My wife and I have a joint savings account. I believe in the future of Ethereum. And the future is here. I put in all our savings into ETH. I have another account where I put in ETH as well to pay for gas fees.
Today, I’ll be talking about staking that ETH so that in addition to the value of ETH as a token, I can earn fees in the process.
Side note: ETH has steadily been rising for the past few weeks or months and is now $3,394.30 according to Coinmarketcap.
Staking is the act of depositing 32 ETH to activate validator software. As a validator you’ll be responsible for storing data, processing transactions, and adding new blocks to the blockchain. This will keep Ethereum secure for everyone and earn you new ETH in the process.
As for me, I don’t have 32 ETH nor am I looking to be a validator. My intention is to earn some ETH and keep Ethereum secure for everyone. I’m going to be contributing to a pool. I’m looking at Lido Finance and Rocket Pool. For a list of all the staking services see here.
Why these two? I read a lot. I started off talking about MakerDAO in this post. I stumbled on this tweet storm and that is where the Lido Finance came from.
As for Rocket Pool, from the Ethereum website
You can stake on Rocket Pool by swapping ETH for Rocket Pool's liquid token rETH with as little as 0.01 ETH. Want to run a node? You can also run a staking node on Rocket Pool starting from 16 ETH. The remaining ETH gets assigned from the Rocket Pool protocol, using ETH users have deposited to the pool.
That is why I chose these two. In the next post, I’ll be talking about my due diligence process for these two protocols.