Transparency is a key feature of Decentralized Protocols. Even though the Blockchain itself already empowers anyone to check, it is all for naught if nobody is actively watching. The Discord Bot allows the community to have easy, quick and in-depth insight into everything they could want to know.
Full Description
The Bot itself is written in Python and uses pycord. It is built upon a light bot-architecture i have been building over the past years while creating various bots. Its primary features are support for easy plugin management (i.e reloading them without having to restart the bot) and automatic error reporting.
For Rocket Watch specifically, there have been a lot of further additions such as a submodule system, which allows for non-blocking event gathering, processing and queuing with additional error handling and deduplication logic, making sure nothing gets missed.
From the more user-facing side, the Bot offers a deep catalogue of commands. It gives members the ability to get instant insight into the deposit pool, the distribution of rewards / minipools / collateral & clients, allows users to retrieve the latest ABI or address of any Rocket Pool contract, and even allows them to call them to get the latest data without having to exit discord.
The Bot also tracks various Events that could be of Interest. Besides the usual Log Events, it also tracks failed Minipool Deposits, triggered Bootstrap-mode commands and slashed Validators on the Beacon Chain. I’m currently also working on adding a feature which would automatically warn when validators are offline for a certain amount of time to aid quick recovery.
The bot is developed, maintained and operated by myself, but is Open Source and I’m happy to receive any outside help I can get. Besides compensating me for my work, this grant would also give me the ability to host my own execution-/consensus-layer nodes, allowing me to develop more advanced features and remove any currently existing third-party trust-assumptions (Alchemy & Infura).
Estimated cost (denominated in RPL)
I was thinking about 3% of the pDAO allocation for the next 12 Reward Periods, as a conversation starter. This is about 0.45% of the inflation, which would sum up to ~3777 RPL, assuming current network parameters. The main reason behind continuous Rewards is to incentives maintenance and further development of the bot. Thinking of it as linearly vesting the Grant also works
Strong proposal. I’m in favor of a grant for this project as it repeatedly proves its worth on a daily basis. I am curious how you got to the 3777 RPL quantity. It is hard to judge what would be fair without some elaboration such as a projected hourly commitment.
To add some further information, as suggested by @knoshua in the discord thread, I have spent around 240 hours developing the bot, as tracked by wakatime. Not a perfect measure by any means, but a good enough estimate. This is about 6 weeks worth of work assuming 40h/week.
To be honest, I have no idea what a fair evaluation is, though I would like to agree with @peteris’s take that we should reward based on impact, and not try to decide on some hourly rate. I feel like the amount of time I spent on the project doesn’t really matter, sure, it’s a nice metric to watch, but at the end of the day it says nothing about the thought I put into, or how many people actually benefit from it.
Splitting this grant into part retroactive, part continuous is something I have no strong opinion on. I liked the idea of linearly vesting all of the rewards, but am completely fine with receiving part of it at once, of course. I’m not quite sure how large the continuous grant would be either - hosting the node would prob end up costing around $60-80/month, as for maintenance & further development cost, no idea ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I created a quick spreadsheet for the split grant idea, it ends up being a bit less than what I mentioned above (~3.3k RPL after a year) and would only use about 1% of the pDAO Treasury inflation.
The continuous grant is per month right? It seemed a little unclear in the spreadsheet. I think it’s hard to argue the impact of your work, and you definitely deserve to get compensated for it, as well as the continual upkeep and improvement.
I agree this definitely deserves a grant. We are working on a protocol wide grant/bounty budget and putting together some ideas about grant sizing.
Although I understand the idea of an impact factor - I believe it will be difficult to implement in a governance setting because it is very subjective.
I will post some further information to the forum when we have drafted the budget.
Ye, obviously very subjective. I based the 30% on the ~400 command triggers the bot gets per week and the general community interaction with it, but agreeing on some amount instead of a percentage might be easier. It was mostly meant as a means of splitting apart the (at the beginning) arbitrary overall number.
