Request for Community Feedback - Rocket Pool Scorecard by Anthias Labs

Grants / Bounties
1

Title: Request for Community Feedback - Rocket Pool Scorecard by Anthias Labs
Author: Anthias Labs
Date: 24 January 2024

Abstract

Anthias Labs has been working on the new Rocket Pool Scorecard, and we are now seeking feedback on the design/UX of the dashboard from the Rocket Pool community.

*Note: We are not seeking feedback on the actual scores or content; these will be part of Milestone 2.

Live Link Here (final version will be hosted by Rocket Pool and have header and footer)

658Ɨ1600 159 KB

Summary

Self-assessment is crucial to Rocket Pool in order to determine areas in need of improvement in the protocol and the DAO as a whole. It is for this reason that Anthias Labs took on the bounty that the Grants Management Committee created for the development of a Rocket Pool Scorecard (RPS) similar to the Lido Scorecard.

The RPS features four sections: Where Rocket Pool is Succeeding, Where Rocket Pool is Okay but Could Improve, Where Rocket Pool Needs Improvement, and Where Rocket Pool Needs Your Community Input.

Our team believes that community input is crucial to the success of this scorecard over time, as well as for factoring in updates, so we also included a comment button next to each score section that will direct the user to a forum post where users can shares thoughts directly, allowing for the continual updating of this Scorecard once the RPS is live after this community feedback period is complete.

Next Steps

  1. This post will remain active for five days until January 30, 2024 to allow for community feedback.
  2. Relevant community feedback will be incorporated into the RPS over the next five days.
  3. The bounty will be completed and passed to the GMC on February 1, 2024.
  4. Our team will begin work on research for the scores along with any other contributors.

About Us

Anthias Labs is a boutique blockchain r&d firm focused on public goods tooling and actionable research. We have worked with blockchain organizations including Aave, Solana, Compound, Euler, and more.

2 Likes
2

Looks fine. However, it does look like itā€™s a rip off of the Lido on Ethereum Scorecard which is not ideal. I think it should be the same but different :smiley:

But I think the content is much more important than how it looks.

Iā€™d use less title case. No title case for section titles and column names.

3

Hey @peteris thank you for reading through and sharing this feedback! We were instructed as part of the bounty to make it very similar to Lidoā€™s in order to allow for the easiest comparisons. And agree that the content is most important. We will adjust some of those cases. Thanks again for this feedback.

4

A scorecard of how the Rocket Pool community scores itself on factors including risk, decentralization, security, and more.

The purpose of the scorecard could be made more clear. The dimensions make sense, but whatā€™s the goal they should be evaluated against?

For example, ā€œWhere Rocket Pool is Succeedingā€ can be interpreted from many points of view: rETH holders, node operators, ETH holders, superphiz, governance actors, governance entities, the RP team, etc.

From a GMC point of view, I care about metrics like whether weā€™re spending funds effectively. Marketing and bizdev oriented folks like @jasperthegovghost probably pay more attention to mindshare, etc.

5

Echoing what Peteris said I think there are a few areas that we can probably change and some areas that are unique to Rocket Pool to include. Iā€™ll try my best to suggest some below.

There are currently over 3,488 unique operators. More info

I think this should instead say what percent of all nodes and minipools are running Allnodes. This data can be found in the discord.

I believe we should be in the green for client diversity as well. The data provided by @Invis shows we are at no majority of any client and in fact, are roughly 1/3 split between major clients on both execution and consensus layers (which IMO are important enough to be separate categories). It should also be highlighted by both minipool distribution and node operator distribution.

Operators can permissionlessly enter the set and prove themselves

Itā€™s unclear what prove themselves means here.

Another major point to highlight is the average number of minipools per node operator

For okayā€“

DVT conversations have occurred but this technology is yet to be fully implemented.

Iā€™m not sure this is accurate or relevant here. Perhaps something related to how you canā€™t do it without connecting to the internet or other things like that, cc @Patches I remember Peter(?) or some other major dev wanting to run their version of the smartnode but finding it difficult to do certain things the way they wanted to.

bad ā€“

Rocket Pool is easy to fork

Iā€™m not sure why this is a category. Rocket Pool does not need to be easily forked, LSTs arenā€™t a market that lends itself towards that. Further, Rocket Pool actually has been forked, a few times. The smartnode is widely used in the industry as a reference for integrations around validators,.

859,040 ETH staked across 136 regions. Largest region in North America with 1,311 NOs.

This needs more info and a link to data to learn more, i suggest the network map. I would highlight the lack of Asian and African nodes.

I would add that we have bad multilingual access. Our docs are in English which is a limitation.

Distributed variation of on-premise infra and cloud providers

This section is not relevant since it is covered under white labels. Most other cloud services are too expensive, though a small group do use hetzner (despite warnings of being kicked off).

There is a way for stakers to resist malicious governance capture

The dual-house governance system for RP means that the oDAO has to vote collectively on contract upgrades, acting as a check on pDAO governance.

Smart contract security

We triple audit and have a large standing bounty on immunefi. I think weā€™re solid.

6

Hey @Dondochaka - thank you for reading through our post! You sound like you have some really well thought out input for the content part of this bounty, so please stay in touch for Milestone 2, where the community will be determining the first round of scores to be added to the Scorecard (which will also be available for update going forward as well).

1 Like
7

Hey @jasperthegovghost - these are awesome recommendations. Our team might decide to contribute to the research/scoring part of this grant, but, for the most part, we intend to leave that part to the community as a whole (that will be milestone 2!). Thanks again for sharing your thoughts here.

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8

Whoops lol, Iā€™ll comment again with just UX in mind. Sorry!

1 Like
9

I would like to see a bit more at the top about what the ideals Rocket Pool represents that inspire these goals - decentralization, permisionlessness, censorship resistance, what they are and why they are important both for Rocket Pool and Ethereum and even further the world.

Additionally, this would be a good place to link to other popular assessments of Rocket Pool - namely the ethereum.org staking pools assessment.

The overall theme, I think is presented somewhat solemnly. The monotonous grey gives it a foreboding feel as you scroll. I suggest breaking up the boxes with the occasional small image row or quote about the importance of decentralization from one of the EF/core devs.

10

@jasperthegovghost No worries at all

11

Thanks for this UX feedback. We were instructed as part of the bounty to align the color scheme with Rocket Poolā€™s main site, so it can be easily integrated, but we added a light mode too, so users can switch to that light look!

And I like those thoughts around a bit more about what inspires these goals. We will incorporate that in.

Thanks again @jasperthegovghost

12

To clarify, I think the colors are fine, itā€™s just that the box looks very ā€˜denseā€™

image
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See the above screenshot, I believe there should be small images or quotes or other things that break up a bit of this density.

13

That makes sense, and thanks for clarifying. This could also be in part because that Where Rocket Pool is Succeeding section has a lot of itemsā€“probably more than it will have after Milestone 2. I will see what we can do here though regarding making that appear less dense and more visually appealing (potentially some work around expanding the text boxes to add more space, etc)

1 Like