stable value soft-pegged to the US dollar.

MKR tokens act as a kind of voting share for the organization that manages DAI; while they do not pay dividends to their holders, they do give the holders voting rights over the development of Maker Protocol and are expected to appreciate in value in accordance with the success of DAI itself.

The Maker ecosystem is one of the earliest projects on the decentralized finance (DeFi) scene: the industry that seeks to build decentralized financial products on top of smart-contract-enabled blockchains, such as Ethereum.

Maker

ssv.network

Synthetix is building a decentralized liquidity provisioning protocol that any protocol can tap into for various purposes. Its deep liquidity and low fees serve as a backend for many exciting protocols on both Optimism and Ethereum. Many user-facing protocols in the Synthetix ecosystem, such as Kwenta (Spot and Futures), Lyra (Options), Polynomial (Automated Options), and 1inch & Curve (Atomic Swaps), tap into Synthetix liquidity to power their protocols. Synthetix is built on Optimism and Ethereum mainnet. The Synthetix Network is collateralized by SNX, ETH, and LUSD, enabling the issuance of synthetic assets (Synths). Synths track and provide returns on the underlying asset without requiring one to directly hold the asset. This pooled collateral enables an array of on-chain, composable financial instruments backed by liquidity from Synthetix. Some of the most exciting upcoming releases from SNX are Perps V2, which hopes to enable low-fee on-chain futures trading through the usage of off-chain oracles, and Synthetix V3, which aims to rebuild the protocol to achieve its earliest goal, being a fully permissionless derivatives protocol. Learn more about Synthetix on their blog or by joining the SNX Discord.

The platform aims to broaden the cryptocurrency space by introducing non-blockchain assets, providing access to a more robust financial market.

Synthetix

Ethereum-based DYDX ($ethDYDX) is a governance token that allows the dYdX community to truly govern the dYdX Layer 2 Protocol built on Ethereum ("dYdX v3"). ethDYDX is currently undergoing a migration from Ethereum to the dYdX Chain. More information is available here. If you want to migrate ethDYDX to dYdX Chain DYDX, to enable staking, security and governance of the dYdX Chain you can follow the how-to-bridge guide here.

If you want to read about the new token utility for dYdX Chain DYDX you can read the blog here

ethDYDX (dYdX) is the governance token for the layer 2 protocol built on Ethereum. By enabling shared control of dYdX v3, ethDYDX allows traders, liquidity providers, and partners of dYdX to work collectively towards an enhanced dYdX v3.

Built on StarkWare’s StarkEx scalability engine, layer 2 is used for trading of cross-margined perpetuals on the platform. The scaling solution allows dYdX to increase transaction speed, eliminate gas costs, reduce trading fees and lower​​ minimum trade sizes on the protocol.

A total of 1,000,000,000 ethDYDX have been minted, and started to become accessible over five (5) years, on August 3rd, 2021, at 15:00:00 UTC.

dYdX (ethDYDX)

Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a distributed, open, and extensible naming system based on the Ethereum blockchain. ENS converts human-readable Ethereum addresses like john.eth into the machine-readable alphanumeric codes you know from wallets like Metamask. The reverse conversion -- associating metadata and machine-readable addresses with human-readable Ethereum addresses -- is also possible.

The goal of Ethereum Name Service is to make the Ethereum-based web easier to access and comprehend for humans - similar to how the Internet’s Domain Name Service makes the internet more accessible. Like DNS, ENS also uses a system of dot-separated hierarchical names called domains with domain owners fully controlling their subdomains.

ENS launched with a highly successful retroactive airdrop in November 2021 that rewarded users who had registered addresses before the project launched its token. However, in February 2022, it faced criticism over apparently homophobic tweets by its director of operations.

Ethereum Name Service

Developed by leading Korean IT company Kakao, Klaytn is a global Layer 1 public blockchain designed to power tomorrow’s on-chain world. With the lowest transaction latency amongst leading blockchains, enterprise-grade reliability, and a developer-friendly environment, Klaytn provides a seamless experience for users and developers that is second to none. Since its launch in June 2019, Klaytn has been accelerating blockchain mass adoption through a broad array of use cases from DeFi to real-world assets, entertainment and gaming, and even the Bank of Korea’s CBDC pilot project. Today, it is one of the only globally competitive Web 3.0 ecosystems developed in South Korea, generating more than 1 billion transactions from over 300 decentralized applications.

Klaytn

Golem Network is an open-source, decentralized computing platform that is building an ecosystem to provide computing power to the AI industry. A peer-to-peer marketplace for distributed computing resources. Users engage directly on the Golem platform, exchanging GLM tokens for the utilization of their idle computing resources.

Golem allows to break down tasks into smaller subtasks and distribute them across multiple providers, enabling parallel processing. This approach boosts efficiency and speeds up the completion of complex computations.

Golem

Conflux (CFX) is a public layer-1 blockchain that was made to power decentralized applications (dApps), e-commerce, and Web 3.0 infrastructure by being more scalable, decentralized, and secure than existing protocols.

Conflux makes it easier to transfer valuable assets by making the process quick, effective, free of network congestion, and with low transaction costs. The platform is based on the Tree-Graph consensus mechanism, and it combines Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) algorithms to achieve consensus. The protocol uses Turing-complete smart contracts written in Solidity, just like those on  Ethereum, and is compatible with the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine).

Conflux's growth is fueled by CFX, the platform's native token, which gives users financial incentives to participate and engage more. The token is used to pay transaction fees, govern the network, and is given as compensation to miners who help secure the network via staking.

Conflux

Decred is Money Evolved.

By combining battle tested Proof-of-Work with an innovative take on Proof-of-Stake that places coin holders in charge of shaping the future, Decred is able to adapt to challenges and innovate at a rapid pace. You acquire influence in Decred by putting “skin in the game”.

Decred’s security, privacy, scalability, and decentralized treasury empower stakeholders and provides them with the tools needed to enhance their financial sovereignty.

Decred

Liquity

Launched in 2017, Livepeer is the first live video streaming network protocol that is fully decentralized. The platform aims to become a viable blockchain-based, economically efficient alternative to centralized broadcasting solutions for all new and existing broadcaster companies.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Livepeer.

As stated in the official Livepeer whitepaper, the live video streaming and broadcasting industry is growing at a rapid pace, and the company is looking to ride this wave and introduce decentralization to the environment. Livepeer aims to streamline the broadcasting process by allowing producers to submit their work on the platform, taking care of reformatting and distributing the content to users and streaming platforms.

Livepeer

Curve is a decentralized exchange for stablecoins that uses an automated market maker (AMM) to manage liquidity.

Launched in January 2020, Curve is now synonymous with the decentralized finance (DeFi) phenomenon, and has seen significant growth in the second half of 2020.

In August, Curve launched a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), with CRV as its in-house token. The DAO uses Ethereum-based creation tool Aragon to connect multiple smart contracts used for users’ deposited liquidity. Issues such as governance, however, differ from Aragon in their weighting and other respects.

Curve DAO Token

Mask Network is a protocol that allows its users to send encrypted messages over Twitter and Facebook. It essentially acts as a bridge between the internet and a decentralized network running on top.

Mask Network was initially launched in July 2019, with its first use case of allowing Facebook and Twitter users to encrypt posts on the social media platforms. It then raised $2 million in a funding round in November 2020, co-led by HashKey and Hash Global, and a further $3 million funding round in February 2021 with participation from Digital Currency Group and Fundamental Labs.

Now, Mask Network offers the ability to fund Gitcoin grant campaigns directly from Twitter, as well as plans to offer peer-to-peer payments and decentralized storage functionality. It is a decentralized portal that also allows users to use DApps like crypto payments, decentralized finance, decentralized storage, e-commerce (digital goods/NFTs) and decentralized organizations (DAO) over the top of existing social networks without migrating, creating what is referred to as a decentralized Applet (DApplet) ecosystem.

Mask Network

Stacks is a Bitcoin Layer for smart contracts; it enables smart contracts and decentralized applications to use Bitcoin as an asset and settle transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Bitcoin is the largest, most valuable, and most durable decentralized asset. The Stacks layer unlocks $500B in BTC capital using the Bitcoin L1 as settlement for decentralized applications.

Stacks has knowledge of the full Bitcoin state, thanks to its Proof of Transfer consensus and Clarity language, enabling it to read from Bitcoin at any time.

All transactions on the Stacks layer are automatically hashed and settled on the Bitcoin L1. Stacks blocks are secured by 100% Bitcoin hashpower. In order to re-order Stacks blocks/transactions, an attacker would have to reorg Bitcoin.