Round 41 - GMC Call for Retrospective Applications - Deadline is October 7

Grants / Bounties
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This thread is for applications for Rocket Pool’s September 7, 2026 - October 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 October 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 41:

  • Application Period (September 7 - October 7)
  • Scoring Deadline (October 20)
  • Final Voting Amendments, Discussion and Finalization (October 21 - October 24)
  • Award Announcement (October 25)

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 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).
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Quick note up front: I used AI tools to help write the scripts and tidy this text. I ran everything myself and checked the totals against the contracts. Last round I put in a weak application and pulled it after reading the feedback. This time I did the work first and I’m only asking for what’s already done.

Name of Retrospective Award

Saturn 2 numbers from the live validator set (RPIP-71 exit selection, RPIP-83 bond maths, the exits happening now)

Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?

Ashwin Goyal (GitHub: let-the-dreamers-rise)

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.

Done over 4 to 7 October while the RPIP-71 exit criterion and bond votes were open. Everything is here: GitHub - let-the-dreamers-rise/rocketpool · GitHub. It only uses public RPC calls and you can rerun it with one command.

What I did:

I pulled every minipool and megapool validator at block 26,118,341. That’s 14,099 staking minipools, 5,186 megapool validator records, 361 megapools and 1,586 nodes with their RPL and ETH positions, plus beacon status for 16,268 validators, both deposit queues in on-chain order, and weekly supply and queue numbers going back to October 2025.

Then I ran the questions people were arguing about in the RPIP-86 thread:

The queue (2,107 validators, 59k ETH) hasn’t moved since Saturn 1. Since launch, 3,304 minipool exits freed roughly 74k ETH. About 61.6k of that is now in megapools and about 31k went out as rETH redemptions. No net new rETH demand at all.

2,472 minipools are in active_exiting right now. 2,460 of them are on six nodes that look like one operator (registered 2021 to 2023, no megapool, exiting everything). Those six nodes have 1.94M legacy RPL staked, which is 29% of all legacy-staked RPL and 8.5% of supply. That becomes unstakeable once the pools finalise. Their 55k ETH of user capital becomes withdrawable on 13 to 14 October. Read in queue order, that money would fund 1,975 validators, with six nodes taking 46% of it.

RPIP-83: to move today’s minipools into megapools you’d need 620k ETH of new rETH at a 4 ETH bond, 263k at 6, 85k at 8. There’s 370k ETH staked in total. A 6 ETH reduced_bond puts 111 of the 112 active megapools under the curve, 4,272 ETH short, and topping that up from rewards takes about 12 years at 3% without RPL, about 8 with RPL staked.

RPIP-71 phase 1: exiting by commission first gives back 16 ETH of liquidity per 32 ETH of TVL until about 34.6k ETH of demand, because all the 16 to 20% pools are 16 ETH bonds, and it wipes roughly twice as many whole nodes as random selection. DAOplomats posted a deeper version of this same result in the RPIP-86 thread a day after my snapshot and our numbers agree (same 58% of eligible pools at 14%, same 2x on wiped nodes), which is a useful cross-check. The exits in progress, the capital flow, the queue, the RPIP-83 maths and the megapool criterion simulation are not in their post.

RPIP-71 phase 2: I simulated eight exit criteria with the tournament of four from the spec and measured who gets hit. “Avoid repeat nodes” touches 64% of the 1 to 2 validator nodes at 10k ETH. Any bias towards big nodes lands on the top 12 to 22 nodes (one node has 798 of the 2,164 active validators). “Lowest RPL first” is basically random among the 12% of validators sitting on zero-RPL nodes.

I’ll rerun it monthly and whenever an RPIP author asks, until Saturn 2 ships, whether this gets paid or not.

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, all of it. Code is MIT, data and figures are CC BY 4.0.

Benefit

Group Benefits
Potential rETH holders The exit criterion and bond votes decide how withdrawals get honoured. This shows what each option costs.
rETH holders Phase 1 ordering decides how much TVL leaves per ETH of liquidity (2.0 vs 1.33) and how much RPL gets freed.
Potential NOs The queue in on-chain order shows who gets funded next and why the standard queue is stuck; the bond maths shows what each bond level needs.
NOs Each criterion’s effect on small operators is measured before the vote, and the big exit in progress is documented with dates.
Community Numbers for the Saturn 2 decisions instead of guesses, reproducible by anyone.
RPL holders The 1.94M RPL about to become unstakeable and the RPL freed under phase 1 are quantified.

Costs

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

$750, or less if the GMC thinks that’s right, a microgrant is fine. Address: 0xbb39ce95778f2ba458a9475676c9e128ef2465f8 (RPL or USDC).

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).

No. Not a GMC member, haven’t nominated one, no GMC member benefits.

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Notice: This message marks the closing of the forty first (41) round of Rocket Pool retrospective award applications. Any applications submitted after this will not be considered for this round.