2024-05 IMC Members Selection

Governance
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Hi All,

We will be selecting nine IMC members (the full committee) for a 5/9 multisig out of a pool of 12 nominees.

In order to help inform your choices, please refer to:

  • IMC nominee statements in IMC Nomination Thread
  • Supplementary hard metrics below
  • You may also ask questions of nominees - I suggest doing that in this thread so others can benefit from the discussion

Per RPIP-10, we’re now ready to have the vote go up, and I will request it in the next few days.

  • For full voting process, see the “Management Committee Selection” section of RPIP-10 .
  • Important note: vacancies that occur get filled by going down the list from previous selections. The main impact here is that it may still be worth giving vote power to folks you consider capable, even if they don’t make it to the top nine.

Supplementary hard metrics

Note: These numbers are extremely rough. Eg, a post on discord might represent a kek, or an insightful multiparagraph response. Different people interact differently with platforms. These numbers should be just one tool for you.

Discord stats

Got total server activity for nominees using rocketscape:
rocketscrape --server rocketpool --include-threads -s 2020-01-01 contributor-history --users 806275470140244019 995528889860370442 109422960682496000 343180040747614209 474028048551772160 354099029434695681 707707212184944702 764676584832761878 405912259706093578 822367662364819456 360474629988548608 916166567228768277

Recent (since March 1st):

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image1086×583 69.1 KB

Forum stats

Absolute stats:

Nominee Forum join date Forum age (months) Forum read Forum topics created Forum posts created Forum :white_heart: received
peteris 4/8/2022 25.32 4200 5 74 202
samus 9/18/2023 7.96 722 1 19 39
Valdorff 5/30/2022 23.61 4600 65 661 899
Jasperthefriendlyghost 2/24/2022 26.73 2200 6 83 187
NonFungibleYokem 4/13/2022 25.15 1500 2 30 40
drworm 3/18/2023 14.01 525 0 4 10
phil 3/21/2022 25.91 275 1 9 17
waq 6/18/2022 22.98 2100 0 58 75
astoneta 3/13/2022 26.17 573 2 17 26
deukey 3/25/2022 25.78 888 0 9 15
haloooloolo 11/20/2023 5.88 777 0 10 12
leighm 11/29/2022 17.59 329 0 6 3

Per-month stats:

Nominee Forum Read/month Forum topics/month Forum posts/month Forum :white_heart: received/month
peteris 165.9 0.2 2.9 8.0
samus 90.7 0.1 2.4 4.9
Valdorff 194.9 2.8 28.0 38.1
Jasperthefriendlyghost 82.3 0.2 3.1 7.0
NonFungibleYokem 59.6 0.1 1.2 1.6
drworm 37.5 0.0 0.3 0.7
phil 10.6 0.0 0.3 0.7
waq 91.4 0.0 2.5 3.3
astoneta 21.9 0.1 0.6 1.0
deukey 34.5 0.0 0.3 0.6
haloooloolo 132.0 0.0 1.7 2.0
leighm 18.7 0.0 0.3 0.2
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Replying to @zk_sjp 's post here - 2024-05 IMC Nomination Thread - #31 by zk_sjp

What’s POL?

POL is “Protocol Owned Liquidity” - it is some full range uniswap rpl/eth and reth/eth postions the IMC has. It’s currently worth about 1/4 of the IMC’s current treasury. The intention was to slowly build up that POL over time so we would be less dependent on spending RPL on incentivized liquidity. So unwinding and spending it would kind of sting in my opinion.

What is changing that would impact liquidity depth?

Well, in general - the more you spend, the more depth you get. More incentives make for a bigger yield number, which attracts more TVL that serves at liquidity depth around the peg. The converse is also true - if spending goes down, LP’s may decide to move their capital to other options to get the yield they are looking for. But, since the IMC only gets RPL as income, as the RPL/ETH ratio has declined, we’ve had to adjust our spend downward to maintain a “runway” of roughly 1 year’s worth of deficit spending at whatever the current ratio was. At the moment though, that ‘runway’ is more like ~8 months instead of a year.

Where can I read about the mechanisms the IMC uses to incentivie liquidity.

Val’s treasurer report here is a good exploration of our recent budget and spending.

What type of creative things do you think you’d suggest to the IMC?

As for ideas - I think a number of things will need to be looked at:

  • The reth/weth Balancer pool (which is our main pool), while concentrated around the peg, isn’t as concentrated as it could be. This has benefits in that we’re less likely to fall off a liquidity cliff, and it’s good from a ‘resiliant’ liquidity standpoint. The downside is it’s more expensive, and that resiliance may not be as necessary now that withdrawals are available. So, in general, shifting to incentivizing more concentrated liquidity (eg a more concentrated balancer pool, the existing Gamma/Uni and PCS pools, possibly a more concentrated curve pool) may be a necessary trade-off.
  • While the IMC’s income is all RPL, the spending budget is almost entirely denominated in Eth since that’s what the LP’s are putting into the various pools and are looking at in terms of their yield. If we were to move to denominating a portion of each line item as flat amounts of RPL - further changes in the RPL/ETH ratio would naturally change the spend without the IMC having to explicitly retarget the budget. This may make more sense for the more concentrated pools since the LP’s in those pools tend to have more yield from trading volume then incentives
  • While I was opposed to incentivizing on Maverick because their LP contract was unverified, their new V2 is supposed to be fully open source and verified. Once it gains some “lindy” time - I’d be open to incentivizing there since they do have some innovative ideas about how to structure liquidity.
  • Explore options for pairing with other values-aligned LST’s since this can be very efficient. We tried this with Stakewise and we were incentivising an osETH/rETH pool on Curve for a while. Unfortunately it wasn’t being picked up by swap aggregators and the pool saw very little volume. So while it was ‘efficent’ in terms of getting TVL, it was ineffective if it only was ever used by arb bots. So any new partnership would need to make sure the logistics around getting the new pool included in the routing for aggregators (at least one) was figured out. This may mean things like reaching out to CowSwap solvers, etc.
  • Asking the PDAO for a modest boost in spend. With the new on-chain governance system coming with Houston, the IMC’s spend will be based on a fixed amount of RPL every period instead of a percentage of the PDAO’s share of inflation. It may make sense to use this as an opportunity to ask for a modest increase to shore up the budget.
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Thank you for such a detailed, prompt and considered reply.

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Questions for IMC nominees:

  1. Should we pursue alt-L2 liquidity more aggressively?
  2. Should we spend more or less on POL (protocol owned liquidity)?
  3. Currently ETH and stables are the most common LP pairs in DeFI. Why haven’t LSTs taken ETH place yet? Should we strive to?
  4. How much Lindy should be enough Lindy for the IMC?
  5. What’s your view on LRTs? Should the IMC work with restaking protocols?

Thank you.

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  1. I think we should pick 2-4 L2s now and focus on those for more liquidity.
  2. I like the idea of protocol owned liquidity, but it’s all about working out what gives us the best bang for our buck. In the past, that was through bribes. I would love to contribute to ideas about transitioning to POL.
  3. We’ve had a few rETH/LST pairs, and they seem like they’re more attractive because of the yield they offer, but they bring their own risks such as depegs. I would love for there to be more rETH/token pairs.
  4. I think it depends on the size of the pool. The smaller pools can get by with a little bit less lindy, and the bigger pools should have more lindy.
  5. I need to think about this more, but if we’re willing to have rETH/LST pairs then it isn’t too much of a stretch to have rETH/LRT pairs.

Thanks for the questions. I liked them a lot.

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  1. Before going more aggressively into other alt-l2’s - we need a better multi-chain bridging solution and then it becomes easier to have liquidity incentivized only on a few chains, with more availablility on smaller chains and arb can work its magic. But - none of the bridging solutions have been appealing at all given the security risks they can pose. I’m looking forward to seeing what Hop V2 might bring to the table there for a solution.
  2. I wish we would have been a bit more aggressive about getting more when RPL was in better shape. But while we are at a substantial defecit it’s hard to justify at the moment.
  3. I think pairing other tokens with LST’s is great efficiency add - but it does come with some risk that the LST may have problems. So, you can’t use it exclusively. And so a protocol would still need liquidity against eth or a stable coin anyway. What might be interesting to explore (and I haven’t thought about it much) is something like the balancer multi-token pools with $TOKEN, ETH and an LST.
  4. “Lindy”-ness needs to be focused on the risks the LP’s capital is exposed to. So, using something novel to distribute the rewards is probably fine, because it shouldn’t put the LP’s capital at risk. From there it’s just a measure of “how long has the new thing had substantial capital in it”, with ‘substantial’ being some multiple of how big we expect the pool to be. And then there also needs to be a look at the risks of external interactions. Balancer nearly got rekt because of their interest in having both tokens in the liquidity pair being yielding - often using aave deposited eth as the opposite pair. Our mainnet pool wasn’t impacted, but our Arbitrum one was and the LP’s had to migrate to a plain reth/weth pool. The lesson is that “lindy-ness” needs to be looked at from a lot of angles.
  5. For me it comes down to values alignment and size risk. Back in the alphabet pool days, there was a mismatch on both. Steth was much, much larger and which meant their depeg had a larger potential to hurt us. And while it was a useful and efficient way to get liquidity going, it wasn’t the best from a values alignment perspective. I do think that the osETH/rETH pool was a much better fit, and had we been able to get routers to regularly use it, it would have been good to keep. As for LRT’s - I think the values alignment question also has to look at the underlying protocol they are restaking for. Which I could imagine a well aligned protocol that we’d work with. I’m skeptical of the existing ones though.
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These are great questions. Thank you. Love it and I encourage this type of questions outside of selection period too (eg, in discord).

  1. It adds up fast, both in effort and in cost. One possibility is a strong multichain strategy and then very small incentives in LST/rETH LPs which largely incentivize themselves. I hope that’s where we end up, but right now there’s no multichain strategy I really love (as Yokem discussed).
  2. We should have spent more on POL when we had lots of runway. I like the idea of the LP tokenomics variant to provide serious RPL POL too. For now, we should make do. We should get more POL going when runway looks better.
  3. For small projects, I think they should just pair against rETH and call it a day. I think they mostly don’t think through options tbh. We do have a jump-start coincentive program, but I don’t think ppl know about it… not really sure how to get the info to the right place/time.
  4. Should definitely have a verified contract, audits I can look at, ideally a bounty program. As Yokem noted, there’s a huge difference based on what’s at risk – a period of rewards (Hidden Hand, Cakepie, etc) or the principal (Balancer, PCS, etc). If the principal is at risk, I want a ton of lindy. Many months holding lots of TVL.
  5. I don’t believe restaking has shown value yet. That said, that doesn’t mean I’m immediately against LRT pairing. If the protocol has strong audits and withdrawals enabled, I’d mostly be looking at it similarly to an LST (at least until restaking slashing is turned on).
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1. Should we pursue alt-L2 liquidity more aggressively?

Rocket Pool is an L1 protocol. But gas can get expensive so many would like to get their rETH on L2s. However, if you are so price sensitive that gas is a big cost it probably means you’re trading relatively small amounts like 0.1 ETH. Even 1000 such people would not make up significant volume (i.e. 1000 * 0.1 ETH = 100 ETH) compared to e.g. 500 ETH deposits that we sometimes see.

On the other hand, we can’t expect only whales to use the blockchain. In Japan they kept one train station open until the one girl using it graduated. While we shouldn’t go to this extreme we should be the protocol for the people and make it reasonably accessible for most to hold a decentralized LST on an L2.

No idea which L2s will survive and which ones will become irrelevant. We could try to support all a little bit or go big on a few. I think we should strive to provide some basic liquidity on popular ones like Arbitrum, Optimism, Base and go big(ger) on promising Ethereum aligned ones like Taiko, Scroll and wait a bit to see how zkSync Era and others develop. I’d ignore Blast, Mantle etc. for now.

2. Should we spend more or less on POL (protocol owned liquidity)?

Ideally all liquidity would be protocol owned. No idea how to get there or if it’s even practical but it’s something we could strive for.

3. Currently ETH and stables are the most common LP pairs in DeFI. Why haven’t LSTs taken ETH place yet? Should we strive to?

There’s one ETH and several LSTs that fragment the liquidity, I think that’s the simplest answer.

Perhaps we should offer optimized rETH/xxx pairs and a generic rETH/ETH pair and let DeFi tooling optimize the most efficient path for swapping.

I haven’t look into it at all but perhaps with Uniswap v4 hooks we can somehow incentivize the usage of rETH instead of ETH.

4. How much Lindy should be enough Lindy for the IMC?

I assume this is about protocols approaching the IMC.

We should consider the TVL, security audits and the reputation of the team and values (decentralization, Ethereum alignment, how proper their DAO is etc.). And also the vibe. And if they are ready to put in some skin in the game (like co-sponsoring incentives).

I personally think Rocket Pool is a Tier 1 protocol and we should not associate with very low tier protocols. We should be picky and reject more rather than less offers of partnerships. The risk here is that the protocol becomes popular and Lido becomes the dominant LST on it.

5. What’s your view on LRTs? Should the IMC work with restaking protocols?

We should wait to see how this develops. When EigenLayer announced their EIGEN token and the changes a lot of hype died down. At this time other protocols like Nektar, Karak, Manta are just jumping on the hype train. I think we should wait and see. If we had an unlimited budget we could throw money to see where it sticks but in current conditions we need to be more cautious.

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1. Should we pursue alt-L2 liquidity more aggressively?
I think the highest priority should be on L1. It seems like a new L2 launches every other week, and the number of L2’s on Ethereum seems to be quickly approaching triple digits. L2BEAT just announced today they are launching L3BEAT https://x.com/l2beat/status/1795758335448281572

If we are limited on funds due to RPL/ETH ratio falling, then I think we should mostly prioritize L1 and if we feel confident we have “enough” there then just pick a few of the most popular L2’s (Base/OP/Arbitrum), and maybe a couple value-aligned L2’s (I’m excited about Taiko).

Hopefully some of the liquidity fragmentation between chains in Ethereum ecosystem can be improved or solved down the road with things like based sequencing. I think the most popular L1 assets will be what users ultimately want to hold/bridge around to various L2’s so we should mostly focus on L1 for now and revisit the topic if funding grows.

2. Should we spend more or less on POL (protocol owned liquidity)?
I’ll be interested to further explore the LP deposits RPL value capture option since that could improve liquidity directly with protocol ETH revenue. I’m hopeful rETH TVL will be able to grow quickly after Saturn 1 changes and maybe some further ideas could be explored on this front once more protocol revenue is available. I like the idea of eventually directing some protocol ETH revenue to IMC as well instead of only relying on RPL, but I think that should be revisited later as there is already a ton of changes the DAO will have to consider with the tokenomics vote.

3. Currently ETH and stables are the most common LP pairs in DeFI. Why haven’t LSTs taken ETH place yet? Should we strive to?
ETH is the native asset and is neutral. I agree with the “Protocol Sink Thesis” put forward by Bankless: https://bankless.ghost.io/12-the-protocol-sink-thesis-639070caed39286b12323271/. I think base layer money also follows the same trends. Network effects are difficult to disrupt, and the primary network effect for establishing the base layer money will be the asset with the highest settlement assurances and least risk attached to it. That will probably always be ETH in Ethereum ecosystems, and USD in fiat systems (and I think USD dominance will only grow with stablecoins, even as other fiat currencies are tokenized - since USD has the highest settlement assurances and lowest risk in fiat systems today). I don’t think LST’s should strive to “replace” ETH in that sense. LST’s might make a good store of value (similar to t-bills in fiat systems), but for a medium of exchange I think native ETH should always have priority (similar to vanilla USD being the primary medium of exchange in fiat systems today). Especially if market forces continue to keep LST’s no higher than 33% market share each, there will always be benefits for native ETH to be the neutral “world reserve currency” of crypto.

4. How much Lindy should be enough Lindy for the IMC?
Rocket Pool should hold other protocols to a similar standard it held itself to. I don’t remember the details exactly but I think RP intentionally limited it’s TVL for some time after the full product was running live on mainnet (maybe on the time frame of 6months to a year)? Contrast that with EigenLayer locking up absurd amounts of value capitalizing on the “points” farmers, and there is still no full products (AVS’s) that are running live on mainnet producing any meaningful amounts of yield. Also important to consider how well audited the projects are, if they are open-source, etc.

5. What’s your view on LRTs? Should the IMC work with restaking protocols?
I think LRT’s will struggle to gain significant traction. Every AVS will have it’s own risk profile, and so every LRT could be managed differently and this introduces a high amount of complexity and risk (for what seems like very little additional yield). Maybe this will change and one or two AVS’s will become extremely popular and profitable, but by that point I think it still probably makes more sense to just treat it more like a “DeFi” product where you are leveraging up on risk by looping or stacking yields from different assets, or it will be something popular enough that Node Operators will opt into it separate from EigenLayer (like MEV-boost). I don’t see LRT’s ever being able to meaningfully compete with LST’s once the points farming / narrative cools off.

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