Lido and Rocket Pool, two liquid staking protocols, have recently engaged in a social media dispute. Rocket Pool accused Lido of being too centralized, claiming that LidoDAO does not have full control over its contracts. Dmitry Gusakov, the Community Stake Lead at Lido, defended Lido’s decentralized nature, stating that all actions within Lido are fully controlled by LidoDAO.
According to Gusakov, Rocket Pool’s contracts are controlled by the Rocket Pool team, allowing them to change parameters and call any method they desire. This means that Rocket Pool developers have the ability to increase the inflation rate to any percentage or raise fees up to 100%. Gusakov claimed that Lido does not have this vulnerability in its contracts.
In response, Waq, a member of the Rocket Pool Grants Management Committee, acknowledged the vulnerability and stated that it would be addressed in the future. Waq accused the Lido team of taking credit for discovering a known issue.
Gusakov further explained that Rocket Pool’s contract contains a parameter called „Guardian,“ which grants certain privileges to a specific account. Many functions in Rocket Pool’s contracts are marked as „onlyGuardian,“ meaning they can only be called by the account listed in this parameter, which is currently set to the RocketPool Deployer account.
One of the actions that the „Guardian“ can perform is changing the „RPL InflationIntervalRate“ and „ETH DepositFee.“ This means that the Rocket Pool team has the ability to increase the inflation rate of the Rocket Pool Governance Token (RPL) or remove user deposits by setting the fee to 100%.
Chris Blec, the content creator, shared the post, claiming that it proves that „pDAO is not a DAO“ or that RPL token holders do not actually have control over Rocket Pool’s governance.
Jasper.lens, a supporter of the Rocket Pool community, responded by stating that the community is aware of this centralization issue, which will be addressed in the upcoming Saturn upgrade. The centralization occurred during the development and testing of Rocket Pool’s DAO voting systems. The team decided not to allow on-chain voting during the initial testing phase of the DAO. Now that the testing is complete, the upcoming Saturn upgrade will focus on closing these decentralization loopholes.
In agreement with Jasper.lens‘ comment, Waq stated that the Rocket Pool community has been working on fixing this problem for over a year and predicted that the Lido team would seek recognition once the issue is resolved.
Liquid staking protocols have gained popularity in recent months. On May 1st, blockchain analytics platform DefiLlama declared these protocols as the highest-ranking DeFi category in terms of total locked value, surpassing decentralized exchanges. On May 30th, Tenet partnered with LayerZero to implement liquid staking on additional blockchains in the future.
