stakefish Ethereum Product Recap 2023
Overview
We would like to share our company’s accomplishments in this very eventful year - from the Shapella merge to the many exciting product and feature launches. Stakefish has a rich history in the blockchain space. We’re proud to create unique products, user-first experiences, and share with you insights into how we build them.
Background
At stakefish, we are driven by the mission of decentralization and securing the blockchain. This mission started with our Founder & CEO, Chun Wang, whose experience in the industry goes as far back as 2013 as a co-founder of f2pool - one of the largest mining (PoW) pools for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other PoW protocols.
When exploring the future of Ethereum, one of the most insightful conversations came after a discussion between Chun and Vitalik in 2017 in which Chun concluded Proof of Stake will be a big shift. In 2018, Chun founded stakefish as the pioneering proof of stake (PoS) staking pool. It was still two years before Ethereum had proof of stake ready, but stakefish was ready. In its early days, stakefish provided staking services for other Proof of Stake blockchains, many of which we still operate and are thriving today. When Ethereum’s proof of stake was ready with the first phase to deposit and operate the Beacon Chain, we were among the first to provide staking services.
Our first validator #10407 was deposited on 2020-11-23 and came online on the Beacon Chain genesis.
Our first validator for LIDO protocol joined in Feb 2021.
Today, stakefish is one of the largest and oldest Ethereum validator services with over $2 billion in staked assets and features over 800k in ETH staked. We pride ourselves on building great products, great features, and empower our users to do more with Ethereum staking.
What makes a good product?
We continually ask ourselves what makes a good product. We aim to push the boundaries of Ethereum staking and what that means for us and our users. We narrowed down our philosophy to these three principles (the 3E’s):
Ease of use: At its core, we want to build a product that is easy to use, intuitive, and just works. Apple products often come to mind when we think of great user experience and inspiration. We want to build a great user experience for all kinds of users and provide rich features without sacrificing their experience.
Empathy: We practice product empathy and express through our user experiences. This year, we recognized that users were looking forward to withdrawing for the first time with the Shapella upgrade in April, as well as new users coming to stake after withdrawals had been enabled. We closely aligned our product & engineering timeline with the Ethereum roadmap -from upgrading validator software, building products, and testing so that our users can use our product the moment the protocol upgraded. Empathizing is a principle that extends to maximizing rewards with high uptime and effectiveness, capitalizing on MEV, and countless other decisions that we take.
Empower: We want to empower users to do more with staking - whether it is to stake with multisig wallet (for DAO’s, and security), re-stake with Eigenlayer, or transfer/collateralize their Validator NFT. We empower protocols like Lido and Mantle to operate liquid staking protocols, offering new experiences to staking Ethereum.
Our products & features
2023 was the year of major product development. We began offering a number of new, and novel features in the Ethereum staking space.
- Classic staking: Staking Ethereum with no contract risk, optimal gas, and stake as many as 100 validators in one go.
- Validator NFT staking: To enable ease of transfer between wallets and empower protocols like Para.Space to collateralize the asset.
- Safe Multisig wallet: To empower DAOs or a group of people to stake on Ethereum.
- Custom withdrawal/Eigenlayer support: To empower our users to restake their validators with Eigenlayer and generate re-staking rewards
- Holesky Testnet support (coming soon): Testing environment for prospective users and partners to test and build applications.
For ease of use, we added:
- Batch claim and exit to help you manage dozens to thousands of validators easily.
- Modal staking to help you easily stake within the dashboard.
- Daily rewards to see all your validator protocol rewards in one place.
- Dark mode for easy reading in low light conditions.
- stake•ai to help answer your questions from our wealth of knowledge on everything Ethereum staking.
Integrations
We provided integrations or support for integrations with our Ethereum staking product this year.
Safe wallet - We built Safe wallet (formerly Gnosis Safe) integrations so users can stake directly from their multisig wallet. This enables DAOs and organizations to stake securely and confidently.
Mantle LSP - Mantle built their LSP (Liquid Staking Protocol), similar to LIDO, on top of our validator infrastructure, while providing value-added benefits like securing & earning rewards on L2. Mantle chose us as one of four genesis node operators for our expertise and experience of operating validators.
EigenLayer - We added custom withdrawal credentials and EigenLayer support for users to re-stake their validators and secure other networks.
Para.Space integrated our Validator NFT to collateralize 32 ETH + rewards locked.
Conclusion
2023 was a big year for stakefish. We launched new Ethereum staking products, features, and grew our business. We can proudly say that we’re one of the few companies within the native staking space that is building unique user-first experiences.
As we look ahead to 2024, stakefish remains steadfast in our commitment to decentralized innovation and Ethereum staking excellence. Join us on this transformative journey.
