Alignment Statement
I’ve been part of the Rocket Pool community since the parcticpating in the Pyrmont Beta in March of '21. I validated minipools on mainnet from March of '22 until February of '24 when I exited for risk management reasons. That said, I am eagerly looking forward to rejoining Rocket Pool as a node operator on the beacon chain with Saturn. I love the goals of Ethereum to build and sustain a permissionless and shared, and social computation platform that can be used to build truly empowering applications for all. And I love Rocket Pool’s mission to sustain and improve Ethereum’s decentralization by enabling permissionless node operation for the protocol. I strongly believe that if Rocket Pool succeeds, my (r)Eth bags will also succeed.
I believe Rocket Pool as a protocol has an incredibly bright future ahead of it as we make the necessary tokenomics changes to enable much better growth with Saturn. That said, while I have an immense amount of respect for the RPL bulls in the community, holding RPL is more risk for me than I am comfortable with for the next 6-12 months.
I am a long time Linux and Open source geek, and strongly believe that when folks have more control over their computers and software, and the abstraction layers within them are allowed to be poked through and proded, people are empowered to build truly awesome things.
I’ve been happy to serve Rocket Pool on the IMC for the past year, and I am pleased to continue that service – if the PDAO will have me.
Conflict statement
I don’t believe i have any serious conflicts with the goals of the IMC or Rocket Pool more broadly. My main crypto holdings at the moment are Eth, rETh, and USDC. I also have some airdrops that are either slowly vesting or awaiting transferability (vCow, Safe, Diva and Avail), which I don’t plan on holding long term.
I am a registered and approved node operator for NodeSet. I do plan on participating in their operator offerings as it makes business sense to do so and while still aligned the promotion of Ethereum’s decentralization.
I may particpate from time to time in the liquidity pools that the IMC incentivizes, but I haven’t recently for tax reasons.
There isn’t much else in crypto that really strikes my interests at the moment as my tolerance for risk in the cryto ecosystem has become increasingly curtailed and I’m rather cricital of the meme-coin and points farming meta’s. My tradfi investments are mainly in target date index funds that I barely pay any attention to.
Identity Statement
I go by ‘NonFungibleYokem’ here and on the RP Discord. My formal Discord handle is @yokem55. I go by ‘Yokem’ as a shorthand if people like.
I am in my early 40’s and live in Oregon with my teenage and young adult kids where I work as a network and systems admin and team lead for a small B2B focused networking services company that I’ve been at for over 10 years.
I prefer to remain pseudo anonymous, although I’m happy to share more about myself in private. I met many members of the community and the team in-person at the Liftoff Conference in Denver this year.
Contribution Statement
- I’ve served on the IMC for the past term where I’ve been dilligent about reviewing and signing transactions, looking over potential partner protocols, and researching what the contract interactions with them might look like. I try to participate in discussions and questions as they come up. When Maverick (the protocol, not our esteemed community manager) was looking like an option for incentives, I raised opposition due to their main liquidity pool contract being unverified with the source code unavailable. Over the past months as the RPL/ETH ratio has declined, I’ve pushed budgetary discussions gently towards spending cuts so as to hopefully preserve our future capacity for incentives. More recently I’ve started working on proposing the structure for allocating and distributing the RPIP-41 committee stipend funds within the IMC. in the coming term, I would like to continue that work and possibly take on the role of treasurer – if the rest of the committee would like.
- I’m currently working on MevMonitor - an MEV relay data aggregation, indexing and re-publishing service with a grant from the GMC. I gave a talk at the LiftOff conference about it.
- I’ve kicked off the process and discussion for building an RPIP about how to setup and structure the security council so it can be a community based entity at some point after Houston launches.
- I am in the Rocket Pool “Holesky NEEEEERDS” genesis validators group and am committed to running 5K holesky validators for the life of the testnet. Watching the VC logs whir by with ~150+ attestations every slot is a small bit of joy in my life.
Additional info
- I believe the IMC is going to need to be incredibly creative over the coming months to maintain the liquidity depth we’re currently incentivizing without wiping out our runway and POL nest-egg. Some hard choices will probably have to be made about how we go about shaping our budget so that we have the capacity for incentives when Saturn comes.
- I tend to think the IMC is going to need more formalized roles and assigned duties - if only because keeping the stipend distribution fair will require it. I also think the commitee will need to be more aggressive about replacing members that have become disengaged. The work of all 9 members is needed.
- Lastly, I’d like to express my gratitude for the opportunity to serve and contribute in a community that is frankly , a shining beacon in the broader crypto ecosystem that often seems totally overrun with grift and scams. I probably would have noped (or been completely rekt) out of crypto if it wasn’t for this community.