Rocket Pool surges on news Coinbase Ventures purchased RPL

• Rocket Pool price soared nearly 10% after Coinbase Ventures’s purchase of RPL tokens.
• The Coinbase venture arm announced the strategic investment on Thursday.
• RPL rose to highs of $29.25, with over $15 million traded in 24 hours as volume spiked 75%

Rocket Pool (RPL) price soared nearly 10% on Thursday to trade at intraday highs of $29.25 on the crypto exchange Coinbase. The token’s 24-hour trading volume rose 75% to over $15 million.

The price of the decentralised Ethereum staking protocol was around $28.45 at the time of writing, still up roughly 7% after a slight drawdown following broader crypto reaction to the US inflation data release.

Why did Rocket Pool price go up today?

Rocket Pool is a liquid staking protocol on Ethereum that has increasingly become popular across the ecosystem. Its website shows the protocol has over 779,800 ETH staked and more than 3,110 node operators. According to data from DeFiLlama, only Lido and Coinbase have more TVL than Rocket Pool among liquid staking platforms.

The native RPL tokens are used for incentivizing ecosystem users and for governance purposes. The RPL price surge today came after a major announcement related to the token.

On Thursday, Coinbase Ventures – the investment arm of US-based crypto exchange Coinbase, announced it had made a strategic investment in Rocket Pool. This was done via a purchase of RPL from the Rocket Pool team, Coinbase Ventures wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

Exciting news to share: Coinbase Ventures recently made a strategic investment into @Rocket_Pool by purchasing RPL tokens from the Rocket Pool team.

— Coinbase Ventures 🛡️ (@cbventures) August 10, 2023

The investment follows the Coinbase unit’s move to join Rocket Pool’s Oracle DAO and the unveiling of Base, the crypto exchange’s layer-2 platform. Highlighting the collaboration with Rocket Pool, the Coinbase team said the investment is part of the push to scale Ethereum’s infrastructure and bring the next billion users to the ecosystem.

“We know the Rocket Pool team shares this belief and we’re delighted to support them via active participation in their Oracle DAO and using ETH from our corporate balance sheet to operate several hundred nodes on the Rocket Pool network,” they wrote on X.