RPL Defi - Rocket Pool DeFi Market Opportunities
[Placeholder – I think this is still in a draft stage??]
Kill the Premium
This is paying out about the same as a premium of 0.417%. In chat, I’ve seen folks saying they’re waiting for 1% or similar a number of times. That was with it being instantaneous. With the “wait for a year” and “be locked in for a year” components, I’m guessing this just isn’t enough to get anyone to act. This is my big point, and the rest are much smaller. I simply don’t think this will move the needle.
The rETH value paragraph assumes the DP is non-empty. If it’s empty for 11 of 12 months, it goes from 1 in 9 needed to break even to 12 in 9 needed to break even (aka, guaranteed losing even without any sock puppets; I do think the need to have extant nodes is a strong disincentive vs sock puppets, even if imperfect and not repeatable).
Bankless Academy
This feels a lot like coinbase earn stuff. I’ve clicked through those and can’t even tell you the names of the things I looked at. This has more since it has an onchain quest, but nonetheless. I would point to the rabbithole quest that saw our number of unique minters spike up, but did absolutely nothing to rETH supply (see “rETH Supply vs Time” and “Unique Minters vs Time” on 2022-08-31 at https://dune.com/drworm/rocketpool).
I also have questions on the lesson like: why does the merge matter anymore, do people need to know validator details to hold an LST (to me one of the benefits is that you get to keep higher level), what is a green payment network, what is a 33% attack (I’m only aware of a self-defeating one that causes temporary delays), etc. The rETH component seems quite small – maybe the 33% bit (clearly aimed at Lido) and our little section at the end (maybe 10-20% of the lesson?).
Anyhow - I see little value for $25k. If we want more bankless audience eyes on rETH, I’d suggest normal ad space over this.
SphereX-Protect
I am extremely dubious of the claims here. In the end, everything has to go through logical checks to determine whether to revert. The idea that a high-level offchain ML thing can better judge what these checks are and execute them in realtime, on any contract, on the EVM, for acceptable gas costs… I don’t buy it at all. I am also guessing this needs admin level privileges, so I might actually end up thinking we’re at more risk after than before. Anyhow. Would need a lot more reason to trust this than my 5 minute browse got me before I’d trust billions of dollars of protocol to it.
RocketPool Tokenomics Simulator
As I said in their initial forum post, I don’t think they’ve got the appropriate foundation yet. The conclusions they’ve noted as learnings are things that a strong fraction of the discord server has known for months/years.
Their response back to me on the forums shows a belief that we need to incentivize adding more RPL than the minimum. That doesn’t help the protocol grow, it’s pure pumponomics. It looks like the community is prioritizing growth (see Snapshot).
This is secondhand, but a summary of their twitter spaces chat claimed their recent analysis suggests that nodes require an attractive rpl Apr to maintain the 10% exposure. It does not show that. In the same response linked above, they note that this is for going beyond the 10%.
I can’t recommend this spend.
Rocket Pool Sabbatical
Cool idea at a high level. I’d like to see this get more discussion and work.
It’s not clear to me if this should be through the GMC, though that’s the closest thing we have right now. It’s not clear to me that we wouldn’t get in trouble via popularity contest. It’s unclear to me that we have many that would really take a sabbatical.
I’m also a bit worried about overhead and competing with ourselves here. Eg, I could make a retro for RPIP work, or I could not do that and try to fund via sabbatical (and apply for a retro if not chosen). If the “CV of unreimbursed activities” is similar to retro applications, what are we earning by doing it this way? A major thing that could be cool here is if was totally open ended – no CV, no nothing – just trust engendered by past contributions. There’s worries about double dipping etc there too ofc.
Part of me goes “let’s do the appreciation titles (via vote) and leave the rest to grants/bounties/retros”.