In order to keep the application threads clear of discussions (to make it easier for committee members to read and score them), please use this thread for any and all questions and discussions of round 10 period of grant, bounty, and retrospective award applications.
Grants
Rocket Pool Google Adwords
$17.5k to spend $50k. Acceptance criteria is sending sending traffic to the Rocket Pool website. Can’t even measure if it drives rETH adoption or new minipools. Just throwing some money in the air. How long does it take to set up a Google AdWords campaign? A few hours with a few clicks? This person seems genuine and taking a cut seems like the industry practice but jfc this reads like a scam/grift.
Sleety Graphic Design
Sleety is the best. Triple it or even more.
POAP Raffle Funding
Fund it. Lotteries/raffles are great.
Retros
Rocket Pool Educational YouTube Videos
Double it. His videos are great. They are almost perfect. It’s like recipe videos where there’s no fluff, just ingredients, how to cook them, some real life protips and the final result (example). It’s a shame they don’t have more views. Rocket School is great but this is actually the stuff we need more of.
Patches Miscellany During Round 10
Patches has done a disservice to potential developer contributors. If you’re a dev how can you now justify asking for more than the top contributor?
Rocket Rescue Node - Solo Support and website overhaul dev work
Fund it. I’d maybe insist on more acknowledgement on the landing page that this was funded by Rocket Pool.
haloooloolo Work in #support
Fund it. He’s been very active in #support and has the data to prove it. I also suggest making him a Rocket Scientist.
RocketScrape
Fund it. I looked at the code and it looks good and I think it’s also appropriately priced. But there’s no license in the repo so the GMC should verify there is one before making the payment.
Bounty Revamp
It’s good work but wow so expensive. And he wants USD, not RPL. I’d value it $5000 or less (tbh it’s probably way less but it doesn’t feel right saying it now because of the anchoring effect). Feels like he’s testing the boundaries now.
Blockies - GMC Payment Verification Bot
Don’t fund it. Listed benefits / cost is not good enough.
Poupas/deetoo/lilac support retros
Pay them.
ETH Denver Hosting
If you can’t organize lodging without losing money then don’t do it or apply for a grant beforehand. Having said that, it stings when it comes out of your pocket and it’s not much to the GMC so I’d pay him and make it clear that things like this won’t be funded retroactively in the future. Deduct $189 to disincentivize this behavior and for not proof-reading the application (it has broken formatting).
RPL DeFi - Rocket Pool DeFi Market Opportunities
Fund it. Maybe we should have a minimum amount that you can request (or wait until you can ask for more).
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Support retros
Just wanted to give a huge thanks to @Patches 
In addition to what Patches said, I refrained from applying before because I believed - perhaps mistakenly - that, even though this is a retroactive thing, there was an expectation for recipients to continue to be active in #support
Due to work (and the fact that too much time in #support can sometimes lead to mild cases of burnout), my time spent in #support has been much reduced. I still help from time to time, but nothing compared with the hours I spent in the past.
If the GMC is OK with me not being able to devote as much time as I once did, I would be deeply grateful to accept the grant, but please take that into consideration.
Grants
Adwords
I think this isn’t really hitting our current need (NOs), and I think those can be better hit by attacking specific bubbles instead of a broad campaign. This might be more useful if/when we need to push rETH rather than NOs.
Sleety for beaconcha.in
Absolutely. Pay more if helpful. I respect and appreciate a friends and family rate if that’s the source of the $300.
Poap raffles
I don’t feel strongly, but the cost per excitement seems solid enough.
As an aside “double minority client” poaps would be cool.
Bounties
No bounties…
Retrospective Awards
Rocket Pool Educational YouTube Videos
Haven’t watched, so no opinion. I lean generous for known community member putting in real work and asking for a modest budget.
Patches Miscellany During Round 10
Ty patches. <3 the friends and family pricing as ever.
Rocket Rescue Node - Solo Support and website overhaul dev work
I’m split here. Supporting solos is honestly not something I feel we should be paying for. Yes, it’s good. No, I don’t think RP is rolling in money to the point where we should spend beyond things that help RP. (I would argue that we already funded the initial dev for the rescue node, which dramatically reduced the cost to dev the public service for solos).
That said, we can think about this as a marketing effort. From that PoV, maybe $5k vibes right if I’m comparing to beaconcha.in, or maybe $10k if I’m comparing to the Adwords campaign. I’d suggest either (a) $7500 trying to hit the value I think makes sense, or (b) the full $9600 gunning for goodwill.
Support - Haloooloolo, poupas, deetoo, lilac
All seemed reasonable, and our support community has been a core strength. Pay at suggested rate.
Addressing @poupas’ comment about current activity, I don’t think that should play into it at all. If we want to incentivize current work, we should use bounties and grants.
RocketScrape
If anything, it’s undervalued. This serves a “fun” purpose - we’ve had at several separate chats in #trading centered around variants. It also serves a “useful” purpose. I suspect we’ll see it and it’s children used to get some understanding of GMC/IMC/support work. I’d suggest $4-5k, unless this is a friends and family rate thing – in which case I appreciate and respect that.
Aside: it’s not bulletproof - let’s make sure not to get that confused.
Bounty Revamp
All right. This is a tough one for me, because of how near and dear governance work has been for me.
This is out of line with past awards. See, eg, RA022302/RA032303 (initially got 2/3 of requested $7k for about 15 votes of gov facilitation; got the later adder to reach $7k), RA042303 ($30k instead of the requested $50k; months of effort, no infighting, pretty darn critical) on RPIP-29: GMC Grants, Bounties, Retrospective Awards Ledger. They’re not apples to apples at all, but if I were using this lens I might suggest something in the ballpark of $10k for the work described.
That said, the going rate for past awards has completely failed to attract new interest in doing governance work. If we’re serious about governance, we need to figure out how to attract people. It is the case that people currently believe fixing our tokenomics fast is existential. Yet it still appears entirely bottlenecked by “how much time/effort Val has for this hobby”. I will note that the oDAO charter work payment to me still rankles - it personally felt low vs value and it was purposeful (not just accepting a number in front of them). Looking at this another way: if LFW didn’t do this work, it is not the case that someone else would have; it simply would not have been done. If we want them to stick around, and if we want to attract more folks, we need to be thinking in those terms.
So. I believe this payment is significantly out of line with past payments. I believe past payments have failed to achieve our DAO’s needs in terms of attracting talent. So I think the question is – how much should we be increasing our payments for this topic. I would be vocal against less than $20k here. While I do believe the ask is too high, I would not have a problem with meeting the request as a show of force to show we care about this genre.
Blockies - GMC Payment Verification Bot
Directly meets a need, moderate cost. Go for it.
ETH Denver Hosting
- LIBC should have planned better
- LIBC shouldn’t lose money for a good faith effort to help the community
If I got housing for my friends and it ended up not covered, I’d ask them to help cover. It’s a bit weird to essentially ask the greater friend group to cover it (vs the folks that actually went). I would suggest the GMC approve this, but – first send a message to the folks that went and ask them to pay an extra 11% if they are able. Then cover the remainder b/c LIBC shouldn’t be losing money on community effort.
RPL DeFi - Rocket Pool DeFi Market Opportunities
Cheap and useful work. Woo. If anything, consider increasing a smidge. regexbuster does twitter threads that certainly weren’t around when I maintained it, eg.
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I’m clocking all of these bounties at $80 an hour. It’s a lot less than the going rate, but not unreasonably (a 50 week year of 8 hour days would be $160k, which is about the salary of a mid-level engineer in my area). I don’t exactly use all the muscles I developed that made me more senior when doing this work, and I do it pretty quickly, which keeps the overall cost to the GMC down. That said, contractors tend to be more expensive than salaried employees, and this pricing does not reflect that.
Additionally, these tickets were all quite small lift. I have larger projects (kurtosis, text/template), that are measured in days instead of hours and the overall costs for those represent that difference.
Non-patches-contributors should use this rate as a lower bound, imo, unless very junior / fresh (like- still finishing college and looking for intern-style commitments).
Neither do we, necessarily, and we did it for free and are happy to have done it for free.
I don’t know what the appetite from the GMC is to fund this sort of work- as far as I know it’s unique. I just calculated the estimated hours out at $100 an hour and threw up the numbers. @dmccartney and I talked about it before hand and agreed we’re both happy to do it for the pride and contribution to the community.
On that note the current balance of the Rescue Node multisig is around $5,000 and I would like to reiterate that we consider that a line of credit from the GMC and can/will send it back at any time.
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Gonna steal Val’s format. It’s pretty. Have addressed comments on my retro as well.
Grants
Rocket Pool Google Adwords
Not an expert at marketing at all, so take all this with some salt. Given the cost here, I would prefer to first see a grant, bounty or retro that does some analysis on where marketing dollars are best spent in order to meet a spread of potential goals.
I’m unclear if there’s an easy way to judge success here as well. I imagine Google Analytics provides stats on click-through and whatnot, but seems hard to measure if any conversion has taken place.
The concerns added at the end are also (heh) concerning. While the transparency from the author is great, I think it would make more sense to try to resolve these concerns before committing to the spend.
Sleety Graphic Design
The main advertising grant is already approved, I think it would be preferable to budget for expenses like this as part of the main grant. With that said, this isn’t expensive, so just approve it but perhaps set the expectation that future grants should include funds for subcontractors if needed?
POAP Raffle Funding
I don’t really do or get POAPs, but they seem pretty popular. Past raffles apparently saw significant participation. I support the idea for an escrowed fund for this purpose that can be accessed more responsively than requiring more grants/retro proposals. Seems fine.
Retros
Rocket Pool Educational YouTube Videos
From comments on these videos at least one was useful to a non-trivial number of people trying to setup nodes. ~$2k does not seem unreasonable for the value added here. I tend to prefer text, but videos have a way of covering questions that no one thought to answer in written form.
Patches Miscellany During Round 10
Not expensive in absolute terms, and I have a lot of respect and admiration for people that take the initiative to notice problems - miscellaneous or otherwise - and the ability to fix them. PRs linked are small but not trivial changes. Seems worthwhile to encourage these sorts of miscellaneous fixes.
Rocket Rescue Node - Solo Support and website overhaul dev work
Not a tool I’m familiar with, though I’ve seen it mentioned positively by the community. Extending its use to solo stakers seems worthwhile for goodwill and outreach reasons. The possibility exists for solo stakers to be converted to RP node operators off the back of this tool. At a minimum, its solid goodwill.
I would perhaps like to see a more up-front message on the https://rescuenode.com/ site indicating that this was funded by the RP pDAO. The subline would be perfect for this, and it doesn’t seem an unreasonable ask in exchange for funding the retro.
I find it hard to judge the improved interface due to no comparison with the old one. In future retros, including both for comparison would be ideal.
#Support Work
Support work generally seems very important to fund. With that said, I would recommend some time spent verifying the accuracy of the output of the time approximation tool. I’d want support folks to track their time themselves over a week or so, and then run the tool over that week to check accuracy. I’m aware this will be a pain, but it can be a one-off thing.
From an external perspective the 15 minute session timeout feel like they may be too long? I’d be very curious to see how the numbers are affected at different values for this parameter.
I’d very much encourage the script code be made public prior to payout as well. There’s always a chance that its bugged in some way, and releasing the source increases the chance that any issues are spotted. I support the script itself receiving funding separately, as this seems like a useful tool.
I’m honestly not sure I’m correctly understanding the split of hourly rates as described in the retro. I’d much rather see hours for general versus technical split into separate buckets, with their own hourly rates, rather than they being combined in what appears to be a blended rate. Possible I’m just not understanding the contents here though.
All that comes across very negative, my apologies for this. I don’t believe there’s any malicious intent here, but I’m trying to approach these somewhat adversarially, especially when there are implications for future spending based on this precedent.
RocketScrape
Didn’t realize this was also present in this round. Yes, should fund. Not sure if the code has been open-sourced as promised. Assuming it has, I don’t see a reason not to fund it.
Bounty Revamp
Feels like I fucked up the pricing somewhat given the responses from Val and peteris. As per the retro, I was aware it was a large ask for the work and included my justifications for that. Its too late for me to modify the retro now, GMC should feel free to adjust as they feel appropriate.
I’ll push back against @peteris’s comments some. I’m annoyed at the implication that this was somehow malicious. I’ve worked primarily on an hourly or salary basis in the past, and that was purely for governance work rather than development stuff. I think the overestimate here was a result of:
- Inexperience with doing this type and scale of work under a retro framework.
- General trend of undervaluing my time and impact in the past.
That said, I strongly believe this work is worth in far excess of $5k. Its important work, pursued for several months, approached holistically and with a solid chance of having ongoing positive impact on the DAO.
Blockies - GMC Payment Verification Bot
Having had experience managing multisig transactions, anything that makes the experience safer and less stressful for those involved is a positive.
I am unsure whether discord is really the right place for this sort of verification, but given it resolves a current need, I think it’s fine.
Poupas/deetoo/lilac support retros
As a point of courtesy, I think it’s important to at least inform recipients of retro grants when you’re posting things on their behalf.
Much of my concern here is described above in response to the prior support work retro. The cost here is high, we should make sure the hours are being reported as accurately as possible.
No objection in principle though, it’s clear this is an needed function.
ETH Denver Hosting
They stepped up to do a useful thing without charging, and show some thought has gone into avoiding the similar problems in the future. Does seem overall successful, despite the small financial loss.
Makes more sense to me to trust a known counterparty that made an effort in good faith, admitted the loss, and has made efforts to learn from it, than to need to trust an unknown counterparty in the future.
RPL DeFi - Rocket Pool DeFi Market Opportunities
I assume this is useful to some folks. If that’s generally agreed to be the case then fund it. GMC may wish to institute a minimum threshold required before payout. Lots of small payouts start to add up in the current gas environment.
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I believe the code is public and haloo has been pretty happy to run variants.
@haloooloolo: would you mind posting 10 vs 15 minute timeout all time #support numbers somewhere?
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What do y’all think is a good minimum threshold before requesting funding? Is it relative to the average gas price (over x period of time)? If it is relative, how would I determine the threshold based on gas price?
Kind of a hard thing to answer. It sort of depends on how often updates are planned. Let’s say you plan on updating each month and think it is an amount of work worth $100 each time. In that case, maybe bundle it three times per year?
If updates will be few and far between, it’s okay to request smaller amounts each time. We would not want to discourage that.
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Also the GMC pays out grants for hitting milestones. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with submitting a GRANT proposal for one year (eg, X money per update for Y updates) and just notify the GMC informally (3-6 months) for payout for what you’ve done. That saves you from having to do frequent proposals and us from having to formally discuss every couple months. If you don’t do as many updates as you expected, we just pay out less accordingly, no harm. You now have a good track record, so it’s low risk for GMC.
Just an option…
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@regexbuster Epi’s concept is what I would suggest. Get a grant approved for a year; get paid, eg, quarterly. If it’s relevant to you, ask for a quarter’s worth ahead. Report back to them quarterly so they can know it’s all smooth and/or can adjust if there were missed updates.
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Grants
Adwords
I don’t think this is the right time for a marketing campaign. We should be marketing when the tokenomics are fixed and we are looking to expand rapidly in both rETH and NOs. Until then we should save the money until it will do the most good.
Retrospective Awards
Patches Miscellany During Round 10
Great value. Fund it.
Rocket Rescue Node - Solo Support and website overhaul dev work
As others have said, I don’t think we should be funding solo stakers use. If anything it hurts, as stakers have one less reason to use rocketpool. I also don’t think it will buy us much good will, as it’s being used by people who have already chosen to be solo stakers.
Yellow circle because Patches does great work, the rescue node is a huge asset to RP, and I could be wrong about buying good will.
Support - Haloooloolo, poupas, deetoo, lilac
15 minutes for the session timeout seems far too long. I am admittedly not a support person and could be wrong here, but it’s hard to imagine someone in support spending more than 5 minutes actively working on support without sending a message (and if it does happen, it is balanced out by times where less than 5 minutes is spent). The nature of support and waiting for people to get back to you also means that you can be multitasking, working on other things.
Due to being able to multitask and also having a great amount of schedule flexibility (this is not a paid position where you are required to get a certain amount of work done), I do not think a full software dev rate is appropriate.
I do think that support should be something we fund, but not in this way. I support looking at smaller timeout windows and also paying a reduced rate. If people want a higher rate I think they should make a grant app rather than a retro app (and the GMC should look at the current state of #support to see whether additional incentive is needed).
RocketScrape
Both interesting and potentially useful.
Bounty Revamp
I agree with much of what Val said - the GMC should be incentivizing this kind of work, and also the ask is too high. I do not think I would fund a grant app at $45k to do this work. I think something closer to $20-30k is appropriate both to sufficiently reward the work done and also to incentivize further work.
Blockies - GMC Payment Verification Bot
This is great. Pay it.
ETH Denver Hosting
This is not something that is GMC or RP community responsibility. There should have been better planning here, or barring that asking for more from guests. Just because the GMC has money doesn’t mean it should fund this kind of thing.
RPL DeFi - Rocket Pool DeFi Market Opportunities
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Ask and you shall receive:
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