At the start of 2024, we saw the bear market begin to wane and give way to the rising activity in the crypto industry, a phenomenon brought upon us by EigenLayer’s introduction of restaking. As an industry pioneer, RockX adopted restaking very early on and became an AVS validator to support EigenLayer restaking. Today, restaking has spawned a myriad of other innovations, such as liquid restaking, a field so big it has been given its own moniker – LRTfi.

Today, the concept of restaking is being expanded upon by many other builders in the industry. Notably, Babylon is working on bitcoin restaking, a project that perfectly marries the capital dormancy of bitcoin to the capital dependence of Proof-of-Chain networks. Other restaking projects, such as Karak, have also sprung up, putting their own spin on EigenLayer’s vision of a shared security layer.

RockX Product Upgrades H1 2024

As your gateway to Web3, we are constantly working on the latest industry upgrades and responding to the needs and feedback of our clients. As such, we have fine-tuned our offerings on our staking and access node products as outlined below.

Native Staking Product Upgrades

We have added support for EigenLayer native restaking, along with support for ETH staking on Holesky testnet as we sunset our support for Goerli testnet staking. This gives our clients access to the very latest restaking innovations and the ability to stake on the latest testnet that most closely resembles Ethereum’s mainnet environment.

Speaking of EigenLayer, we also recently announced that we are a Genesis Operator on Drosera Network. It is an AVS in testnet, and is the first and only incident response protocol in Web3. Drosera is pioneering a new category of security to enable a Web3 without compromise, and we’re extremely happy to be on board.

Furthermore, we have implemented Ethereum batch native staking. This will allow clients to deploy up to 100 Ethereum validators in one staking operation, heavily saving time and energy for clients looking to stake large amount of ETH at once.

Moving away from Ethereum, we are also a proud supporter of Babylon’s BTC staking protocol, and are a covenant committee signer in their latest testnet 4. Having been involved since Babylon’s early days, we are excited for this new phase in their development and are looking forward to great things from them and from the innovation of BTC staking.

In the meantime, you may stake sBTC with our Finality Provider to participate in this new current testnet phase.

We’re proud to continue to offer native staking on over 20 Proof-of-Stake blockchains with the highest hardware and software features, incredible security, and a highly professional team taking care of each of our clients’ needs.

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Access Node Product Upgrades

This year, we’ve worked exceptionally hard on fine-tuning our access node offering to our clients as we know many people want to capture the opportunities present in the bull market. As such, we are proud to host APIs to 29 mainnets and 4 testnets.

All leading Proof-of-Stake blockchains, such as Ethereum, Sui, Arbitrum, DePIN leader IoTeX, and many more, are covered. This year, we also launched support for trending chains such as Bera Chain, Zeta blockchain, and most recently, the Phala and Khala networks.

Check out our full list of offerings or get started with a free trial on our access node portal today.

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H2 Outlook

In the first half of the year, we witnessed a great season for airdrop farming, and those efforts are now slowly coming to fruition. Many wonderful projects have sprung up in the wake of EigenLayer’s restaking innovation, and larger projects have released airdrops, though not all of them satisfied their respective communities.

Even so, momentum seems to be strong and people are continuing to participate and farm for as many airdrops as possible as companies push out their own form of points for people to collect. 

Also, while BTC is an already-established cryptocurrency that has gone mainstream and is relatively stable, more and more hype is being built up around the DeFi narrative. For instance, the price of bitcoin barely budged this year despite the bitcoin halving event that traditionally gives the currency a price boost. However, bitcoin staking is a growing narrative that we expect the public to pick up once it starts going public and away from testnet.

More and more, we are witnessing people gather around community-centric projects that listen to their communities and rewards them. At RockX, we are committed to our people. This is why we are constantly reiterating our products, taking in feedback and implementing new features as requested by our clients.

We look forward to continuing to serve you to the best of our ability.