How rETH and rFIS Solutions Will Minimize The Uncertainties Surrounding ETH 2.0 Staking

4 min readDec 19, 2020

Introduction

Stafi Protocol (abbreviation for staking finance) is the first decentralized protocol built on Polkadot to provide liquidity of your staking assets. StaFi is a polkadot parachain. Simply put, with Stafi, you use staking contracts to make your staked assets liquid and tradeable.

rToken; your reward token is a hedge against volatility of the market while you earn your staking rewards in a specific token. With Stafi, you don’t have to bother about varied quantities of rewards due to market volatility. Generally, there is no guarantee that you will always be in profit just because you are staking, so the market value of your asset could drop while you are staking.

Stafi guards you against market volatility by analyzing the blockchain, the cryptocurrency asset is built on and allocates a token that is specific to that blockchain. The rTokens users stakes are available for trading while your stakes are still locked. rToken is short form for reward token. For example, rALGO represents staked Algo.

Users can redeem their stake anytime. You can stake your tokens on platforms built by StaFi with the tools on the platform and receive reward tokens which are tradeable on centralized and decentralized exchanges including DeFi Protocols.

ETH 2.0 and Stafi

Stakers and validators face high liquidity risk after staking their ETH possessions, which is unfortunately unavailable for transfer, unstake nor redeem until Phase 2 of Ethereum 2.0 is reached.

Uncertainty surrounds ETH 2.0 staking as the launch of Phase 2 might take years. StaFi created the rETH and rFIS solutions to minimize the uncertainties surrounding ETH 2.0 staking.

rETH Solution

StaFi launched a bridge from StaFi to Ethereum. With this bridge one can transform FIS (StaFi Native token) to ERC 20 FIS at the ratio of 1:1 using rBridge. One can use the FIS token to trade and provide liquidity on Uniswap and other ERC 20 services.

The lack of liquidity of staked ETH might affect user participation and this demands immediate solution. Stafi is a project dedicated to addressing the liquidity issue of staked assets, Stafi team hereby propose the rETH solution, which allows for Ethereum 2.0 liquid staking at ease even if you do not have 32 ETH to stake to start the validator.

For the Stakers and validators

Stakers will be able to participate in ETH Staking through the Staking Contract deployed on Ethereum 1.0 by StaFi, and one would only need as little as 0.01 ETH to start, or any amount at his own discretion, instead of a fixed amount of 32 ETH.

Stakers are not required to run validator nodes nor spend time and costs maintaining them. StaFi’s Staking Contract (SC) deployed on Ethereum 1.0 will automatically match a staker’s ETH to validators available and suitable.

StaFi will allocate staked ETH in Staking Contract to a batch of well-performing original validators, who would establish and maintain appropriate amounts of validator nodes to provide staking rewards to stakers.

Solving the Liquidity Dilemma for Both Stakers and Validators

For a specific staker, whenever he stakes ETH to the SC, she will automatically receive a certain amount of rETH Tokens (ERC20 version) in return, which is a synthetic representation of her staked ETH balance and corresponding staking rewards. The rETH token may then be traded on a variety of trading venues, and can be used in other DeFi protocols.

For validators, StaFi will initiate a Liquidity Program, through which they could also sell part of their ETH staked in the SC back to StaFi. Relevant details are specified in the Original Validator portion.

How to Use the Cross Chain Bridge to Ethereum For Stafi Native Token and rEth for Staking Ethereum 2.0

Using the link for bridge application, you fill in the number of ERC 20 FIS tokens you want to exchange and the Ethereum address for the payment in Stafi bridge product page.

rBridge will automatically calculate the charge of the current Eth network and calculate the amount of FIS tokens to be paid by current FIS/ETH exchange rate. The user confirms and makes the payment which will be temporarily locked in a transitional contract address.

When the rBridge deployed on the Ethereum network monitors the user’s request on the StaFi chain. It will automatically mint the same amount of ERC 20 FIS tokens and transfers them to the Ethereum payment address filled by the user. In less than one minute the user will receive FIS token in ERC 20 with no extra commissions from the user.