The Rocket Pool community celebrates the 2025 holidays, with node operators and community members sharing festive greetings and looking ahead to the upcoming Saturn 1 upgrade. Participants receive a POAP.

Around October 30, 2025, Beaconcha.in data provided by Hildobby, showed that the share of validators on the Ethereum beacon chain operated by Lido had fallen below 22%. 22% is regarded as a critical threshold for entity size, because larger entities represent a centralization and governance risk to the network. We welcome Lido as an aligned actor and we celebrate the robustness of the beacon chain.

Rocket Pool has released Smart Node v1.18.0, featuring key client updates and several Smart Node improvements, including Saturn branch integration and enhanced Docker functionality. This is a low-priority update for Mainnet users but mandatory for Hoodi testnet ahead of its October 28th fork. Node Operators who updated received a POAP.

The Rocket Pool community got spooky! In the month of October, community members changed their profile pictures to Halloween-themed avatars and earned a POAP for participating.

Rocket Pool has released v1.13.8 of the Smart Node. Smart Node 1.13.8 adds contribution guidelines, flags bloXroute Max Profit relay as censoring, supports configuring Nethermind's pruning, and auto-initializes voting power. It also removes the Eden Relay, improves voting command text, and adds a warning for uninitialized voting power during staking after the hotfix. Rocket Pool node operators that updated swiftly received a POAP.

The Rocket Pool Houston release delivered Protocol DAO on-chain voting. Shortly, the Protocol DAO will be able to vote on Snapshot for meta governance and vote on-chain to make protocol changes. Before Rocket Pool can enable Protocol DAO voting, node operators need to initialize their voting power in the new system and update their signaling address that is used to vote on Snapshot. Node operators that initialized their voting power by July 15 received a POAP.

Rocket Pool released v1.13.6 of the Smart Node, a recommended update for all users. This version includes important client updates, bug fixes, and new features. Node operators's can now use the command 'rocketpool pdao set-signalling-address' to connect your node voting power to the address that will be used to vote on Snapshot. Node operators that updated within 48 hours were given a POAP.

This POAP commemorates voting in the 2024 Rocket Pool IMC Full Membership Selection