Crypto staking flows reveal critical market signals that often precede narratives and price movements. When investors deposit or withdraw assets from staking protocols, they're making capital decisions that reflect confidence, risk appetite, and market sentiment. Whether you’re tracking trends for yourself or your team, monitoring these flows can provide a real edge: early visibility into capital movement and evolving on-chain behavior.
Historically, tracking staking activity meant building dashboards, writing queries, or relying on engineers. This guide introduces an easier way, no code required. With Dispatch, you can visualize real-time staking activity across protocols like RocketPool, Frax ETH, and stETH without touching a line of code. While this monitoring won't replace your strategy, it can provide timely signals to identify trends, and respond to market shifts with confidence.
Table of contents
Why staking flows matter
When people stake (deposit) or unstake (withdraw) assets from staking protocols, they're often moving hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in a single transaction — moves that can impact and reveal market dynamics before they become obvious elsewhere. These decisions show where confidence is growing, where risk is being reevaluated, and how capital is rotating between protocols.
These flows are leading indicators that typically appear 2-3 weeks before price changes or social media narratives catch on. If you can track them in real time, you're in a better position to:
- Catch momentum shifts early
- See how much trust users have in protocols during upgrades or incidents
- Compare your product's traction against what's happening across the ecosystem
- Track liquidity migration patterns and LSD (Liquid Staking Derivative) market share shifts
The problem is, most teams don't have the time or resources to set up that kind of monitoring. It usually means writing queries, building custom dashboards, or pulling engineers off more important work.
Founders tracking competitor adoption, analysts monitoring market behavior, and growth teams measuring sentiment all need these signals without adding to their workload. This is where Dispatch comes in — connecting teams to what's happening on-chain without requiring engineering resources or specialized knowledge.
Choosing how to monitor staking flows
Compare real-time alerts for immediate response with visual monitoring for trend analysis — choose either or combine both approaches based on your team's needs.
Before diving into setup, it’s important to decide what type of monitoring best fits your workflow — whether you’re working solo or with a team. Dispatch offers two complementary approaches that serve different needs.
Everyone works differently. Some need to know the moment something changes. Others care more about spotting patterns over days or weeks. With Dispatch, you can set up both real-time alerts and visual trend monitoring — it just depends on what you're looking to track.
Strategy 1: Real-time alerts
Use real-time alerts if you want to get notified whenever a significant staking event happens. This approach is particularly valuable for teams and investors that need to react quickly to competitor movements or market shifts.
These are push notifications that you get via Discord, Telegram, email or webhook, and are best for infrequent activity you want to know about right away.
Strategy 2: Periodic monitoring
Use Dispatch Monitor if you're more focused on tracking activity trends over time. Dispatch Monitor is just what it sounds like: monitoring within Dispatch via activity logs and data visualizations.
Rather than real-time push notifications, you can log into Dispatch periodically or at any time for insights.
This approach helps you identify patterns and trends over time — like weekly deposit cycles or gradual shifts between protocols — that might not be obvious from individual transaction alerts.
Strategy 3: Hybrid
This is the approach we recommend:
- Real-time alerts for specific, significant, infrequent activity.
- More robust, comprehensive tracking for everything else in Dispatch Monitor
Here you get the best of both worlds. Get alerts for specific actions and see visualizations to review the bigger picture when it suits you.
The setup process is the same for all strategies, but since visual monitoring provides the most immediate value for teams new to staking analytics, we'll focus on that: setting up Dispatch Monitor to visualize staking flows across multiple protocols. If your team prefers notifications for specific events, like withdrawals, you can easily choose Telegram, Discord, or email alerts.
Here’s a preview of what you’ll see once your Patch is live:
Let's get started.
Prefer to follow along visually? Watch the step-by-step video below, or keep scrolling for the full walkthrough:
Setting up Dispatch to monitor staking flows across protocols
In this guide, we’ll be using Ethereum-based staking protocols like Frax Finance and RocketPool as examples, but the steps apply to any protocol with on-chain staking activity.
You don’t need a custom dashboard — or an engineer — to keep track of staking activity across protocols like RocketPool, Frax ETH, or stETH. With Dispatch, you can set up real-time monitoring in a few minutes.
1. Pick the protocols you want to monitor
Start by adding or choosing staking protocols you're interested in monitoring. Popular options include Rocketpool, Lido, and Frax Finance.
2. Grab the smart contract addresses
You’ll need the addresses of the smart contracts tied to staking actions — like deposits and withdrawals. If you don’t already have them bookmarked, head to verified sources like Etherscan. For example, RocketPool’s Deposit Contract is publicly available.
Starter list of staking pool contracts on Ethereum
- RocketPool Deposit contract:
0xDD3f50F8A6CafbE9b31a427582963f465E745AF8 - FraxEtherMinter (V2):
0x7Bc6bad540453360F744666D625fec0ee1320cA3 - Lido and stETH Token (Proxy): 0xae7ab96520DE3A18E5e111B5EaAb095312D7fE84
- lsETH token:
0x8c1bed5b9a0928467c9b1341da1d7bd5e10b6549
3. Create a Patch in Dispatch for each protocol
Patches in Dispatch consist of an on-chain activity Trigger (smart contract or wallet event emission or function call) and a resulting Action (e.g. send a Discord message or log in Dispatch Monitor).
Once you’re logged into Dispatch:
- Select “Smart Contract Activity” as the Trigger
- Select “Dispatch Monitor” as the Action
- Click “Complete Patch”
This should take you to the Patch Builder page.
4. Set your Trigger conditions
- Network: Select the network where the protocol operates (for RocketPool, that’s Ethereum).
- Smart contract: Do a quick search to see if the contract is already in Dispatch.
If the search turns up no results, click “Add a smart contract”, paste in the contract address you want to monitor, and give it a clear nickname.
Example: For RocketPool staking activity, use the Deposit contract (0xDD3f50F8A6CafbE9b31a427582963f465E745AF8).
Now comes the important part — choosing which events and functions to track.
You’ll see a list of available options from the contract.
If you’re focused on staking inflows, here are some examples of activity to keep an eye on.
Events:
- DepositReceived: This captures when ETH is deposited into RocketPool.
- ExcessWithdrawn: Tracks when excess ETH is withdrawn from the pool.
Functions:
- deposit: The core function for staking ETH
- withdrawExcessBalance
For most, starting with DepositReceived and deposit will give you a clear view of staking activity without adding unnecessary noise.
Once you’ve selected the events and functions that matter to your use case, click “Continue”.
5. Confirm your Action type
Since you already selected Dispatch Monitor from the Dashboard, there’s nothing extra to configure here. Just double-check that Dispatch Monitor is set as your Action. This ensures all the staking activity you’re tracking will be logged and visualized in Dispatch over time.
Once confirmed, click “Continue” to move on.
6. Test Action
Since we’re using Dispatch Monitor, there’s nothing to test. Once your Trigger conditions are met — like a deposit or withdrawal — you’ll see the activity appear in Dispatch automatically.
7. Name your Patch and turn it on
Before wrapping up, give your Patch a name that makes sense for you or your team.
If you’re tracking multiple protocols or different types of activity, a clear naming system will save you time later.
Sample Patch names:
- “RocketPool - Staking Deposits”
- “Frax ETH - Withdrawals Tracker”
Once you’ve named it, turn your Patch on — and it’s live (until you switch it off).
Now, Dispatch will start logging staking activity as it happens.
Pro tip
Set up multiple Patches for a complete view
There is no limit to how many Patches you can create, so if your goal is to stay ahead of market sentiment, tracking several protocols side by side is one of the simplest ways to do it.
Visualize on-chain staking activity in seconds
Once your Patch is running, Dispatch instantly transforms raw contract data into actionable insights without any additional configuration. Your dashboard becomes a window into staking behavior across protocols, making patterns visible that would otherwise require hours of analysis.
To access your staking flow visualizations:
- Navigate to the Contracts tab
- Select the contract you're monitoring (RocketPool Deposit)
- View the automatically generated analytics dashboard
Here’s what you’ll see:
- Date range filters: Adjust the timeframe to review recent or historical activity. Free plans include views from 1 hour up to 30 days. Extended ranges are available on upgraded plans.
- Contract and address activity: See how many unique addresses have interacted with the contract and which addresses are most active.
- Top functions and events: Identify which staking functions and events — like deposit() — are happening most frequently.
- Functions and events breakdowns: Detailed charts that show what watched staking activity is happening most in the selected timeframe.
This view helps teams monitor how staking behavior changes over time — whether you’re tracking deposits, withdrawals, or overall protocol engagement.
Go beyond staking flows
If you're tracking staking protocols, there’s more you can uncover.
In Beyond alerts: Easily decode smart contract activity at a glance, we show how to use Dispatch’s smart contract data visualization to decode broader on-chain behavior — using Lido’s Community Staking Module as a real-world example.
Turning data into insights: Real-world applications
The value of monitoring staking flows comes from how you apply these insights to your strategy and operations. Here are four high-impact use cases:
Detect market momentum shifts early
Product teams track deposit volume relative to historical baselines across multiple protocols. When deposits to a specific protocol like RocketPool start increasing above average, it often signals growing momentum before it becomes visible in TVL (Total Value Locked) metrics or social media discussion.
Validate market narrative changes
Research analysts monitor the ratio of deposits to withdrawals as an early indicator of changing risk sentiment. A sustained pattern of withdrawals across multiple protocols often precedes broader market pullbacks by 1-2 weeks, giving teams time to adjust strategy.
Guide strategic timing decisions
Treasury managers can use staking flow patterns to inform the timing of their own protocol's upgrades or token events. By aligning with periods of positive staking momentum, you can capture more attention and participation during launches.
Track competitor or partner activity
Growth leads compare their protocol's staking activity against competitors to assess relative market traction. This becomes especially valuable during product launches, where traditional metrics might lag behind actual user behavior.
Send on-chain activity to your own apps with webhooks
If you want even more flexibility, Dispatch also supports webhooks.
This lets you automatically send smart contract activity to your own apps or services — like logging events in Google Sheets, building live dashboards in Notion, or integrating alerts into your internal tools.
Wrapping up
In just a few clicks, you’ve set up a staking flow monitoring system providing a real-time window into one of the most meaningful on-chain signals: capital movement. While this guide focused on protocols like RocketPool, the approach works equally well for monitoring governance participation, liquidity movements, or your own smart contract activity.
What makes this approach valuable isn't just the data itself — it's the context it provides. When you can see deposits shifting between protocols or withdrawal patterns emerging before they become widely recognized, you gain decision-making confidence that most teams simply don't have.
In a market where timing and information asymmetry create outsized advantages, having these signals automated and visualized gives you the clarity to move deliberately rather than reactively.
Set it up once. Let the data flow. Make decisions with confidence.
More info:
Ready to track what matters on-chain?
