name: Rocket Pool Vocabulary
description: >-
  Domain vocabulary for the Rocket Pool decentralized Ethereum liquid staking
  protocol — the protocol's core entities, roles, tokens, and governance
  artifacts.
version: '0.1.0'
maintainers:
  - FN: Kin Lane
    email: kin@apievangelist.com
concepts:
  - term: rETH
    definition: >-
      Rocket Pool's liquid staking token. A non-rebasing ERC-20 whose exchange
      rate against ETH increases as the underlying pool of staked ETH accrues
      consensus and execution layer rewards. rETH is freely transferable and
      composable across DeFi.
  - term: RPL
    definition: >-
      Rocket Pool's governance and node-operator collateral token. Node
      operators stake RPL to back rETH user deposits; RPL holders share in
      protocol inflation through periodic rewards distributions.
  - term: Minipool
    definition: >-
      A smart contract that pairs a node operator's ETH (8 ETH under the
      current scheme) with rETH-user ETH to fund and operate a single
      Ethereum beacon-chain validator.
  - term: Megapool
    definition: >-
      A next-generation node operator contract that aggregates multiple
      validators under a single node, replacing the one-contract-per-validator
      minipool model with a shared megapool delegate.
  - term: Node Operator
    definition: >-
      A permissionless participant who runs Rocket Pool node software and one
      or more minipools or megapool validators, earning consensus rewards,
      commission, and RPL inflation rewards.
  - term: Smart Node
    definition: >-
      The reference Rocket Pool node software — a Go CLI (rocketpool),
      long-running daemon (rocketpool-daemon), Docker stack, and Validator
      Client wrapper distributed by the smartnode and smartnode-install
      repositories.
  - term: Smoothing Pool
    definition: >-
      An opt-in pool that aggregates priority-fee and MEV rewards from
      participating node operators' execution clients and redistributes them
      proportionally, smoothing the variance of MEV income.
  - term: Deposit Pool
    definition: >-
      The protocol's holding contract for rETH-user ETH waiting to be matched
      with node-operator capital to fund new validators.
  - term: Protocol DAO
    definition: >-
      The on-chain governance body composed of Rocket Pool node operators who
      have initialized voting power. The pDAO sets protocol parameters and
      manages a treasury.
  - term: Oracle DAO
    definition: >-
      A permissioned set of bonded oracles that report off-chain data on-chain
      — beacon-chain balances, RPL price, and rewards trees — under economic
      penalties for misbehavior.
  - term: RPIP
    definition: >-
      Rocket Pool Improvement Proposal — the protocol's specification process
      tracked in the rocket-pool/RPIPs repository.
  - term: Rewards Tree
    definition: >-
      The Merkle tree produced each rewards interval that encodes per-node
      RPL and smoothing-pool ETH allocations; node operators submit Merkle
      proofs to claim.
  - term: Express Ticket
    definition: >-
      A megapool-era queue-jumping primitive that lets a node operator skip
      the deposit queue at the cost of an additional bond.
  - term: Withdrawal Address
    definition: >-
      The Ethereum address that receives ETH consensus and execution layer
      rewards on behalf of a Rocket Pool node operator.
  - term: rETH Exchange Rate
    definition: >-
      The on-chain ratio of total backing ETH to outstanding rETH supply,
      reported each oracle period.
  - term: Saturn Upgrade
    definition: >-
      The protocol upgrade series introducing megapools, express tickets, and
      revised tokenomics; tracked through verify-1.4 and saturn-fuzz repos.