Protocol Development - Roadmap Prioritisation (2025)

Governance
1

Hey everyone!

As per RPIP-37 Protocol Development (RPIP-37: Protocol Development), the core protocol team will facilitate a prioritisation discussion with the Rocket Pool community.

To get the conversation started, I’ll revisit the themes I used in our previous prioritization discussion.

Tokenomics

This was a major outcome of RPIP-30, Saturn 0 and Saturn 1 deliverables. I believe we’re in a strong position regarding this.

That said, further governance decisions are needed to determine if and how RPL value capture will be implemented—whether through RPL Burn; or RPL Buy & LP.

rETH Demand

This is essential for fully leveraging Saturn’s improved capital efficiency. Saturn 1 enhances withdrawal liquidity—key to maintaining a stable rETH peg—through RPIP-65: Prioritize rETH Withdrawal Buffer. Additional design work is underway on rETH withdrawal liquidity via EIP-7002.

Together, these initiatives strengthen rETH’s resilience to shifting market demand and improve its appeal to users and integrators.

Node Operator Supply / Efficiency

Saturn 1 includes several RPIPs that directly address this concern. Additional efforts are underway to further improve protocol efficiency—and ultimately rETH yield—by enabling the protocol to offboard underperforming node operators.

Decentralisation

Saturn 1 incorporates several RPIPs designed to reduce reliance on the Oracle DAO:

Progress on disabling the Protocol DAO guardian has been strong, and we’re confident that full deactivation is close.

Additional efforts to minimize trust in reward tree generation are expected to follow in future updates.

Protocol Safety

Saturn 1 bolsters protocol safety by delivering the following:

Emerging Research

During Saturn development, both the team and community explored the potential inclusion of EIP-7251: Increase the MAX_EFFECTIVE_BALANCE. To avoid delaying Saturn’s release, it was decided to defer implementation of “maxeb” to a future update. While the Saturn 1 contracts have been designed with “maxeb” compatibility in mind, adopting the EIP has broad implications that require careful evaluation. Further research is needed to assess whether integrating “maxeb” would be advantageous for Rocket Pool.

The detection of MEV penalties remains an active and ongoing area of research, within the community. Accurately identifying and attributing MEV-related behavior within the protocol is complex, requiring sophisticated analysis and robust data sources. The goal is to develop detection mechanisms that are not only effective but also fair and resistant to false positives.

Feedback

We’d love your input.

What areas deserve more of our attention? Where are we strongest—and how can we build on that? What gaps need addressing? And what risks should we be anticipating?

Your feedback helps shape the future.

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2

My shortlist would be:

  • rETH withdrawal liquidity
  • offboarding underperforming operators

The faster RP ships it the better. Everything else can wait for Saturn-3.

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3

From the rpip71 forum post (here), could you help answer these questions?

I was curious what the teams feedback would be on implementing these two items in Saturn 2 (forced exits for rETH withdrawals, and rETH protection)? At what point would Saturn 2 scope have to be frozen to avoid delays in Saturn 2 release? Does the team find these two items feasible to include in Saturn 2? Would it meaningfully improve the schedule if the GMC were to fund research and spec work in parallel for these two items similar to the rest of the Saturn RPIPs? At what point would the specs need to be completed to avoid delaying the team’s dev work on Saturn 2 if this work were to happen in parallel?

We seem to be blocked as a protocol by rETH demand, so I think improvements to rETH should be the highest priority.

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We agree that these items are high priority.

Really we need at least an outline to determine feasibility but it does look like we can. Coming back to the first point - I don’t think we have a choice. There are items in Saturn 2 that are arguably less important than these items.

This is not straight forward to answer, we don’t know what is going to come out of the audits.

As an estimate, I have looked at the current Saturn 2 scope and we have approx 6 weeks of approved / unblocked work. This includes some capacity for Saturn 1 audit support and helping with the rETH withdrawal/protection feasibility/design/spec.

It would be beneficial to have community support on the researching and spec work, from a time, quality, and community involvement, and governance perspective. I would be supportive of GMC funding support.

3 Likes