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Rocket Pool Origins
Rocket Pool was founded in Australia on September 1, 2016 by David Rugendyke. Not long after, senior developer Jake Pospischil joined the team followed by Darren Langley. They would work for the next years developing the Rocket Pool protocol (Langley took a brief hiatus for a couple of years in the late two-thousand teens).
In 2021, after several successful beta tests and with mainnet launch in sight, Jake moved on to other projects but the team grew with Darren Langley returning as General Manager and with the additions of Senior Solidity Engineer Kane Wallmann, Senior Blockchain Engineer Nick Doherty, and Senior Blockchain Engineer Joe Clapis, an avid member of the Rocket Pool Discord #trading community who had already proven himself adept at working with the codebase when he successfully hosted a node on a raspberry pi.
Subsequent years saw the additions of Nick Ashley, aka Maverick, beloved Marketing and Community Manager, Grant, leading Business Development, and Fornax, brought on from within the RP community to work on the Smart Node stack and golang.
Of course, Rocket Pool would not be what it is today without the mysterious and ever-present Kron, who keeps the Discord server running smoothly.
Since the early days, Rocket Pool has grown into a huge, diverse and engaged community on Discord, X, Reddit, Discourse, etc. with participants, contributors and admirers spread throughout the web3 ecosystem.
Rocket Pool helped lay the foundations of liquid staking tokens and has been prominently involved in important Ethereum Improvement Proposal discussions (for example, changing withdrawal credentials to allow smart contracts).
Though Rocket Pool was one of the earliest Ethereum based protocols to begin development, it was not able to be first to market. The complexities of designing an ETH pooling mechanism that aligned so closely with Ethereum principles were vast. The result, however, has far exceeded expectations.