## What is rETH? rETH is a liquid staking token issued by Rocket Pool. There are two ways to obtain rETH. The first is to mint rETH by directly depositing ETH into the Rocket Pool protocol. For this to happen, minting must be enabled by the Rocket Pool protocol. The second way is to obtain rETH from a decentralized exchange. You can swap any tokens to buy rETH. Let’s look at an example of the first way, directly minting rETH from the Rocket Pool contracts. Suppose that Alice deposits 1 ETH into the Rocket Pool contracts. In return, she gets back 0.83 rETH. Notice that she deposited 1 ETH, but only got back 0.83 rETH. The exchange rate is not one-to-one. This is because rETH is a yield bearing token; it accrues value. Assuming that the Rocket Pool protocol is doing well and the node operators of Rocket Pool are performing well, then over time this rETH is going to collect ETH staking rewards, hence it accrues value - it is yield bearing. And that is why when Alice deposits 1 ETH, she gets back less rETH. If she wants to redeem ETH from her rETH, she would send this rETH back over to the Rocket Pool contracts, and hopefully she’ll get back more than one ETH. The other way to obtain rETH is through decentralized exchanges, such as Curve, Uniswap, and Balancer. For example, let’s say that Joe has 1 ETH and he swaps this 1 ETH with a decentralized exchange, and he gets back, let’s say, 0.82 rETH. When Joe does this, he’ll need to keep in mind that there is some trading fee, so he might get less rETH than if he was to mint directly with the Rocket Pool contracts. Depending on the market condition, this might flip. Joe might have a better exchange rate if he were to obtain rETH through a decentralized exchange instead of directly minting rETH from the Rocket Pool contract. So, these are two ways to obtain rETH: directly from the Rocket Pool contract, and from decentralized exchanges.