GMC Budgeting Allocations

Grants / Bounties
1

The GMC is requesting community feedback on future funding priorities.

Project Categories
Marketing - The marketing category encompasses a wide range of projects, with subcategories including videos, business development, marketing materials, live streams, educational initiatives, and POAPs. The marketing has funded YouTube videos such as Rocket Fuel and The Weekly Orbit. The GMC has also invested in educational initiatives such as Rocket School and Rocket Pool University.

Development - The development category finances projects that have either directly contributed to Rocket Pool Core or have provided valuable tools for the community. Subcategories include community resources, development features, and documentation. Funded development projects include the Rescue Node, RocketScan, Rocket Watch, and others.

Governance - The governance category includes work on creating RPIPs, conducting protocol research, and producing in-depth papers. Subcategories encompass research, research papers, and governance. Examples include GovAlpha’s efforts in organizing and documenting the Rocket Pool governance process, as well as Valdorff’s administrative management of the Incentives Management Committee, facilitating RPIP-30 and other governance contributions.

Support - Support primarily involves contributions within the Rocket Pool Discord’s support channel. Some notable support recipients include Patches, [object Object], 0xFornax, haloooloolo, and poupas.

Public Goods - These are projects that support the greater good of Ethereum. Some examples of these projects include solo support for the Rescue Node and a trustless oracle by DendrETH.

Allocation History
The GMC’s latest report, available here, indicates that the first year of funding was well-distributed across different categories.

Breakdown
Marketing - 30.7%
Development - 29.6%
Governance - 24.0%
Support - 10.4%
Public Goods - 5.2%

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Which category of funding do you think the GMC should prioritize?
  • Marketing
  • Development
  • Governance
  • Support
  • Public Goods
0 voters

Please share your thoughts and suggestions below on areas where you would like to see the GMC allocate more funding.

1 Like
2

Actual research, not educational material or summaries of existing ideas, on topics that are relevant to the future of the protocol and can be the basis for its development.

4 Likes
3

Not wanting to overly derail the thread, but for those voting for governance funding, what are your high priorities there? It’s tricky to know what you’d all like the focus to be as it’s a fairly wide category.

4

Here is a look at the data with the Governance category separated from Research.

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1) Please revote.

Apologies for making everyone vote again. The first poll suffers from research and governance not being segmented.

Which category(s) of funding do you think the GMC should prioritize?

  • Development
  • Governance
  • Research
  • Marketing
  • Support
  • Public Goods
0 voters

2) Leave feedback on how to handle allocation process / planning.

Based on the results of the first poll, here’s a suggestion for GMC funding targets (I’ll update this once we get results from the new poll):

Sample Target Allocations (during a 12 month period)

  • Development - 27%
  • Governance - 18%
  • Research - 18%
  • Marketing - 14%
  • Support - 10%
  • Public Goods - 3%

We still don’t have enough applications incoming to be able to perfectly hit any allocations we set. However, we can toggle maximum ranges to ensure we’re not aggressively overspending in any one category.

Sample Maximum Allocations (during a 12 month period)

  • Development - 32%
  • Governance - 23%
  • Research - 23%
  • Marketing - 19%
  • Support - 15%
  • Public Goods - 8%

The major risk of setting a cap on a category is we could potentially be making less use of the treasury if the amount of incoming applications is low.

After we receive a fresh round of the updated poll results I’ll adjust these numbers and repost.

Feedback Requested:

  • What are your thoughts on implementing a system like this?
  • Do you find the estimated figures provided above reasonable? (After they’re updated with the latest poll)
  • Are there alternative funding planning methods you would suggest exploring?
5

I’m not sure if I like the idea of hard caps on categories. They should be soft caps.

6

If I were to do allocations, they’d look something like this.

Target Allocations (during a 12 month period)

  • Development - 30%
  • Governance - 25%
  • Research - 32%
  • Marketing - 10%
  • Support - 0%
  • Public Goods - 3%

Maximum Allocations (during a 12 month period)

  • Development - 40%
  • Governance - 30%
  • Research - 45%
  • Marketing - 35%
  • Support - 3%
  • Public Goods - 6%

The most important thing I want to call out here is that these numbers should change depending on the state that RocketPool is in. As an example I think RP should not be spending much on marketing right now but I could envision that in a year 1/3rd of the budget should go to marketing. The listed targets reflect right now in which I think the vast majority of spending should go to research, overseeing and steering that research, and finally development / implementation (supplementing or sidestepping the team in order to speed things up).

3 Likes