How to stake less than 32 ETH in your own wallet, no lockup, mininal fees

A lot of people use centralized exchanges to stake small amount of ETH, but thereby they give them custody over their coins.

There is actually a very easy way to stake ETH in your own wallet decentralized, without any lockup and with mininal fees of only a few dollars.

It works through layer 2 Arbitrum and the decentralized staking pool Rocket Pool!

First you need to get ETH to your Arbitrum account. Most big centralized exchanges support withdrawals to Arbitrum, for example Binance or Crypto.com. If you have ETH on mainnet, there is also a bridge from Ethereum mainnet to Arbitrum, but using centralized exchanges to bridge will be cheaper for gas.

You can now use metamask to access your arbitrum account. Here is a tutorial on how to connect your metamask to the arbitrum network.

After you can access your Arbitrum funds on metamask, there is only one thing left to do: Go to Uniswap and swap your ETH to rETH (Rocket Pool ETH)

You can do that through this link: Uniswap. (You might have to switch the network to Arbitrum on Uniswap first)

The swap will only cost around $2 dollars on Arbitrum. So you pay less than $5 total in fees, including the exchange withdrawal.

The value of rETH will automatically increase over time compared to ETH, because the staking rewards that are earned through staking in Rocket Pool automatically flow into the value of rETH. At the beginning of Rocket Pool, 1 rETH was equal to 1 ETH. Right now, 1 rETH = 1.02 ETH.

If the staking pool earns 5% staking rewards every year, the rETH/ETH ratio will go up by 5% in the same amount of time. Thats how you earn your staking rewards.

You can swap your rETH back to ETH at anytime to 'unstake' your ETH.

To get more information about rocket pool, check out the official website.