Rocket Pool Atlas upgrade goes live with 8 ETH minipools and more

Rocket Pool, an Ethereum staking protocol, has announced the Atlas upgrade, which will make the protocol compatible with Ethereum's Shanghai upgrade.

This will enable validators to initiate withdrawals of their staked ETH on the Beacon Chain, and will allow validators to change BLS withdrawal credentials to a withdrawal address on the Ethereum blockchain.

Atlas will be Rocket Pool's biggest upgrade to date and is primarily aimed at scaling the protocol to meet higher demand while maintaining decentralisation and the health of Ethereum.

It also includes the introduction of LEB8s (Lower ETH Bonded 8), which will allow node operators to create minipools with 8 ETH instead of the previous 16 ETH, and a method for solo stakers to migrate to Rocket Pool while still maintaining decentralisation.

With this change, the protocol can triple its capacity, increase decentralization, improve node security and adapt to the growing demand for rETH.

For node operators, who already earn approximately 16% higher yield compared to solo stakers due to the additional 15% commission from the protocol, the lowered requirement of 8 ETH will allow for 42% higher commission compared to solo operators.

Node operators on 16 ETH minipools can easily migrate to 8 ETH minipools without exiting the validator, increasing the chances of randomised events such as block proposals and sync committees for the node operator.

The upgrade will also introduce several other improvements to optimize gas and scaling, including a simplified minipool queue across multiple types of deposits (8 ETH, 16 ETH) and a dynamic Deposit Pool Limit that grows with the demand.

Furthermore, creating a new Minipool is now more gas-optimized - using 40% less gas.

Atlas is audited by Sigma Prime and ConsenSys Diligence, both spending a cumulative 6 weeks reviewing the code and generating a detailed list of findings.