The suspension of all retrospective awards stemmed from the retrospective award cap, which has now been lifted following the approval of RPIP-26. Notably, the awards for January were computed at a rate of $38/RPL, whereas those for July were calculated using a rate of $47/RPL. To illustrate, an individual who was granted $1000 worth of RPL back in April would presently receive approximately $500 worth of RPL due to the change in RPL price. Given the exceptional situation of the freeze from the cap, there have been deliberations about undertaking a singular reassessment of all past retrospective awards prior to disbursement.
Important Note: For the “Recalculate at the time of payment” option, RPL adjustments will be implemented to align the total monetary disbursement with the initial award sum. In cases where Retrospective Awards have already received partial payments, this entails subtracting the dollar-value assigned at the time of the partial payment to determine the outstanding balance.
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This is a tough one - the issue, I suppose, is that awardees became forced holders of RPL for longer than expected. I’m inclined to leave the predetermined RPL amounts since I usually think of the awards in RPL denomination. But I know that the GMC generally does not think in RPL denomination, in which case recalculation is perhaps the better choice.
On the one hand, the awardees were, as Ramana says, forced holders. On the other hand, would they have even sold? And if RPL was way up, would anyone be voting to recalculate down? I suspect some would have sold some RPL, so maybe you make everyone unhappy and recalculate at the midpoint of price at award and current price.
Unless this vote is not contentious and everyone says recalculate. Then do that.
Real tough to be unbiased here… gotta be honest – I can try to correct, but I can’t tell if I over/undercorrect.
What would’ve happened without the freeze is clear. People would’ve gotten the predetermined amounts. The question is then - what would they have done with it?
Sold enough for taxes; held the rest. This is the identical situation to current receipt and selling enough for taxes. Net-zero tax liability, same amount of RPL in the wallet.
Held it all. This would’ve been significantly worse, as tax liability would be higher than receiving it now.
Sold it all. This would’ve been dramatically better, as the price of RPL took a dive.
The issue is we have a mix of recipients that would likely have done a mix of things. It’s not immediately obvious to me that there is a population bias among recipients here. That said, I think it’s important to have rewards feel good and rewarding, so I think we should bias positive.
Two suggestions for that (even possible to combine them):
0.5*predetermined + 0.5*recalculated
Provide interest on the unpaid amount. Eg, a January award has been sitting for 7 months and could receive 7 months of interest. We could use RPL staking APR, or maybe that plus a smidge if going purely predetermined (again - to get to “feels good and rewarding”).
Arguably it should not only be recalculated, but interest should be layered on top.
I don’t think transferring anything less than the actual value the recipients were supposed to receive sends a good message. Many of them have waited almost a year, and in that respect, have missed out on staking emissions or liquidity fees or whatever else they would have done with the capital.
It’s important to keep in mind that this is a one-off event. The retroactive rewards for this first period were placed into forced holding that realistically cannot happen again.
An earlier GMC post stated: “The committee is open to revisiting ongoing grant/RA payments and open bounties should RPL’s value fall significantly from its awarding, to more fully reflect the USD value at the time of awarding,” and this is the clearest example of this.
This isn’t a short amount of time either, it’s over half a year in which the price of RPL has doubled and halved. I cannot speak to others, but I have had a consistent regime of taking profits on RPL I have received as a reward for my work in RP to pay for IRL things. You can look at when Patricio first paid me in RPL and see significant sales early on.
I appreciate Patches’ note on interest. As this was unexpected debt, interest does make sense, however, I am happy to go with just the original USD amount. I will also note that in my application I did all my math from USD and only converted to RPL as it was requested.
Mind you, I also think the GMC undercut some of the early retro-awards, but that’s a convo for another time.
FWIW, I advocated for recalculating down for the period in which the RPL was inflated to the original ask amount. However, that’s a discussion for the RPL vs USD debate; this is a separate issue that only affects one cohort – the earliest retro awardees.
I also don’t see why this needs to be unanimous. In reality, the GMC should be able to do this unilaterally without even the pDAO input. I appreciate them seeking it out, but this is squarely within their power to do and requiring a blanket agreement is needlessly roadblocking.
Also, the GMC is sitting on several million USD at the moment. It seems like rewarding the people who worked for the pDAO on faith is pretty valuable and not leaving them worse off because of the GMC’s own internal issues.
FWIW the internal GMC discussions are leaning heavily in favor of recalculating. 7 out of 9 members have retrospective awards that were frozen. It’s a conflict of interest for them to deliberate on this without the community input. Apologies, I should have included that within the original post.
I vote that the retrospective awards should be paid out in the currency (USD or RPL) of the recipient’s current choice (recalculate). This would be a voluntary gesture of good will for some of our greatest contributors and a recognition that almost all recipients have done a lot more work for Rocket Pool in the interim.
I strongly disagree with any suggestion that the GMC is obligated to pay any restitution for the time between when the award was approved and paid out. The GMC did exactly as the pDAO instructed it, against some significant pressure, and both the GMC specifically and the pDAO in general have been fierce advocates of trying to change the rules to get our retrospective contributors paid. There was no contract and no expectation of payment when the work was performed, and I hope the recipients still feel grateful for being recognized for their contributions even though things seem delayed.
In the future, the amount and currency needs to be decided at time of approval with discussion between the GMC and the recipient, and not change afterwards. Otherwise the pDAO will be taking bidirectional risk, and we would not be great shepards of our funds.