This thread is for applications for Rocket Pool’s July 7, 2026 - August 7, 2026 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 forum thread which has been established for all community discussions related to this round of applications. Only those retrospective award applications that are posted in this thread and timestamped by August 7, 2026 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 39:
- Application Period (July 7 - August 7)
- Scoring Deadline (August 25)
- Final Voting Amendments, Discussion and Finalization (August 26 - August 29)
- Award Announcement (August 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:
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 help the Rocket Pool community? |
| RPL holders | How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given 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).
Name of Retrospective Award
Rocket Pool Performance Dashboard (rocket-performance.net)
Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?
Steely
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 retrospective covers work completed from the first prototype in July 2025 through the end of July 2026. The work was originally requested on a Rocket Pool community town hall call, and grew from there. The project is rocket-performance.net, a public dashboard built to help the Rocket Pool community spot offline and underperforming validators, contact operators, and get them back online.
The work included:
-
Building and maintaining a public dashboard at rocket-performance.net that scans the whole Rocket Pool network: roughly 4,000 nodes, 42,000 minipools, and around 17,000 currently active validators. Support is also in place and confirmed working for Saturn-1 megapool validators, which are now active and tracked on the dashboard, with the count continuing to grow as more come online.
-
Generating 20 reports across five time periods (1-, 3-, 7-, 30-, and 100-day periods) and four thresholds (<80%, <90%, <95%, and all nodes), refreshed four times a day and published on the live dashboard. In addition to attestation performance, the reports calculate earned rewards, missed rewards, penalties, and total lost ETH at node and network level.
-
Building a historical trends page at rocket-performance.net/stats/ backed by 295 daily snapshots covering 10 October 2025 through 31 July 2026. It tracks performance bands, active and exited validators, missed rewards, penalties, total lost ETH, balance risks, ULD adoption, and separate minipool and megapool trends.
-
Adding features over time in response to community use, including ENS support, POAP support, a notes system for collaborative tracking of operators, extra reports and filters, tracking for major network events such as Fusaka and Nimbus fork deaths, minipool balance flags such as below 31.9 ETH, and ULD (use-latest-delegate) tracking.
-
Adding full Saturn-1 megapool support ahead of mainnet activation, including a dedicated scanner, integration into the analysis pipeline, report and trends support, and dashboard filtering for minipools, megapools, or both. By 31 July 2026, the scanner was tracking 327 nodes with deployed megapools and 4,652 assigned megapool validators, including >2,000 already active.
-
Building and operating the infrastructure needed to produce and publish the reports, including execution-layer node access, a ClickHouse beacon-chain attestation database, the public site hosting, and the rocket-performance.net domain itself. The production pipeline also includes scheduled collection, automatic gap backfilling, report validation, deployment verification, collaborative-notes backups, failure logging, and recovery tooling. These have all carried ongoing infrastructure and operating costs.
-
As a small bonus alongside the main reporting work, sending a 1-wei transaction from minipool-down-alert.eth to the withdrawal address of zero-performance nodes, giving operators another chance to notice a problem if they are not watching Discord or other monitoring.
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?
Yes. The core subject of this award—the dashboard, scanners, analysis, and trends system—is entirely open source under the MIT licence, with the code publicly available
at Steely’s GitHub.
Benefit
| Group |
Benefits |
| Potential rETH holders |
It gives prospective stakers an independent public view of Rocket Pool validator performance, which helps show that bad performance is visible and gets followed up on. |
| rETH holders |
Offline and underperforming validators hurt rETH yield. Alongside the excellent work of community members who use the dashboard and put real time into tracking down offline operators, it has helped get validators back online faster, reduce missed rewards and penalties, and protect rETH APR. |
| Potential NOs |
The reports and trends pages show what normal validator performance looks like and give new operators a clearer picture of the network they would be joining. |
| NOs |
It is a free monitoring and benchmarking tool. Operators can see when their validators are struggling, compare performance over different time windows, and in some cases receive an on-chain alert even if they have no other monitoring set up. |
| Community |
The main use of the site has been practical community coordination: finding offline operators, sharing notes, and helping people get validators back online. Used this way, it has helped the protocol avoid considerable losses that would otherwise have come from validators staying offline longer. It also gives the community a shared public view of network health and a useful reference point during incidents and governance discussions, and it will remain useful until performance-based exits are implemented in Saturn 2. |
| RPL holders |
Better validator performance and faster response to outages make the protocol stronger and more credible, which is good for Rocket Pool as a whole and therefore good for RPL holders too. |
Costs
How much USD $ is the applicant requesting be awarded to the recipient?
The applicant suggests a retrospective award of $5,000, while leaving the final size of any award to the discretion of the GMC.
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).
Yes. The applicant (Steely) is a member of the GMC, and as such will take no part in any discussions or decisions.
Notice: This message marks the closing of the thirty-ninth (39) round of Rocket Pool retrospective award applications. Any applications submitted after this will not be considered for this round.