The time has come to fund the core team for the next year. This follows the required roadmap prioritization discussion and will be an amendment to RPIP-10, requiring a pDAO vote. The protocol development funding process can be found in RPIP-37. The text of the expense can be found here.
If this vote passes the team will continue to be funded at 5% of RPL inflation, paid in one lump sum of ~52k RPL.
Sentiment Poll
Support moving to vote; I think this proposal is great
Support moving to vote; I think this is good enough
Oppose moving to vote; I have a specific issue I’m mentioning in the comments below
Oppose moving to vote; other
Undecided; I have a specific question I’d like clarified in the comments below
This sentiment poll is expected to end shortly in order to get the results of the vote in before the 25th. If you would like to vote or comment please do so in the next 24 hours!
So to me RPIP 37 would make a lot more sense if it read MUST participate in drafting Rocket Pool Improvement Proposals (RPIPs) or “cannot make new protocol features without an RPIP”. Optimally, it seems like the pDAO should be the one leading these initiatives; the Team frequently does it because the DAO is slow and unreliable, but that will hopefully not always be the case as we mature. Similarly, I think there are frequent disagreements arising from communication between team and DAO, which the roadmap should help but won’t entirely solve; RPIP 37 would have been a good place to define some of these expectations, as otherwise expectations vary greatly from person to person.
Because RPIP 37 was authored by the team, I honestly think it’s hard to say how exactly the pDAO envisions development.
I will still make some of the same points that were made a year ago:
a) the Team should consider denominating in stablecoin, at least partially, to prevent diminished payments in a prolonged bear market (like the one we are in). Obviously, nothing is worse for an already bleeding token than losing team members.
b) The team should be more open to the DAO about how the payments are being spent. For example, if Saturn gets shipped in late 2026 and Lido has eaten our NOs, do we: a) continue same payments because this stuff happens, b) increase payments because the team needs more capacity to meet the needs, c) decrease payments because our expectations were not met, or d) try to find another team. To me, the answer is we would have no idea because we don’t know how our money is allocated.
Overall, while I think the relationship between DAO and Team has a lot of growing to do, I think that it’s better to have these discussions at a time where the funding is not immediately at risk, so am in favor of this vote.
pDAO SHOULD engage in discussion and co-development of the new protocol features.
In order for new protocol features to be included, they MUST be approved by a pDAO vote.
Which seems to cover the two points you are asking for pretty nicely?
Overall I read RPIP 37 as outlining something along these lines:
team and community discuss priorities
this discussion is the basis for a roadmap
the team is tasked and paid for working on the roadmap. working on it explicitly includes drafting of RPIPs (with pDAO engagement) as necessary.
The last point doesn’t rule out non-team members also authoring RPIPs in any way.
Yes, langers authored RPIP 37 last year. The pDAO voted for it and we are currently discussing extending the funding based on it, so I think it makes sense to view the content of RPIP 37 as pDAO thoughts on this issue. If pDAO wanted a different process, presumably we would have heard about it last year or in this thread.
Langers’ announcement of the team no longer writing RPIPs seems to conflict with RPIP 37. What is the team working on and being paid for if nobody else steps up and writes RPIPs? Nothing? Things without pDAO support behind it? This seems quite problematic and I think under that new process that langers seems to imply with his discord message, the pDAO really should prioritize RPIPs drafting from non-team people and should consider putting funding towards that.
If we commit to funding, I think it’s important to understand what we are getting and not getting. If RPIP writing is cut from the team tasks and we want to replace it, can we fund that as well?
That is a fair call and, to be honest, saying that the team will not write RPIPs was a knee-jerk reaction on my part. Ultimately, it doesn’t solve the issue in the context of the thread.
I’d love even more communication between team and dao. Some options have been floated (issue tracker, straw poll snapshot space) that might help.
I think we’ve seen improvement in comms. It aint perfect by a fair margin, but things are trending the right way.
I will once again whine about team size – I think more bandwidth would be useful for one or both of QA and governance. I mention those roles specifically as they don’t require much onboarding. Another SC dev would always be nice, but I acknowledge that does require more onboarding effort.
And now let’s go back to the big picture thoughts
The team gives a shit about the protocol
The team gives a shit about the DAO
The team is expert
In the end, I think it’s a straightforward yes for me.