Round 22 - GMC Call for Retrospective Applications - Deadline is March 7

Grants / Bounties
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This thread is for applications for Rocket Pool’s February 7, 2025 - March 7, 2025 retrospective awards. Please only post retrospective award applications in this thread. If you would like to discuss and/or ask questions about any applications you see in this thread, we ask that you do so in this separate forum thread which has been established for all community discussions related to this round of applications. Only those grant applications that are posted in this thread and timestamped by March 7, 2025 at 23:59 (11:59 PM) UTC will be considered. Any retrospective award applications posted after that deadline will be carried over to the next award period.

This is the expected schedule for round 22:

  • Application Period (February 7 - March 7)
  • Scoring Deadline (March 25)
  • Final Voting Amendments, Discussion and Finalization (March 26 - March 29)
  • Award Announcement (March 30)

To guide you in your application, the GMC has established the following goals and the following scoring rubric:

GMC Goals

Grants, bounties, and retrospective awards should make it easier and/or more attractive to do one or more of the following:

  • become a node operator

  • operate a node, mint rETH

  • hold or use rETH

  • improve the quality of life for the protocol and its community.

Retrospective Award Rubric

To what extent did the proposed and completed project further the GMC goals?

Note: if the project is ongoing, the retrospective award is given for work completed prior to the current award period, with any future awards for the same project expected to compete in the Grants category and as a separate application.

Retrospective Award Application Template

Please copy paste the template below into a reply. Answer the questions there, feel free to remove or add sections based on relevance.

## Name of Retrospective Award

### Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?

### 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.

### Are the subjects of this award entirely open source ([MIT](https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT), [GPL](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html), [Apache](https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0), [CC BY](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) license or similar)? If not, which parts will not be, why, and under what license will they be published?



## Benefit

<please enter N/A where appropriate>

| Group | Benefits |
|---|---|
| Potential rETH holders | How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given help people looking to stake ETH for rETH? |
| rETH holders | How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given help rETH holders? |
| Potential NOs | How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given help people looking to run a Rocket Pool node for the first time? |
| NOs | How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given help people already running a Rocket Pool node? |
| Community |  How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given how does this help the Rocket Pool community? |
| RPL holders |  How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given how does this help RPL holders? |



## Costs

### How much USD $ is the applicant requesting be awarded to the recipient?



## 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).
4

Name of Retrospective Award

The Weekly Orbit.

Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?

Pat & Waq.

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.

The Weekly Orbit podcast reports on the top stories of Rocket Pool each week, we engage in two-way conversations, allowing for in-depth discussions and the sharing of opinions on the most important topics. Our content caters to a diverse audience, ranging from beginners to advanced users, ensuring everyone finds value in our discussions.

The Weekly Orbit produced three episodes (90,91, & 92) after our grant expired on 7 February 2025.

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?

All episodes of the The Weekly Orbit are available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Benefit

image
image1132×240 4.59 KB

Total views on YouTube of the three episodes.

image
image816×424 14.2 KB

Total views/listens on Spotify for the three episodes.

The aggregate of views/listens between the two platforms for the three episodes is 260 (179 YouTube and 81 Spotify).

The Weekly Orbit provides in depth discussion of Rocket Pool news for node operators, rETH holders, and RPL holders. We also provide market analysis.
<please enter N/A where appropriate>

Group Benefits
Potential rETH holders How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given help people looking to stake ETH for rETH?

Episode 90 covered deposit pool analytics which impacts the discount on rETH secondary markets. This episode also covered rETH on secondary markets being back at peg for the first time in months.

In episode 92, we discussed the rETH discount that has reappeared on secondary markets.

| rETH holders | How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given help rETH holders? |

Episode 90 covered deposit pool analytics which impacts the discount on rETH secondary markets. This episode also covered rETH on secondary markets being back at peg for the first time in months.

In episode 92, we discussed the rETH discount that has reappeared on secondary markets.

| Potential NOs | How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given help people looking to run a Rocket Pool node for the first time? |

Episode 92 covered the SEC dropping its lawsuit against Consensys, which specifically mentioned Rocket Pool.

| NOs | How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given help people already running a Rocket Pool node? |

Episode 90 discussed Proposal #1, the first proposed vote using unchain voting. We also alerted NO’s about the newest Smartnode update release.

Episode 91 covered the delay for Rocket Pool unchain voting. We also had a segment discussing how important Node Operators are to the network health of the Ethereum network. We also discussed the bug found during the Pectra Holsky Testnet fork.

Episode 92 covered the SEC dropping its lawsuit against Consensys, which specifically mentioned Rocket Pool.

| Community | How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given how does this help the Rocket Pool community? |

Episode 90 discussed Proposal #1, the first proposed vote using unchain voting. Episode 91 had a segment about the community and team at ETHDenver.

Episode 92 covered the SEC dropping its lawsuit against Consensys, which specifically mentioned Rocket Pool. This was a cloud hanging over the community’s head.

| RPL holders | How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given how does this help RPL holders? |

All three episodes covered RPL in the market analysis section. In episode 90, we discussed Val’s ETH/RPL ratio spreadsheet.

In episode 92, we discussed the news that the team’s legal advisor provided positive feedback on the different RPL value capture ideas (Voter Share, Buy & Burn, & Liquidity).

Costs

How much USD $ is the applicant requesting be awarded to the recipient?

We are requesting $450. This is $150 per episode, which is half of the standard rate for Rocket Pool media production. We request the grant be paid with an 80/20 split between Pat and Waq, respectively.

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).

Pat has no conflict of interests.

Waq is a member of the GMC and the IMC. He receives donations in the form of RPL from anonymous and non-anonymous members of the community. The donations have no impact on the content of The Weekly Orbit.

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Name of Retrospective Award

Rocket Watch Contributions

Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?

@haloooloolo and @invis

What specific project or work is the retrospective award in recognition of? This is in recognition of all the time I’ve spent working on Rocket Watch features, big and small, over the last year.

Are the subjects of this award entirely open source ([MIT]

Yes, the source code is available on GitHub.

Benefit

I will skip the detailed breakdown here as everyone reading this will be familiar with Rocket Watch. The event tracking features and various commands have been useful to node operators and rETH holders alike.

Costs

How much USD $ is the applicant requesting be awarded to the recipient?

$25,000 in total. $23,000 for me, $2000 for invis.

I realize this is a big ask at face value. To justify this, I will provide a bit more context.

Git Statistics

These are the contributions statistics for the Rocket Watch git repo, first for all files (including JSON config edits for new events) and then only .py source code files.

Author                  Commits         Files           Insertions      Deletions       Total Lines
-----                   -------         -----           ----------      ---------       -----------
invisiblesymbol         1506            220             32764           10424           43188
haloooloolo             270             102             18789           9007            27796
jacob                   17              11              688             272             960
blaze                   1               2               174             0               174
ramirond                3               1               92              7               99
valdorff                10              1               36              9               45

Author                  Commits         Files           Insertions      Deletions       Total Lines
-----                   -------         -----           ----------      ---------       -----------
invisiblesymbol         1283            130             21161           9251            30412
haloooloolo             246             78              9567            8588            18155
jacob                   17              10              687             272             959
blaze                   1               2               174             0               174
ramirond                3               1               92              7               99
romirand                1               1               6               6               12
0xobjectobject          2               1               9               3               12

In both, I am up to around 50% of invis’ activity. On to specific contributions.

Notable Contributions

Improvements to Scam Prevention

I have made improvements on the patterns used to detect scam messages, added new types of scams and added the ability for Rocket Watch to DM new users in the server a warning about scammers and a list of best practices.

Houston Events

This includes full support for on-chain governance in Houston, other events such as stake on behalf and all the other minor things that changed with the Houston update. For full transparency, invis actually paid me $4000 to implement this at the time, so do take that into account when making a decision on funding this grant. However, I think the work involved went beyond the initial requirement and the sheer number of events to support also caused the requirements themselves to be more than expected. If you decide to fund for less than the full requested amount, you should prioritize invis’ share.

RPL Reward Simulation

This is only a single command but I spent quite a lot of time tweaking the layout, making sure all the simulation parameters work fine in combination etc. It also gets used quite a lot.

Constellation Support

Similar to Houston (though smaller in scope), I added all events relevant to Gravita’s and NodeSet’s Constellation including a /constellation command to keep track of all relevant stats.

Snapshot Module Improvements

This is the first contribution in this list that was mostly work under the hood without necessarily immediately being noticeable by the end user. I spent a lot of time cleaning up and refactoring the code that requests new proposals and votes from the Snapshot GraphQL API, processes the data and turns it into events. A large part of this is the logic to render the images that show up when running /snapshot_votes. The code is much more readable and maintainable now, which should pay off in the future. In terms of new features, the command is now able to arrange rendered proposals in a grid instead of a single row if there are many of them and Rocket Watch can keep track of starting and ending Snapshot proposals and creates events for each.

Changes To Core Event Handling

This one is actually quite large and not observable at all. Rocket Watch’s event aggregation across its multiple plugins had been largely unstructured with each plugin keeping track of its own state. It was also only able to request all events and process them in one go, which made catching up on long amounts of history a nightmare. A good example of this was having to drop history when Rocket Watch was deployed for Holesky. It was also what kept it from being redeployed after running into an error at some point. Though Holesky is half dead now, so maybe not the best example …

If one is interested in details, each plugin only has to implement two functions: get_past_events(from_block, to_block) and get_new_events(). The core event loop keeps track of the current head block and manages calls to those functions. If far behind, it will use the past event interface to catch up in block batches of configurable size.

RPL Market Depth

This one hasn’t seen the light of day yet. It’s a replacement for the /wall command, but aggregrates across multiple DEXes and CEXes, similar to what Hodja has been doing semi manually a few times. I’m including this because it will likely be merged by the time the GMC reviews this grant. For a bit more context, I actually spent over 40 hours on just this alone on writing abstractions for all the data sources, figuring out the different APIs, liquidity math for Balancer and Uniswap etc. I can point to the code on GitHub or show it working on my own Rocket Watch deployment if needed earlier.

Miscellaneous

There are some smaller things like /node_gini, /rpip and the exit arb event that took a few hours here and there, but aren’t really big enough to mention on their own. This also includes smaller refactoring work that probably adds up to 20+ hours.

Summary

While $25k is a lot of money, I think it is a fair amount to request. In direct comparison, invis previously received two grants totaling $80k for Rocket Watch (significantly more at the time of payout, but the initial grant amount is the relevant number to compare to). Given the contribution statistics, my ask seems in line with invis’ compensation, if not slightly lower. While I didn’t directly track the time I spent working on this, I’m confident I surpassed the 230 hours required for a $100/h rate that has been used for various development grants in the past. Invis still manages the Rocket Watch deployment and has spent quite a lot of time reviewing my code, which is why I think a $2000 payout for him is also fair.

Conflict of Interest

None.

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Notice: This message marks the closing of the twenty second (22) round of Rocket Pool retro applications. Any applications submitted after this will not be considered for this round. The GMC will announce the award recipients in a new thread here on the forums around March 30th. The community will then have two weeks to issue any challenges before funds are disbursed. Thank you to all who applied and thank you to everyone who has followed along. Anyone who would like to comment on existing applications is encouraged to do so in this thread.