Round 7 - GMC Call for Retrospective Awards - Deadline Is December 10

Grants / Bounties
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This thread is for applications for Rocket Pool’s November 11, 2023 - December 31, 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] 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 December 10, 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 expected schedule for round 7:

  • Application Period (November 11th - December 10th)
  • Application Discussion Meetings - one for each subcommittee (December 14th - December 18th)
  • Negotiation Period (December 19th - December 25th)
  • Scoring Deadline (December 26th)
  • Final Voting Amendments, Discussion and Finalization (November 27th - December 30th)
  • Award Announcement (December 31st)

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

| 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 how does this help the Rocket Pool community? |
| RPL holders |  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).
1 Like
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/node_tvl_vs_collateral RocketWatch command

Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?

@Patches @ patches.eth

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.

I’ve added a command to Rocket Watch that draws heatmaps of eth stake vs collateral percent.

It took about 1 person-day. I spent a little longer because I simultaneously fixed /collateral_distribution to reflect Atlas (previously it did not take leb8s into account, and conflated borrowed/bonded).

As I understand it, this is the first visualization that shows these particular data.

image
image640×960 111 KB

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 https://github.com/InvisibleSymbol/rocketwatch/blob/main/LICENSE

Benefits - enter N/A where appropriate

Group Benefits
Potential rETH holders N/A
rETH holders N/A
Potential NOs I’ve seen some potential NOs ask what amount of collateral people typically opt for. Previously, we didn’t have the data in an easy to interpret format.
NOs NOs can now see exactly where their node fits in the scatter plot. This tells them if they are an outlier in their configuration, or closer to the average.
Community This feature was requested by #trading members of trading and prioritized (for me) in a poll.
RPL holders N/A

Payment

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

$600

Conflict of Interest

None

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).

None

1 Like
3

RP Book

Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?

@Patches @ patches.eth

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.

https://book.sprocketpool.net/

I built and hosted a community site to act as a link aggregator.

It took around 2 days. I specifically built it to be community-maintained, with automated deployments and hands-off moderation.

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?

MIT License - https://github.com/jshufro/rp-book/blob/master/LICENSE

Benefits - enter N/A where appropriate

Group Benefits
Potential rETH holders Probably N/A, small chance they may find it and find it useful before buying rETH. I link to Dune dashboards and various useful media.
rETH holders Same as Potential rETH holders.
Potential NOs The Node Operation section highlights the great community tools that make RP NOing smooth.
NOs Same as potential
Community N/A
RPL holders N/A

Payment

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

$1000

Conflict of Interest

None

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).

None

2 Likes
4

RPIP-30 preview trees

Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?

@Patches @ patches.eth

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.

and

Over about 2 days of work, I implemented RPIP-30’s post-phase-in state in treegen, and created two alternative-history trees for interval 15.

These aimed to answer the question, “all else held equal, what would rewards for every node look like if RPIP-30 was already enacted and past its phase-in”.

I believe they helped the community understand the shape of the rewards curve, and the tangible incentives the new tokenomics would create, reducing confusion during the vote.

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?

Has been released without a license, in that the forum posts link to my diffs in smartnode.git

Benefits - enter N/A where appropriate

Group Benefits
Potential rETH holders N/A
rETH holders N/A
Potential NOs N/A
NOs A resource to help in a major governance vote.
Community N/A
RPL holders RPL holders who pay active attention could see how inflation, which devalues their RPL, is being spent under the new proposal, compared to under the status quo.

Payment

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

$1000

Conflict of Interest

None

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).

None

2 Likes
5

low quality posting with impunity. redirect ban to Patches. ty.

2 Likes
6

Please do not ban me nor @Snocones I needed someone to post before I could post a 4th RA application.

Treegen v8 Thoughts / Spec Proposal

Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?

@Patches @ patches.eth
Knoshua
Valdorff
Ramana

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 document was prepared in anticipation of RPIP-30’s ratification, and outlines my analyses of the various options for the next treegen spec, which will (most likely) incorporate the changes RPIP-30 prescribes.

I offer my opinion of 3 possible options and recommend a specific strategy, describe the specific changes needed for the treegen spec as well as the a recommendation for the merkle tree json.

I spent about 1 day on it. I had help from the other people mentioned-
Knoshua, Ramana, and Val all provided feedback at various stages.

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?

Has been released without a license. I have an implementation of the ln function as specified in the document that is not released but available upon request.

In the case of specifications, it is often healthier to release a specification without an implementation, so independent parties can create unbiased implementations.

Benefits - enter N/A where appropriate

Group Benefits
Potential rETH holders N/A
rETH holders N/A
Potential NOs N/A
NOs Hopefully this work helps with the lift required to implement the changes prescribed by RPIP-30, for which the pDAO (NOs) have voted heavily in favor
Community N/A
RPL holders N/A

@jcrtp is the main audience for this document, if the GMC wishes to get a sense of how helpful it is, ultimately that is down to his opinion.

Payment

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

Patches: $300
Ramana: $100
Val: $100
Knoshua: $100

Conflict of Interest

None

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).

None

3 Likes
7

Do it,

Faster stronger bigger better

2 Likes
8

Committee Membership Record (RPIP-36)

Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?

GovAlpha (@LongForWisdom, @Prose11, @Patrick_J)

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 retro covers the drafting, coordination and submission of RPIP-36.

RPIP-36 is a Living Informational RPIP that records the committees and roles defined by the pDAO, relevant links and resources, their current membership and their historic membership.

Relevant links:

This work took ~8 hours total over 2 weeks.

  • 1 hour planning
  • 3 hours for a first draft
  • 1 hour updating GMC records + minor fiddling.
  • 1 hour discussion + gathering feedback.
  • 2 hour feedback changes, polish, etc.

The maintenance plan for this is currently: ‘LFW will do while he’s around, but officially RPIP editors are supposed to maintain.’ Given the maintenance is not difficult or time consuming, I’m happy to just handle it without worrying about payment.

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, CC0.

Benefits - enter N/A where appropriate

Benefits here are not easily measured, but are widely identical across the relevant groups: This RPIP provides a more accessible insight into the function and structures of the Rocket Pool DAO than was previously available.

For the active community especially, this RPIP provides a way to get up to speed, find resources they may need access to, and generally engage with and understand the existing groups and roles.

I also feel that it will be quite valuable for onboarding when new community members join the DAO. Something like this would have helped us when we were getting up to speed.

Payment

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

$800 in some stable token (LUSD / USDC / DAI)

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 conflicts of interest.

3 Likes
9

RPL Defi - Rocket Pool DeFi Market Opportunities

Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?

EthereumStakingGuide.com’s team (Kent Philly & Sunshine).

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.

The Rocket Pool DeFi document (www.RPLdefi.com) has beeb updated with new market rates and opportunities bi-weekly and/or weekly for the last two months. After the rates were updated, the information was shared on X, Medium, Youtube, and Discord. Videos Updates, Blog posts, and weekly updates were tested out for a month. The videos, blog posts, and weekly updates were stopped after not getting enough attention. Market Updates and X Threads continue on.

How-To guide Video for providing rETH and wETH on Balancer on Arbitrum created - [Youtube link] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kK7_VjFcu4)

[X Post Example - Nov 2nd & Nov 25th Updates] (https://x.com/ETHstakingGuide/status/1720558774677569639? and https://x.com/ETHstakingGuide/status/1728600722433011999?)

Blog #1 Example - October 6th Update

[Market Update Youtube Example - Oct 22nd] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WibnSwCm_2U)

Are the subjects of this award entirely open source ([MIT]

Yes

Benefits - enter N/A where appropriate

Group Benefits
Potential rETH holders Education on current rETH APY and additional yield opportunities in DeFi
rETH holders Education on current rETH APY and additional yield opportunities in DeFi
Potential NOs N/A
NOs N/A
Community Education on DeFi opportunities and How to take advantage of them within the RP community
RPL holders Education and information on how to earn additional yield on RPL if not staked

Payment

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

This project used to pay 4 RPL or $100 a month for bi-weekly updates. More information and updates have been added to the updates so each update takes 1.5-3 hours of work and we are requesting 2.5 RPL per update.

We are requesting payment for the content created per piece of content.

Blog Post - 1.5 RPL
Market Summary Update Video - 3 RPL
How-To Guide Video: 5 RPL
X Thread - 1 RPL

6 Updates were performed over 2 months with the addition of 3 summary videos, 1 how-to guide video, 3 summary blog posts, and 6 X Threads.

6 RPLDeFi Updates - 15 RPL
3 Market Summary Videos - 9 RPL
1 How-To Guide - 5 RPL
3 Blog Posts - 4.5 RPL
6 X Threads - 6 RPL

With the above payment levels per piece of content and 2.5 RPL per update to RPLDeFi.com the total request is for 39.5 RPL.

Conflict of Interest

Kent is on the GMC and will abstain from voting on this grant.

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).

Kent Philly also is a grant manager for BlockSwap DAO (StakeHouse Liquid ETH staking). Their community is small and wants to partner with Rocket Pool rETH holders so I see synergies while also acknowledging that there is conflict of interest.

Thank you.

10

Governance facilitation

Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?

Valdorff

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 covers routine RPIPs I’ve facilitated since the last governance facilitation award.

  • RPIP-19
    • S: fresh RPIP - some discussion around details with community and team
  • RPIP-20
    • S: adds two bullets to IMC charter, some discussion around details with community. (20 post thread, some discord)
  • RPIP-21:
    • XS: got community discussion and support; 10 post forum thread
    • ended up getting aborted after team clarification – changed to an informational RPIP to have a reference in the future
  • RPIP-28
    • S: fresh RPIP, some discussion around details with community (20 post thread, some discord)
  • Governance digest
    • There have been 5 separate times when there’s been enough governance stuff ongoing that I’ve kept and broadcast a summary to help people be able to follow it all.

Note: I am explicitly leaving off RPIP-4 voting body resolution and RPIP-30. I will be posting something for those, but they seem too large to include in a bundle.

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

Benefits - enter N/A where appropriate

I don’t want to claim the contents of the RPIPs as benefits here, though there’s plenty. The award here is meant to cover the effort to get from “casual idea that gets tossed out in discord” to something that can be voted on. The main benefits I’ve provided:

  • A concrete starting point
  • Active encouragement to discuss and give feedback on both discord and forum
  • The brunt of RPIP writing and formalizing
  • Aid for tracking ongoing governance
  • The brunt of vote text writing

Sorry for not using the template tablet, I don’t think this fits well into those categories.

Payment

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

$1500-$2000 sounds reasonable.

We’ve previously done $500 per vote. These are a little smaller on average. The vote text work has improved in quality a lot and the digests have been much more important in this timeframe imo.

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
11

Smartnode Rescue Node Addon

Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?

patches.eth

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.

I spent a few hours (3ish) adding an Addon to smartnode to make it easier to connect and disconnect from the rescue node.

Since the rescue node provides users with a BN URI, which is theoretically all they should need, i consider this work to be 100% smartnode work and not related to the development of the rescue node itself.

PR 1: Add a Rescue Node add-on to make it easier for people to connect and … by jshufro · Pull Request #402 · rocket-pool/smartnode · GitHub
PR 2: Update Rescue Node plugin to add details to 'node status' output by jshufro · Pull Request #415 · rocket-pool/smartnode · GitHub

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?

Smartnode is GPLv3

Benefits - enter N/A where appropriate

Group Benefits
Potential rETH holders Meaninglessly improves the APR through easier node operation
rETH holders Meaninglessly improves the APR through easier node operation
Potential NOs Easier emergency remediation options decrease trepidations
NOs Easier emergency remediation
Community N/A
RPL holders N/A

Payment

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

$200

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).

N/A

12

Fix truncation of user-settings.yml by smartnode when ~/.rocketpool device is full

Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?

patches.eth

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.

PR: https://github.com/rocket-pool/smartnode/pull/411

Basically, smartnode had an issue that would manifest when a NO’s disk filled up.

If they ran rocketpool s c and saved, their settings would get erased from disk, and then writing the new settings would fail, leaving their node unconfigured. When this happened, their only recourse was to recover the smartnode backup settings file manually.

Because eth clients are wont to fill up the disk, this happened somewhat regularly, and delayed these NOs from coming back online.

I resolved the issue by writing the new settings to a temporary file before replacing the old settings, so we fail before we erase when the disk is full.

I probably spent an hour here.

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?

Smartnode is GPLv3

Benefits - enter N/A where appropriate

Group Benefits
Potential rETH holders Meaninglessly improved apr
rETH holders Meaninglessly improved apr
Potential NOs Probably N/A unless they are monitoring #support for common issues
NOs Faster recovery from full disk, more robust smartnode
Community N/A
RPL holders N/A

Payment

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

$100

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).

N/A

13

IPFS CID calculator without web3storage dependencies

Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?

patches.eth

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.

I submitted https://gist.github.com/jshufro/ea077c953db93725c6be554fecb26666 to fornax to be incorporated in smartnode.

This gist demonstrates how to calculate an IPFS CID without actually uploading a file to IPFS, in the same manner that our existing implementation via web3storage works.

It was a blocker for removing web3storage from the stack, which has become a priority for the team since they announced the deprecation of their api.

While I consider this more of a research project, most of the code was copied verbatim into smartnode by fornax here: Remove web3.storage dependency by 0xfornax · Pull Request #414 · rocket-pool/smartnode · GitHub

NB that this PR has not yet been merged, but it is part of the team’s plan for resolving the web3storage dependency, which has an urgent deadline in January. Removing the dependency on their libary wasn’t strictly required to meet the deadline, but it has benefits-

  1. fewer external dependencies reduces the attack surface
  2. retired external dependencies are vulnerable to repojacking
  3. it proves that the migration away from web3storage is fully feasible

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

I’ve removed the table here- Joe and Fornax are the main beneficiaries, with node operators being secondary beneficiaries.

Basically, I took this off their plates.

Payment

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

$250

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).

N/A

14

This message marks the closing of the seventh round of Rocket Pool retrospective 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 December 31st. 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.