Coinbase Ventures' Strategic Investment Sends Rocket Pool Token Surging

Coinbase Ventures – the investment branch of the biggest publicly traded U.S. crypto exchange – expanded its relationship with RocketPool by announcing today its purchase of the liquid staking network’s native token RPL.

RPL, which provides direct incentives, insurance and governance for the Rocket Pool ecosystem, has jumped more than 9% in the past 24 hours to $28.82, according to CoinDesk market data.

The announcement occurred several months after Coinbaes Ventures joined Rocket Pool’s Oracle DAO, a group of permissioned special node operators with extra responsibilities for the liquid staking network.

While Coinbase Ventures did not disclose how much RPL they acquired, it said on X (formerly Twitter) that the purchase of the tokens was a “strategic investment.”

The investment shows that Coinbase has “some confidence in both Rocket Pool, the protocol, and RPL, the token,” said pseudoanonymous rocket pool community contributor Valdorff to CoinDesk in a Discord message. “Rocket Pool’s brand is valuable and Coinbase wants to be tied to us.”

According to its website, Rocket Pool, which offers 3.33% APY for staking ether (ETH), has more than 779,000 ETH, worth about $1.4 billion, making it the third most popular liquid staking platform by total value locked behind Lido and Coinbase, per blockchain analytics firm DefiLlama.