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.
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.  |
| 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.