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.

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.

Smart Node v1.17.0 is now live, bringing major client updates—most of which raise the default block gas limit to 45M—and a new pruning feature that allows node operators to reduce storage needs by enabling partial history expiry. This is a recommended update for all Node Operators. Full details and upgrade instructions: https://github.com/rocket-pool/smartnode/releases/tag/v1.17.0.

On March 26, 2025, at Epoch 2048, the Hoodi Testnet upgraded to the Pectra fork. If the upgrade is successful it will lend a strong signal that mainnet is ready for the Pectra upgrade.

The Ethereum community is ecstatic to welcome Danny Ryan as a co-founder of Etherealize. Danny has shown his prowess as a leader, diplomat, and problem solver in the Ethereum ecosystem, and now he'll lay the groundwork to onboard the world to Ethereum. ​Etherealize is an Ethereum Foundation-backed organization dedicated to accelerating institutional adoption of the Ethereum ecosystem by providing research, content, and products tailored for financial institutions. POAP development by superphiz, art by shfryn. All funds from this POAP go directly to etherealize @ etherealize.eth. This POAP is available in two variations, a green ring for an 0.001 Ether donation, and a gold ring for 0.1 Ether donation to Etherealize. Go Danny Go!

It’s been a turbulent week for crypto, with RPL and other altcoins continuing to struggle as the token price hovers near $5. While the market remains uncertain, Rocket Pool has exciting upgrades on the way, such as Saturn on the horizon. Until then, the price action will be a bumpy ride. Community members within the Rocket Pool Discord that share their struggles receive a POAP.

Rocket Pool has had separate quora for on-chain and snapshot voting. This isn't really the intent; it's based on getting similar absolute requirements given that one is a percent of all vote power and the other is a percent of initialized vote power. haloooloolo has volunteered to initialize more vote power so that the difference is small and Rocket Pool can use a single quorum going forward without more tweaks. Buyers of this POAP helped fund this community initiative to initialize on-chain vote power!