Round 8 - GMC Call for Retrospective Award Applications - Deadline is January 14

Grants / Bounties
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This thread is for applications for Rocket Pool’s December 10, 2023 - January 28, 2024 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 January 14, 2024 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 8:

  • Application Period (December 10th - January 14th)
  • Application Discussion Meetings - one for each subcommittee (January 18th - January 19th)
  • Negotiation Period (January 18th - January 23rd)
  • Scoring Deadline (January 23rd)
  • Final Voting Amendments, Discussion and Finalization (January 24th - January 26th)
  • Award Announcement (January 28th)

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

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?

### Is the applicant requesting RPL or LUSD?

## 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).
2

Management Committee Gas Reimbursement

Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?

The 25 management committee members who have personally funded gas expenses for executing transactions on behalf of the GMC/IMC since the inception of these committees, encompassing both current and former members.

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.

GMC has at least two transactions per month, one for treasury diversity, and one for payments. Meanwhile, the IMC has to regularly execute transactions to manage liquidity incentives. Members are required to use their personal funds to execute transactions.

Payment

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

I estimate the payout to be $400 ~ $1,500 total. This will fluctuate depending on the RPL / ETH ratio.

This dune analytics dashboard shows all gas expenses from both the IMC and GMC safe:

I propose to reimburse each member on a dollar-for-dollar basis, calculating their ETH spent to RPL (two decimals) at the time of payout.

For example:
0xf280ef6d278a485f6feb9d3242fd65d09633ec33 has 0.119582631452897 in gas fees.
They would be paid 8.54 RPL if the RPL / ETH ratio is 0.014 at the time of payout.

Is the applicant requesting RPL or LUSD?

RPL

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).

I am on the GMC and would be receiving reimbursement for the amount I have spent on gas. There will be several other members of the GMC being reimbursed as well.

2 Likes
3

RPL Staking Rework Research and Facilitation

Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?

@Valdorff @knoshua @epineph @sckuzzle @Pieter

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.

So. There was an enormous amount of engagement and discussion.
To help express how big this effort was, I spent ~4 hours just trying to figure out this application cuz there’s soooo much to even skim through. This is many hundreds of communal hours. I believe better-aligning our spend with rETH supply is extremely valuable, though I don’t think we’ll be able to get a concrete metric there at all.

Explicitly not included in this RA, despite being very important: discussion, opining, asking questions, etc. While this is awesome/critical, it doesn’t vibe as “work”.

The things that I’ll be counting are:

  • Delivered products for the discussion - draft text, plots, models, formulae, distilled writeups, etc
  • Discussion facilitation - this is the boring bits: answering questions for new joiners that have already been answered, finding links that are needed again, doing math to specifically answer someone’s question, peacekeeping, summarizing, polling, distilling, summarizing, chasing down loose ends, etc.
  • Hazard pay - it’s tough to express how aggravating it is to be told that you have ill intent towards RP or RPL when you are working hard for it. For me, personally, this kind of rhetoric is the biggest disincentive to doing significant work for RP. I’m adding this item here to be explicit to the pDAO: if contributors need to endure heavy negativity as part of the job, you (the pDAO) will need to literally pay for that. The alternative (which I like better) is improving tone as a community. Thanks to those that actively defended me – without you, I would be gone by now.

List of delivered products:

  • Knoshua’s pre-existing suggestions of “reward by minipool” and later “reward by borrowed ETH” models. These dramatically predate this work, maybe even before 2023.
  • Val wrote up a starting point with a proposed ruleset, the current ruleset, and knoshua’s. Alongside that, Val provided visualizations and some early thoughts about the systems.
  • Val added a model around the beliefs of those who might sell. Eventually this turned out to be too complex to follow. Essentially research-only.
  • Val added a model around the on-chain behavior of folks to date and thus the likely groups with incentive to sell after this change. This model was extremely useful and made nice pie charts.
  • Val made a calculator for people to check how their specific setup would fare after the changes (assuming context stayed constant).
  • Knoshua helped Val multiple times in his models including running code and a commit; having a reviewer was invaluable
  • Pieter wrote a really great steelman argument; mad props here – I asked and asked and asked for stronger steelman arguments and this was something that actually arrived
  • sckuzzle wrote an agent-based model and used it for a variety of thoughts. It was useful to some research folks, though I don’t think it got broader traction
  • sckuzzle proposed alternative RPL reward curves
  • epineph proposed alternative RPL reward curves
  • Val wrote the explanation document (over many iterations)
  • Val wrote the RPIP
  • Val wrote the vote text

Discussion facilitation

Val took on the most of this, but definitely not alone.
I skimmed through and found that the biggest other outliers were knoshua, epineph, and sckuzzle. Lots of honorable mentions including: Intelligent Investor, sadcuzz, david vi, woodenship, wander, mig – I am certain I’m missing some as I don’t want to spend too long on figuring out the past here.

Why is this work a big deal?

Let me start with these plots from the explanation document – we are more than doubling the spend towards incentivizing rETH creation via new or more efficient minipools. Insofar as that is important to the pDAO, this was a massive step.

image
image1029×411 57.3 KB

RPIP-30 was the largest proactive step we’ve taken recently. As I’m sure people are aware, RP has recently (after RPIP-30, actually) become very aware that competition is coming and we need to be proactively being the best we can be (shoutout to the Rapid Research Incubator, eg). In addition to any direct impact RPIP-30 has, I think there was a lot of important work done in terms of addressing anxiety towards change and balancing that with the need to be proactive (as reactive may be too late).

This was a lot of work. It was fun at times and unpleasant at times. It got (imo) a strong outcome. As I’ve noted before, the GMC’s goal is to signal what it (as a proxy for the pDAO) values such that future contributors do more of that. Hoping this falls in that boat.

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?

Much of the work here is of a different genre than covered by open/closed source (eg “facilitating discussion”).

Val’s delivered products and associated source code are at https://github.com/Valdorff/rp-thoughts/tree/main/rpl_staking and covered by GPLv3.

The delivered products from Pieter and epineph were highly specific to this discussion, so their status is immaterial (and unknown to me or I’d include that :P). sckuzzle has posted outputs and not their model’s code insofar as I know – I have counted the contribution with that in mind as specific outputs for the discussion and not the underlying model (which may be reusable).

Benefits - enter N/A where appropriate

Group Benefits
Potential rETH holders Spending more on rETH supply should help with rETH availability (at the NAV rate)
rETH holders -
Potential NOs Greater rewards for rETH supply creation. Expands the universe of potential NOs somewhat, by increasing the rewards of nodes with lower RPL staked per rETH supply (aka borrowed ETH).
NOs Encouraged to bond reduce if they haven’t by greater rewards. More rewards for the NO, and more rETH supply. Woo.
Community Showed that we’re willing to make changes to better support our end goals as a community. Showed that we’re willing to respectfully discuss, model, disagree, find compromise, etc. :muscle:
RPL holders This work supported rETH supply, which in turn supports RP TVL (especially when, as we are now, we are supply-limited). Insofar as RPL success depends on RP success, then this helps RPL holders.

Payment

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

$7000 to Val for work
$1000 to Val as hazard pay
$1000 to knoshua
$500 to epineph
$500 to sckuzzle
$250 to Pieter

I’m very open to community feedback here.

Is the applicant requesting RPL or LUSD?

RPL

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 from myself. Note that @epineph is a member of the GMC.

3 Likes
4

Miscellaneous work by Patches during Round 8

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.

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 - smartnode is GPLv3

Benefits - enter N/A where appropriate

Only NOs

Payment

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

11.8 hours at $80 - total $944

Is the applicant requesting RPL or LUSD?

No preference. RPL if evenly convenient for 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).

No

1 Like
5

Treegen work by Patches during Round 8

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.

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 - smartnode is GPLv3

Benefits - enter N/A where appropriate

Only NOs

Payment

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

6 hours at $80 - total $480

Is the applicant requesting RPL or LUSD?

No preference. RPL if evenly convenient for 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).

No

1 Like
6

CID work by Patches during Round 8

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.

5 hours total

Following testing on Holesky, Fornax identified that the oDAO wasn’t coming to consensus. Joe messaged me about some behavior in my previous contribution of the CID calculator, and I discovered a few bugs had been introduced since the contribution (note- I do not want to point fingers, but I feel it is important the GMC knows I not adding bugs and then billing for the fixes- these bugs were not authored by me, though insofar as I believe bugs that make it into master are the collective responsibility of all who maintain a project and review its pull requests, I am not fully excused from responsibility).

I added an abstraction that makes the code “easier to hold” as we like to say (less likely to be used in a way that produces undesirable results). I also added some unit tests to smartnode to ensure that the abstraction remains intact and that the CIDs we get from the calculator match expectations.

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 - smartnode is GPLv3

Benefits - enter N/A where appropriate

  1. Resolved an issue threatening consensus for interval 18, like, just in time
  2. Code quality and reliability improvements for watchtower (odao) code

This one, again, is most benefiting Joe and Fornax, who have been scrambling.

Payment

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

5 hours at $80 - total $400

Is the applicant requesting RPL or LUSD?

No preference. RPL if evenly convenient for 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).

No

1 Like
7

Notice: This message marks the closing of the eighth 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 January 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.