April 2023 GMC Call for Retrospective Award Applications - Deadline is April 15th

Retrospective Award

LEB Research

Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?

@Valdorff

What specific project or work is the retrospective award in recognition of? Please detail what the project or work entailed and the duration over which it took place.

Val analyzed actual execution layer rewards and market dynamics. Previous work (eg, by Ken and Stader) has made the assumption that the market seen recently represents all future likely markets; I believe this has led to significantly overestimating how safe certain scenarios would be.

Val used the EL data to look at the costs of EL reward theft to the protocol (assuming all users are rational agents willing to steal to maximize profits).Finally, Val put some suggested directions that the protocol could take to enable smaller LEBs, including an option for doing it entirely trustlessly.

Val provides his analysis, the preprocessed data used in the analysis, and scripts to generate the charts used in the analysis. He also provides a link to the initial raw data and the script is also able to analyze using the raw data.

See the work at https://github.com/Valdorff/rp-thoughts/tree/main/leb_safety

Are the subjects of this award entirely open source (MIT, GPL, Apache, CC BY license or similar)? If not, which parts will not be, why, and under what license will they be published?

Yes,GPL v3

Benefits - enter N/A where appropriate

How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given help people looking to stake ETH for rETH?

If we cannot meet rETH demand, a path towards smaller LEBs is important, and this work provides that.

How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given help rETH holders?

It didn’t

How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given help people looking to run a Rocket Pool node for the first time?

It didn’t.

How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given help people already running a Rocket Pool node?

If we cannot meet rETH demand, a path towards smaller LEBs will allow NOs to get higher yield. Additionally, the negative commission construct in the mitigation section allows NOs to run without a trusted arbiter for penalties.

How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given how does this help the Rocket Pool community?

This work helps create confidence that we will be able to meet rETH demand, even if it requires smaller LEB sizes to do so.

How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given how does this help RPL holders?

RPL value is tied to rETH TVL. If we are unable to meet rETH demand, a path towards smaller LEBs is important, and this work provides that.

Payment

In my opinion, this work is both the most realistic and the most up to date look at LEB safety from EL reward theft [please talk with technical folks on that and get their opinions too]. Additionally, it provides two outline implementations for how we could safely include smaller LEBs in the protocol, which previous research did not seek to define. As such, I would suggest that the award should be similar or perhaps slightly greater than RA012312 (Ken’s LEB research paper), which was awarded $14000.

Address: rs.valdorff.eth

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