Retrospective Award Application
Retrospective Award
Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?
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.
rocketwatch, part 2.
N.B. this is a supplemental RA to augment the April 2023 RA, which was RA022307 (awarded $40,000). I believe the original RA underpaid for Rocket Watch, and will focus this RA application on expressing why.
The earliest commits for the project are from September 2021, over two and a half years ago. The latest commits (as of this writing) are from yesterday (2023-07-01). In this time span there are exactly 1,500 commits on the main branch of the repo with just over 1,300 of them from the author (invis). Don’t get caught up in the absolute values here, as they all vary in scope (34 of them have the commit message “ye”, for instance, and I don’t know what that means in the context of changes)- I am just establishing that the project, while it has several contributors, has been developed almost entirely by invis. Of the 200 remaining, most are authored by bots that invis configured to help him keep the code up to date.
Wakatime reports almost 550 hours of work, which is itself a flawed measurement, as it only tracks time invis spent actively coding in his IDE (not, say, reading documentation or testing or other important development tasks), so we can use this as a lower bound.
The bot is quite sophisticated, has several integrations such as Etherscan, TheGraph, Discord (obviously), Discourse (the dao forum), Snapshot, 1inch, yearn and maker, and has quite a few components (mongodb for persistence/caching, for instance), and by my rough count (git grep @.*command\( | grep -v debug | wc -l), has 73 available commands.
My sense of scope, reading the commit history, looking at the features, reading the code, puts the level of effort on a similar scale to the protocol’s other largest project, rocketscan. I believe these two projects are in a category of their own.
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?
They are GPLv3
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?
Potential stakers researching Rocket Pool routinely use bot commands to learn about the protocol and help guide their decisions, including but not limited to:
- /current_reth_apr
- /deposit_pool
- /tvl
- /reth_extra_collateral
Indirectly, it provides the community the tools it needs educate newcomers and convert them to active members of the ecosystem.
How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given help rETH holders?
rETH holders benefit from many of the same commands as prospective stakers. Additionally, a few more commands spring to mind
- /dai_stats
- /maker_vaults
- /yearn
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?
Similar to with prospective rETH stakers, the community is empowered by the bot to educate prospective node operators through the use of the following commands (again, including but not limited to):
- /rpl_apr
- /client_distribution
- /collateral_distribution
- /current_no_apr
- /delegate_stats
- /deposit_pool
- /effective_rpl_staked
- /leaderboard
- /minipool_balance_stats
- /minipool_distribution
- /minipool_withdrawal_stats
- /node_fee_distribution
- /queue
- /rewards
- /smoothing_pool
- /tvl
- /withdrawable_rpl
How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given help people already running a Rocket Pool node?
Existing node operators benefit from many of the same commands as prospective node operators, and these additional commands
- /get_upcoming_rewards
- /latest_releases
- /lottery
- /version_chart
- /votes
Slightly off-topic, but the members of the community who provide support on discord routinely use the support template features as well as many other of these commands to educate and assist others.
How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given how does this help the Rocket Pool community?
Looking at the bot’s usage metrics, it’s clear that it’s immensely useful to the community, with thousands of commands executed monthly, and very consistent use:
(N.B. July just started so the right-most bars are partial data)
How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given how does this help RPL holders?
RPL holders benefit from value added to the protocol, which indirectly improves the price of RPL. Several of the above commands are also very useful to RPL holders, as are /wall and /depth
Payment
How much RPL is the applicant requesting be awarded to the recipient?
Denominating in USD I am requesting $40,000 in supplemental rewards to bring the total RA for rocket watch to $80,000. At this value, rocket watch be compensated at around $2.3k per month (going off github dates), which is on the low end for part time software engineer work, and make no mistake, invis is a talented software engineer.
Earlier I said that rocket watch is on par with Rocketscan, and I believe this to be true. Rocketscan was compensated with an RA for $70k, and Rocket Watch’s compensation should exceed that, as it has been about 6 months since rocketscan’s RA application was submitted, though both projects manifested in late 2021.
Conflict of Interest
No conflicts for invis that I know of.
Does the person or persons requesting the retrospective award have any conflicts of interest to disclose? (Please disclose here if you are a member of the GMC or if you have nominated a member of the GMC for this retrospective award).
No direct conflicts for me, though for full disclosure, I have contributed 1-2 small changes to rocket watch’s codebase in the past. I do not stand to benefit from this RA.