Round 30 - GMC Call for Grant Applications - Deadline is November 7

[ShfRyn]

This thread is for applications for Rocket Pool’s October 7, 2025 - November 7, 2025 grants. Please only post grant 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 November 7, 2025 at 23:59 (11:59 PM) UTC will be considered. Any grants posted after that deadline will be carried over to the next award period.

This is the expected schedule for round 30:

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

Differences Between Grants and Bounties

Grants are intended to be applied for by those who are wishing to carry out the work themselves. Bounties are open-ended goals that could be met by anyone, including those other than the proposing party. In other words, if I believed that Rocket Pool needed a fifty-foot paper mache orange rocket for publicity purposes and I wanted to be the one to built it, I would apply for a grant. If I instead thought Rocket Pool needed a fifty-foot paper mache orange rocket for publicity purposes but I wanted it to be open to whoever built it first to claim the reward (similar to a prize), then I’d apply for a bounty.

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.

Grants Rubric

When evaluating grant applications, the GMC takes into account the following goals:

• If the application is successful, to what extent does it further the GMC goals?

• To what extent can the application be feasibly carried out by the person(s) proposed to complete it?

• If the application is successful, how large is the benefit to the protocol relative to the size of the proposed costs

Grant 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 Grant

### What is the work being proposed?

### Is there any related work this builds off of?

### Will the results of this project be 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 | If the grant is successfully completed, how does this help people looking to stake ETH for rETH? |
| rETH holders | If the grant is successfully completed, how does this help rETH holders? |
| Potential NOs |  If the grant is successfully completed, how does this help people looking to run a Rocket Pool node for the first time? |
| NOs | If the grant is successfully completed, how does this help people already running a Rocket Pool node? |
| Community |  If the grant is successfully completed, how does this help the Rocket Pool community? |
| RPL holders |  If the grant is successfully completed, how does this help RPL holders? |

### Which other non-RPL protocols, DAOs, projects, or individuals, would stand to benefit from this grant?



## Work

### Who is doing the work?

### What is the background of the person(s) doing the work? What experience do they have with such projects in the past?

### What is the breakdown of the proposed work, in terms of milestones and/or deadlines?

### How is the work being tested? Is testing included in the schedule?

### How will the work be maintained after delivery?



## Costs

### What is the acceptance criteria?

### What is the proposed payment schedule for the grant? How much USD $ and over what period of time is the applicant requesting?

### Who will directly receive the payment? (Required — the GMC can only send grants directly to a recipient address and cannot accept invoices.)

### How will the GMC verify that the work delivered matches the proposed cadence?

### What alternatives or options have been considered in order to save costs for the proposed project?

### Have you already been compensated by the RP protocol in any way for this work?



## Conflict of Interest

### Does the person or persons proposing the grant have any conflicts of interest to disclose? (Please disclose here if you are a member of the GMC or if any member of the GMC would benefit directly financially from the grant).

### Will the recipient of the grant, or any protocol or project in which the recipient has a vested interest (other than Rocket Pool), benefit financially if the grant is successful?

[langers]

Snapshot Voting

What is the work being proposed?

The Rocket Pool community has exercised governance power through two voting platforms:

• Snapshot - for meta governance proposals
• Onchain Protocol - for proposals to change settings and direct treasury funds, these are raised/executed on the Rocket Pool protocol

Both voting systems use the same underlying strategy to determine vote power so they are equivalent. A critical feature required for Rocket Pool voting to occur is the use of Snapshot custom vote strategies.

Until recently, Snapshot was free to use but they have now implemented layered pricing for specific features. The custom vote strategy feature now requires a Snapshot Pro account.

We have explored workarounds to avoid using the feature but none exist.

Is there any related work this builds off of?

We have looked at other options but most are emerging and are not as robust as Snapshot. There may be options that we can use but planning, design, and migration will take time.

In the medium/long term, we can look into using the current onchain protocol to support meta governance votes.

In the meantime, we do not want to halt DAO activity so propose to use Snapshot for now until the DAO and team can coordinate an alternative or decide to stick with Snapshot.

Will the results of this project be 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?

Snapshot is a paid for service so I don’t believe this is applicable.

Benefit

Pretty much all Rocket Pool stakeholders benefit from this proposal.

Group	Benefits
Community	If the grant is successful the community benefits from ongoing governance expression.

Which other non-RPL protocols, DAOs, projects, or individuals, would stand to benefit from this grant?

Snapshot would benefit - that said they have serviced us well for free for some time.

Costs

What is the proposed payment schedule for the grant? How much USD $ and over what period of time is the applicant requesting?

A Snapshot Pro account costs US$6,000 / year (1 year commitment) or US$600 / month (1 month commitment).

We suggest a minimum commitment of 3 months and a suggested commitment of 6 months. However we leave it up to the GMC to decide the commitment.

Conflict of Interest

Does the person or persons proposing the grant have any conflicts of interest to disclose? (Please disclose here if you are a member of the GMC or if any member of the GMC would benefit directly financially from the grant).

No conflict of interest.

Will the recipient of the grant, or any protocol or project in which the recipient has a vested interest (other than Rocket Pool), benefit financially if the grant is successful?

No.

[haloooloolo]

Support Payments #5 (December 2025 - February 2026)

General Information

What is the nature of the proposed bounty?

Provide support for questions posed by Rocket Pool community members in the #support discord channel; questions come largely from Node Operators and those hoping to be Node Operators.

Allowing prospective payments allows for both effective budgeting from the DAO, the possibility of increasing payments for critical time periods (for example, bonus payments to encourage more #support contributors around rocketpool v2, LEB rollout, or megapool transition), and quicker feedback to contributors for their efforts.

This is a continuation of the previously approved Support Payments #4 ( Round 24 - GMC Call for Bounty Applications - Deadline is May 7 - #3 by ShfRyn ).

Why are you writing this bounty proposal?

I believe responsive, public, node operator support at this level is one of the major differentiators for RP compared to other protocols and it makes sense to compensate people for providing that service. This 3-month period specifically is expected to encompass the Fusaka hard fork and the Saturn 1 launch, both of which are likely to significantly increase support activity.

Benefit

Group	Benefits
Potential rETH holders	Questions answered, although much of this is done in # general / # trading.
rETH holders	Solving NO issues ultimately benefits rETH holders through less downtime and drag on APR, as well as facilitating the supply side of rETH.
Potential NOs	Huge benefit, both for answering questions and for the assurance that should problems come up, there is an active support structure.
NOs	See above.
Community	The community provides support; this bounty regularizes payments. The payments will all go to community members. The folks who are active in # support are often active in other parts of the protocol that they are not reimbursed for.
RPL holders	By creating a budget for #support, the payments will be more regular and we will not have as many unclaimed allocations weighing on our balance sheet.

Which other non-RPL protocols, DAOs, projects, or individuals would stand to benefit from the bounty being successfully completed?

It is likely that questions about Rocket Pool adjacent protocols (as examples, NodeSet or Dappnode) sometimes pop up in support, but almost always in the context of Rocket Pool nodes.

Work

What steps would be entailed in completing the bounty? Do successful examples of such work exist elsewhere? What skillsets or knowledge will be required?

Provide user support in the #support channel of discord, under the following terms:

1. Provide at least 1 hour of work providing #support discord channel in EACH of the three months December 2025 - February 2026, as measured by RocketScrape; alternatively provide 15 hours TOTAL over the 3 month block.

2. Within the first 3 days after a 3 month block ends, a list of all potential awardees will be produced by GMC.

3. A 10-day period will follow where any community member can publicly or privately notify the GMC that a potential awardee was not providing support (for example, was requesting support) or not providing quality support (for example, multiple ineffective messages/farming). Anyone offering support can also petition for a name to be added to the list if they narrowly failed the initial inclusion criteria and can be included on a case-by-case basis.

4. The GMC will investigate the #support record of any questioned potential awardee and weight contributions either 0%, 50%, or 100% based on posts on # support channel. The 50% level will be for users with approximately 25%-75% effective support messages. Potential awardees receiving 0% or 50% will be considered 0% or 50% for future #support bounties unless they specifically request and are granted re-evaluation.

5. The “cost” below will be split proportionally amongst all awardees based on time spent as measured by RocketScrape and adjustments based on investigation in (5); payment will be done during the next GMC distribution phase.

What advice would you give a bounty hunter working on this bounty?

The pot scales sublinearly with total time. If there are people who are not actively helping or should not be providing #support, there should also be self-monitoring to ensure that high quality contributors are not diluted. This can be done on the back-end by GMC oversight, but self-policing is encouraged (if for no other reason than a better experience for support seekers).

• If farming becomes an issue then some degree of whitelisting may be needed in the future.

Should the output of this bounty be available under an open source license?

N/A, although RocketScrape should continue to be open source.

Costs

How much do you think the completion of this bounty worth to Rocket Pool (in USD)?

In the previous round, support was funded at a maximum of $10,000 per 3-month period, down from $18,000. Given the difficult treasury situation and lower activity as of late, continuing at this reduced level of funding seems appropriate.

The formula for total payout should stay the same at `min($1000 × √(total support hours), $10000)`.

How much work will be needed to verify this bounty has been completed? What skillsets or knowledge will be required?

• RocketScrape

• GMC investigation by reading support messages of people identified as not offering quality support.

• Math

Structure

How would you structure this bounty, and why?

Payments proportionally split amongst all awardees based on adjusted hours worked according to RocketScrape, as listed above.

Is this bounty repeatable?

The goal is to provide reimbursement for ongoing support. There are other ways to pay contributors prospectively, and it may be that other better systems are proposed. I think this system is very low overhead and ‘good enough’. The specific amount is always open to negotiation from GMC.

Are there any reasonable circumstances under which this bounty should be withdrawn? Should it expire?

Only good for the 3 months in question. It should be withdrawn if there is significant evidence of gaming. It can be withdrawn effective immediately based on GMC request; in this case prorated awards would be calculated up to the withdrawal date.

Conflicts of Interest

Does the person or persons proposing the bounty have any conflicts of interest to disclose? (Please disclose here if you are a member of the GMC or if any member of the GMC would benefit directly financially from the successful completion of the bounty).

Steely, a member of the GMC, and myself have historically been major recipients of this bounty. I am also the author of RocketScrape, the tool used to assess the amount of support work done for the purposes of this bounty.

Will the applicant, or any protocol or project in which the applicant has a vested interest (other than Rocket Pool), benefit financially if the bounty is successfully completed?

I will likely be one of the major contributors again.

[ShfRyn]

Notice: This message marks the closing of the thirtieth (30) round of Rocket Pool grant 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 November 30. 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.