Frax Ether is a liquid ETH staking derivative designed to uniquely leverage the Frax Finance ecosystem to maximize staking yield and smoothen the Ethereum staking process for a simplified, secure, and DeFi-native way to earn interest on ETH.
The Frax Ether system comprises three primary components, Frax Ether (frxETH), Staked Frax Ether (sfrxETH), and the Frax ETH Minter:
frxETH acts as a stablecoin loosely pegged to ETH, leveraging Frax's winning playbook on stablecoins and onboarding ETH into the Frax ecosystem.
sfrxETH is the version of frxETH which accrues staking yield. All profit generated from Frax Ether validators is distributed to sfrxETH holders. By exchanging frxETH for sfrxETH, one become's eligible for staking yield, which is redeemed upon converting sfrxETH back to frxETH.
Frax ETH Minter (frxETHMinter) allows the exchange of ETH for frxETH, bringing ETH into the Frax ecosystem, spinning up new validator nodes when able, and minting new frxETH equal to the amount of ETH sent.
ETH in the Frax ecosystem comes in two forms, frxETH (Frax Ether), and sfrxETH (Staked Frax Ether).
frxETH acts as a stablecoin loosely pegged to ETH, so that 1 frxETH always represents 1 ETH and the amount of frxETH in circulation matches the amount of ETH in the Frax ETH system. When ETH is sent to the frxETHMinter, an equivalent amount of frxETH is minted. Holding frxETH on its own is not eligible for staking yield and should be thought of as analogous as holding ETH.
sfrxETH is a ERC-4626 vault designed to accrue the staking yield of the Frax ETH validators. At any time, frxETH can be exchanged for sfrxETH by depositing it into the sfrxETH vault, which allows users to earn staking yield on their frxETH. Over time, as validators accrue staking yield, an equivalent amount of frxETH is minted and added to the vault, allowing users to redeem their sfrxETH for a greater amount of frxETH than they deposited. The exhange rate of frxETH per sfrxETH increases over time as staking rewards are added to the vault. By holding sfrxETH you hold a % claim on an increasing amount of the vault's frxETH, splitting staking rewards up among sfrxETH holders proportional to their share of the total sfrxETH. This is similar to other autocompounding tokens like Aave's aUSDC and Compound's cUSDC.