0xFornax, a dedicated and long-standing community member, has officially joined the Rocket Pool team! 0xFornax's addition brings not only Golang expertise but also a wealth of insights and skills to the table. In his new role, he will be immersing himself in various aspects of the protocol and contributing to the development of the smart node stack. The Rocket Pool team continues to grow stronger and more vibrant, thanks to the valuable contributions of individuals like 0xFornax. A POAP was gifted to those who celebrate this exciting addition to the Rocket Pool team.

The Goerli Testnet successfully merged the Execution and Consensus clients on August 10th, 2022. Holders of this POAP were there for this historical moment, and also supported $2 or more to Coin Center, a non-profit focused on crypto policy. Next up, Mainnet! - https://www.coincenter.org/ - https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ - https://ethereum.org/en/ - https://ethstaker.cc/

Rocket Pool is hitting mainnet on November 9th after 4 years of development time! As such, the Rocket Pool community has organized a series of POAPs and raffles honoring communities that share a similar ethos to Rocket Pool. This is a thanks for all the people who participated in these raffles and spread the word that Rocket Pool was ready to launch while recognizing Patricio Worthalter for his contributions and donations to the raffles.

Over 4 years ago Rocket Pool was born as an idea for the first ever decentralized staking project for Ethereum. Today we're extremely excited to announce... again, decentralized staking will be a reality on mainnet from 9th November, 2021 00:00 UTC*, just 4 days away! Front end deposits for rETH will open first, then node registrations will be opened about 5m after. We've pioneered a solution to the very esoteric exploit that was raised just a day before our initial planned launch date. This exploit not only affected us, but several other live staking platforms as well. The solution has been verified by Sigma Prime and we have upgraded our initial mainnet deployment of Rocket Pool smart contracts and also our smart node stack to bring it inline with these changes. The full report for that can be found here https://rocketpool.net/files/SigmaPri... To say this launch is huge milestone for the team... again, and our beloved community would be an epic understatement. Rocket Pool isn't just a standard Ethereum project anymore, it really has become a collective of devs and community combined that have helped craft a once good idea, into a great one.

On 4th of October a white hat (who chose to remain anonymous) revealed a potential critical exploit in the node side of protocol that could allow an operator to submit previously made withdrawal credentials for a minipool. In the matter of hours the Rocket Pool team examined the sophisticated node exploit and designed a fix for it.

On October 3rd, 2021 Langers from the Rocket Pool team published the full audit results (https://discordapp.com/channels/405159462932971535/405163979141545995/894372662795731003). With less than 48 hours before the Rocket Pool Ethereum Mainnet launch, there is nothing left to do. This is the clam before the storm. All systems nominal - we are go for launch. To celebrate this moment in time, the official "calm before the storm" POAP was distributed and the Rocket Pool Ethereum Mainnet Poster NFT was officially revealed.

Rocket Pool is launching on October 6 and is celebrating with a series of community crossover events. Here Rocket Pool joins up with Zapper, much beloved by the RP community, for a poap + raffle. Hopefully RP and Zapper will be able to team up for more events and who knows what else, in the future?