Could you explain why we are considering building up the rETH/RPL pair?
The incentives for rETH/RPL in this period are part of our co-incentive strategy, the idea is that other protocols provide incentives to a token pair that includes rETH and in exchange we match those incentives by up to 10-20%.
There are a couple of target benefits to the co-incentives, firstly it raises awareness of the option of using yield bearing rETH instead of ETH as a pairing for other tokens increasing efficiency for liquidity providers.
They are also volume generating pairs. Most people who want rETH are comfortable holding it for a relatively long term, therefore the rETH/ETH liquidity pair generates very little back and forth volume apart from arbitrage.
This is a problem for a couple of reasons, firstly the trading fees generated for liquidity providers are very low, making liquidity more expensive to incentivise. Increased volume on pairs including rETH will ripple via arbitrage to the rETH/ETH pair making it more attractive.
The other benefit is that third parties ( chainlink for example) use metrics such as volume to evaluate rETH before committing resources and development time.
Normally these co-incentives would be OtherProtocolToken/rETH but in this case Balancer have generously funded incentives on the rETH/RPL pair to kick-start the pool. Since this pair is obviously of extra benefit to us, we have decided to match their incentives at 20% with a delay.
That being said, there are good reasons to encourage deep liquidity for RPL outside of this context so it is worth discussing the value of more general incentives for the pair in the future.
Maybe we could consider setting aside some amount for grants and bounties?
The IMC only spends funds earmarked for liquidity incentives, separate funds have been reserved for the purpose of grants & bounties.
The Grants Management Committee charter is in the draft stage at the moment, see https://dao2.rocketpool.net/t/grants-and-bounties-rpip/