Hey everyone!
Here is a quarterly roadmap update for May, June, July 2024.
Houston
The beginning of the period saw the Houston audit reports made public (Rocket Pool - Decentralised Ethereum Liquid Staking Protocol).
Before launch, some specification discrepancies were identified and subsequently resolved (Houston Specification Discrepancies). Additionally, a bug bounty was raised, assessed, and it was decided to incorporate a fix into the Houston release.
Finally, the Houston smart contracts were deployed and verified by the community. Once the ODAO had voted and executed the upgrade proposal, Houston was ready for launch (Rocket Pool — Houston Launch. Hello Rocket Poolers! | by David Rugendyke | Rocket Pool | Medium). Houston went live on the 17th June.
Post Houston launch, the core team had to combine Snapshot and the on-chain voting system to ensure we have a unified governance system. This was a little more involved than we expected, mainly due to Snapshot not having a Holesky deployment, so we were unable to develop or test anything up front. The team successfully integrated Snapshot and the on-chain voting system. Additionally, significant changes needed to be made to the Delegates’ website (https://delegates.rocketpool.net/) to align it with the new voting system and support current delegates.
Since launch, the core team have been monitoring the Protocol DAO voting initialisation. Currently the Protocol DAO on-chain voting element is disabled until enough vote power is initialised. We are now have enough vote power to enable the system but please see the Houston Hotfix section below.
To summarise the current status of governance voting:
- Snapshot will still be used for most governance votes - because it is gas-free.
- The on-chain system will be used when protocol settings or protocol treasury spends are necessary
- Snapshot is integrated into the new voting system so we have a unified governance system - essentially vote power is consistent
- The on-chain system is disabled for now until the Houston hotfix goes live
For more information please take a look at the Protocol DAO Governance medium article:
Houston Hotfix
Just after the launch of Houston an issue was raised with older 16 ETH minipools. A bug introduced with Houston corrupted state when exiting minipools if the node operator had not initialised voting. We announced a smart node release to prevent node operators from experiencing the issue but ultimately a smart contract fix is required.
In the meantime, we have had some interesting Immunefi bug bounties raised about the on-chain voting system. The first was a medium severity protocol griefing vector that did not effect funds but would allow someone to withdraw their RPL collateral when they are not supposed to. Another excellent submission, allowed a challenger to steal a proposer’s bond - the impact was limited but clearly it was a good find. We have developed fixes for these bug bounty submissions.
Additionally, there were small non-functional changes that we wanted to include:
- Changed the way a vetod proposer’s bond is burnt - instead of sending to burn address it uses RPL’s burn feature
- Fixed possible error situation if RPL bond amount is set to 0
- Event naming consistency
Lastly, we have been paying attention to the discussions around an interim release before Saturn that would launch ETH-only minipools earlier. One issue with the potential interim release is the scrub check RPL penalty. The penalty is important for security reasons but cannot be enforced if there is no RPL bond. So included in the hotfix is a change to make this an ETH penalty rather than an RPL penalty. We are in discussion about how this is processed through governance.
RPIP-28 and RPIP-30
As per RPIP-30, we reduced the RPL withdrawal limit to 60% of node’s bonded ETH.
RPIP-28 - Implementation needs to be discussed. Depending on the result of the RPIP-49 vote it is not currently in that scope afaik.
RPIP-30 - Depending on the result of RPIP-49 (which looks certain), RPIP-30 is included in the rework scope so will be included in Saturn.
Saturn
Over the last few months, the core team have engaged in discussions on the reworked tokenomics proposal. As the scope has formalised the team have provided feedback, feasibility advice, and conducted multiple full day internal workshops to break down the components.
The core team have also engaged in discussion on alternative proposals:
The core team have kicked off development of the least contested elements of Saturn, namely Megapools. As soon as the RPIP-49 vote is ratified we will continue to break the components down, determine delivery order, and plan key milestones.
The core team have also been engaged in conversation about the possible interim release that would deliver ETH-only minipools sooner.
v2 Smart Node
The smart node devs have been hard at work bringing the v2 Smart Node release up to feature parity with v1. The v2 release now has all new Houston features and continues to be beta tested. We have started the process of feature freezing v1 and will start the transition to v2.
Node Manager Website
We have been working on a new user experience for node operators. The node manager website be separate to the staking website and be a consolidated place for managing your node. The new node manager website is very close to launch so look out for that.
Please let me know if you have any questions!