Name of Retrospective Award
Node Operator Behavior Trends
Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?
sckuzzle
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.
This project started with the question of how Node Operators were changing their behavior over time, and whether we could correlate that change in behavior with market conditions. After drawing these inferences we could hopefully answer questions like whether the rewards cliff was encouraging nodes to top up or whether nodes completely gave up.
This kind of understanding of node operator behavior is particularly useful when designing new tokenomics systems such as eth-only LEB8s.
Work occurred around mid-August and took approximately one week. The time involved was largely impacted by the research being open-ended without an agenda, and only useful data or findings being reported on.
discord thread: Discord
github summary: rp-thoughts/analyses/distribution.md at main · sckuzzle/rp-thoughts · GitHub
Note: haloooloolo offered to wrap this work into the eth-only retro, and I declined as this work was not done only for eth-only and also because the value of this work is highly subjective (and I wanted the GMC to be able to choose the payout).
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?
Everything is released under GPL3.
Benefit
This work did not benefit specific groups looking to use RP but rather is a useful aid in designing new tokenomics. By using data-driven approaches we are more likely to make correct design decisions that makes Rocket Pool an effective and successful protocol. All benefits would be confined to researchers making new designs as well as voters looking to make informed decisions.
Costs
How much USD $ is the applicant requesting be awarded to the recipient?
Evaluating value that comes from such work is highly subjective. It is important that we use data-driven approaches when reworking tokenomics, and also how much impact this work had and the resulting value to the protocol is unclear.
I am picking a value of $4000 as an initial point, but explicitly expecting the GMC to determine value however it deems fit.
Is the applicant requesting RPL or LUSD?
RPL
Conflict of Interest
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).
None
Acknowledgements
Thank you to people who took a look at the analysis and suggested additional things to look into. A few from the thread: @Valdorff, @ramana, @NeverAnIsland, @LenOfTawa