Glossary of Terms
Bonded ETH: The portion of a validator’s ETH that is provided by the Node Operator. Sometimes called NO ETH or nETH.
Borrowed ETH: The portion of a validator’s ETH that is provided by the protocol (ultimately from rETH holders). Sometimes called protocol ETH or pETH.
Cliff: Description of RPL rewards going suddenly to 0 (as opposed to gradually declining) when you fall below 10% borrowed ETH worth of staked RPL. Aka RPL reward threshold.
Forced Validator Exit: The ability for the protocol to exit a validator (eg, for bad behavior, such as MEV theft). Currently only the node operator can trigger an exit, or the Ethereum protocol itself, which it does when the validator balance reaches 16 ETH.
LEB, or x-ETH Bond: Originally minipools used a 16 ETH Bond. As a result, smaller bonds were referred to as “Lower ETH Bond” minipools, or LEBs. The Atlas release introduced LEB8s. The new proposal suggests 4-ETH bond validators and 1.5-ETH bond validators.
LP: Liquidity Pool. A pool of liquidity held by a smart contract that allows for on-chain trading between a pair of tokens. For the purposes of these explainers, an RPL-rETH pair at a ratio of 90:10.
Megapools: A single Rocket Pool contract serving as the withdrawal address for multiple validators.
MEV Theft: When a node operator steals execution-layer rewards for profit. This requires a sophisticated, unethical, and lucky operator. See Node Level Penalties.
Node Level Penalties: The ability to penalize a Megapool in order to disincentivize MEV theft. The ability to penalize across validators means a malicious node operator can only profit when an opportunity is larger than their total bond across validators, rather than just their bond on one validator.
NO: Node Operator
Top off: To (buy and) stake more RPL to keep above the RPL reward threshold. (See Cliff).
rETH TVL: Total value locked in rETH. Consider it the “size” of the liquid staking token.
Sock Puppeting (aka Sybil Behavior): A single entity creating and controlling multiple identities (sock puppets), usually for an attack or to gain influence. An example in Rocket Pool is voting, as multiple fake identities with the same amount of RPL have greater voting power than a single identity due to quadratic voting.
Solo staking APY: The yield for staking on a full 32-ETH validator (inclusive of consensus rewards, tips, and MEV rewards)