Leads added: 30
Contacts made: 13
Deals closed: 10
Wins: 3
Key Contributions
- Created BD materials such as guidelines and a pitch deck for the community to use.
- Built a CRM system to help the community track progress.
- Discovered the https://www.strategicethreserve.xyz/ leads sheet early on.
- Success or near-success deals:
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ETH Strategy – Provided introductions and ongoing support related to Star.
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Yo Protocol – Integrated Pendle rETH, with plans to integrate Balancer and participate in rETH LPs.
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Rezerve.money – Adopted rETH for reserves, with plans to also include RPL.
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Reserve bsdETH – Currently delayed due to auditing; the team has limited resources until Q4, but integration is expected later this year.
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Additionally, we’ve established collaboration groups with Gnosis, Ethena, Fluid, Treehouse, USUAL, Resolv, and others.
(For more detailed progress, please refer to the linked resources.)
https://rocketpool.notion.site/Sales-Workflow-Management-CRM-18c574a282d6802ca52eeb7bef7d7f39
Why We Adjusted the Leads Incentive — and Observations on Community Engagement
Submitting leads is relatively easy, which risks “volume farming” (e.g., mass submissions from the StrategicETHReserve list). The real challenge — and where the true value lies — is making contact. For this reason, we shifted the incentive focus from Leads to Contacts.
Regarding low community participation, it may be that our community is primarily technically oriented and less interested in pitching. Even if outreach were moved to external or third-party platforms, participation might still remain low. Working with LSTs like rETH requires specific knowledge, and meaningful outreach often involves multiple channels — making it less appealing compared to the effort vs. reward.
Extra Work Beyond Expectations
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With limited community participation, I took on lead processing, outreach, proposal submissions, and partnership development to keep the project moving forward.
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Several partnerships require ongoing follow-up; if initial commitments aren’t met, additional pitching is needed.
Areas for Improvement
Our discovery and pitching for DATs hasn’t been as deep as it could be. If there’s a next phase, this should become a primary focus — we’ve already identified some promising approaches for improvement.
Key Challenges
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Competitive incentives: weETH, wstETH, and other LSTs currently offer higher yields or stronger incentives (e.g., restaking rewards, Lido DAO rewards). Lending protocols are also competing with yield subsidies comparable to native LST returns. The advantage for Rocket Pool is strong reputation and ETH alignment — enough to realistically aim for maintaining a solid third position (after Lido and EtherFi).
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Limited Self liquidity: Self LP liquidity is limited, so when a major LP exits (e.g., ENS recently withdrew from Balancer, reducing liquidity by $10M), it has a significant impact. In addition, we currently can’t quickly deploy liquidity to ecosystems enjoying incentive subsidies on L2s or L1s — such as the current Linea Etherex and Avalanche incentive programs, or earlier examples like Unichain.
Next Steps
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Scale up DAT discovery and pitching — the key is establishing contact. Once we reach the right decision-makers, securing allocations should be achievable, thanks to Rocket Pool’s reputation and ETH alignment. Star will remain a secondary incentive tool to push deals forward.
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Make breakthroughs with protocols like Ethena, Resolv, and f(x), aiming to position rETH as one of the selected LSTs. Currently, Ethena and f(x) primarily use stETH; Resolv is mostly weETH.
Thoughts on Saturn 1
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With RPL now offering fee share, could this become a new incentive distribution mechanism? If we design a safe, efficient way to stake RPL to nodes, incentives could be paid out via fee shares instead of directly distributing RPL.
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For DATs interested in running nodes, GMC could stake RPL to their nodes, sharing part of the fees as an incentive — replacing direct RPL payouts.
Expectations from Stakeholders
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Team: Grateful for the support from @maverick and @G-rant — current backing feels sufficient.
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GMC: How to optimize RPL usage. I understand a large budget was reserved for Star but much remains unspent — perhaps this can be revisited for better efficiency.
This is a summary of the Star project. Feedback, questions, and new ideas are very welcome.