Round 5 - GMC Call for Retrospective Awards - Deadline is October 7

Grants / Bounties
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This thread is for applications for Rocket Pool’s September 10, 2023 - October 7, 2023 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 (link) 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 October 7, 2023 at 23:59 (11:59 PM) UTC will be considered. Any retrospective awards posted after that deadline will be carried over to the next grant period.

This is the second application period that will use the new revised process outlined in RPIP-26. This is the expected schedule:

  • Application Period (September 10th - October 7th)
  • Application Discussion Meetings - one for each subcommittee (October 9th - October 13th)
  • Negotiation Period (October 14th - October 22nd)
  • Scoring Deadline (October 26th)
  • Award Announcement (October 27th)

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

The Retrospective Award rubric involves scoring the following question on a 1 to 5 scale:

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

Please copy paste the template below into a reply. Answer the questions there, entering N/A where appropriate:

## 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?

## Benefits - enter N/A where appropriate

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

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

### 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?

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

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

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

## Payment

### 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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[Placeholder] Rocket Watch scam detection

Invis is still developing this feature further, so I’ll hold off on this RA submission for a future round.

Draft

Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?

@Invis

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.

Invis made a small addition to RW to help protect folks on our server. Modest amount of work, but impactful and proactive should both get rewarded. Hitting the values in the pDAO charter very hard.

See fake link detection

See reaction emoji spam

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?

GPLv3

Benefits - enter N/A where appropriate

Group Benefits
Potential rETH holders Less likely to get scammed – especially as a newbie on our discord
rETH holders Less likely to get scammed on our discord
Potential NOs Less likely to get scammed – especially as a newbie on our discord
NOs Less likely to get scammed on our discord
Community Less likely to get scammed on our discord; easier moderation; less urgency for community tagging of automatically tagged scams
RPL holders Less likely to get scammed on our discord

Note also some intangible benefits, like folks seeing the warnings knowing we as a community are trying to keep them safe.

Payment

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

TBD

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

1 Like
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RPIP-4 Ambiguity Resolution Vote Text Proofreading

Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?

@a35u

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.

For proof-reading the vote text created by @Valdorff [here].

More specifically, for identifying the issue of the implementation PR links being incorrect, as described in discord [here], when it had been missed by everyone else up to that point. The issue was fixed [here].

This deserves recognition due to the potential for this mistake to require a revote if it was discovered after the vote text was made live on snapshot. Governance in Rocket Pool is already effectively blocked by this issue, a situation which is already causing frustration. A revote could potentially have blocked governance for an additional 2 weeks.

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?

N/A

Benefits - enter N/A where appropriate

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

N/A

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

N/A

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?

N/A

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

N/A

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

Prevention of further governance deadlock as detailed above.

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

Prevention of further governance deadlock as detailed above.

Payment

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

I’ve no strong opinion on an exact number. Perhaps in the range of $50 - $500.

A higher award amount would better incentivise engagement with governance operation, even in cases where the topic is very meta. The potential negative impact of making this mistake could also have been quite high, which implies a higher amount.

A lower award amount is perhaps more appropriate given that the actual effort / time spent was quite low, and because spotting mistakes like this when you’re not specifically looking for them is a little like a roll of the dice.

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).

Nothing financial.

I’m one of the people that failed to spot the error. One could argue that I’m partially motivated to propose the retro to make up for having missed it, and would feel less embarrassed for having done so if some good came out of it.

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Name of Retrospective Award

Easy to spin up Rocket Pool Mini Pool on AVADO

Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?

AVADO AG

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.

We developed a Rocket Pool package designed to simplify running a Mini Pool and make the node management (like monitoring or adding more Mini Pools) much more convenient for non-technical users.
We started developing the package in December 2021 and released the first mainnet version in March 2022. It included the creation of a user-friendly UI, in-depth tutorials, YouTube videos showing how to use the package, and community forums for active discussions. From the day of releasing it to the dappstore on AVADO, we also maintained the package and updated it as frequently as Rocket Pool updated their node. (97 releases were created up until now with various improvements to the UI and updates of the node)

Are the subjects of this award entirely open source? If not, which parts will not be, why, and under what license will they be published?

Yes, the entire package is open-sourced under the Apache license, allowing for wide accessibility and future improvements by the community. The source code can be found here: GitHub - AvadoDServer/AVADO-DNP-Rocketpool

Benefits - enter N/A where appropriate

The main benefit is the ease of use. Creating a Rocket Mini Pool only takes a few minutes and the user does not have to have any technical knowledge.

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

Our solution is a tool for node operators and not directly for people staking ETH for rETH. There are of course indirect benefits for rETH holders because we add node operators to the Rocket Pool operator set, thereby increasing the quality of the network as a whole and increasing the decentralization goals of Rocket Pool.

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

As mentioned above - the AVADO efforts help grow the Rocket Pool node operator network, and each of these users also stakes both ETH and RPL - so it grows the overall TVL and thus captures more staking rewards for the protocol, which go to rETH holders.

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?

Our integrated wizard takes the user through the staking process and we created a comprehensive documentation that covered all the necessary steps in setting up a Rocket Pool node, thus reducing setup time and potential errors.

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

Even for experienced node operators, it is better if the maintenance of the package is taken care of by us. However, our “under the hood” optimization of all the components needed to run a Rocket Pool node (Execution client, consensus client, validator, MeV client) allows experienced node operators to improve the performance of the node.

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

By simplifying both the staking and node operation processes, we enhanced user experience and encouraged more non-rocket pool users to join the community and participate in the ecosystem, thus strengthening the network.
As our devices are run at people’s homes, we also contribute to decentralization as each node is in a different location, without any centralized access.

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

Our project directly contributed to the utility of Rocket Pool, driving demand for RPL tokens as we added new node operators to the system. In addition, the decentralized nature of AVADO is helpful for the recognition of Rocket Pool in the greater Ethereum community.

Payment

We are asking for a grant of 50,000 USD or equivalent in tokens. This includes the creation of the package as well as the maintenance since its release (march 2022)

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This message marks the closing of the fifth round of Rocket Pool retrospsective award 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 October 29. 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 .

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