In order to keep the application threads clear of discussions (to make it easier for committee members to read and score them), please use this thread for any and all questions and discussions of round 8 period of grant, bounty, and retrospective award applications.
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Does Anthias.xyz have a misunderstanding of how our voting works? It seems like they donāt understand the snapshot data saying only 20,000 rpl votes.
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Hey - thanks for reading through our proposal. We have since shifted away from this proposal in light of Rocket Pool having this governance delegate dashboard: https://delegates.rocketpool.net. However, we hope to apply with a separate idea soon.
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@Anthias.xyz Does that mean you wish to withdrawal your delegate dashboard proposal?
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Hey @ShfRyn - yes it does
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Grants
Rocket Rescue Node Renewal
Please fund. It is a significant community resource and befit.
Rocket Fuel Renewal
Please fund. Valuable for community alignment and knowledge.
Retros
RPL Staking Rework Research and Facilitation
I see this retroactive reward request as two things
- Retroactive Payment for great work - Please fund but modify line item language
- Bringing to light changes are needed as a community to encourage an environment of being awesome to one another in time of contentious change - Needs another mechanism or avenue
I strongly favor folding in the hazard pay addition to the Val line item or reframing it into some type of bonus language. Then asking and offering an additional adder on top of it all for a short debrief ($200 - $369 $āBā-āniceā? prep and work) on one of the bi-weekly community calls and/or a Rocket Fuel mini-segment should a party member be up to the task. Good parts, pain points, and thoughts about what one or two things people may do to help with process, communication and community going forward. A nice sandwich.
Context
The request is quite a reasonable ask for the research and facilitation of getting a significant and widely approved improvement to incentive alignment for the protocol. More so than that, it felt like it was the first husky through the snow providing a path and direction that will make it easier for governance to have positive and significant impact in the future. By no means it is it a clean path as yet, but there are now tracks in the snow to follow.
Hazard pay as a line item doesnāt feel as it if it will bring about positive change or make up for the cost. The pain and heartache is clear to me. Pulling the sled is impressive enough. To have squirrels ridding that sled throwing nuts at the leads, instead of offering kibble or providing lights ahead, is disheartening to say the least. It is a real and personally felt cost. On the other hand Iād hazard compensation in USD value will neither make up for actual struggle, beyond being a symbol, much less prevent it in the future. Hazard pay is just not a great mechanism in this context.
The monetary incentive of hazard pay provides no disincentive to those who are uncivil. I can be a jerk and have the vast majority of the cost paid by everyone else. Such a thing may actually encourage greater uncivility. Kindness and building social norms for a given context is done by action and speech over time. Putting this callout of pain in an aggregated group payment or buried in a DAO message board about public good funding will make it mostly unheard. It will not be felt by those who would most benefit to hear it. The message will be lost in the next snow fall. It would do well for it to be spoken and heard on a community call, but thatās a lot to ask.
Management Committee Gas Reimbursement
Please fund.
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We are a bit confused about the first question. Could you please better explain the first question āWhat examples do you have of your community following today?ā
Thank you,
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Hey @ShfRyn - just wanted to share that our new Anthias Labs x Rocket Pool proposal is now live. Just confirming that the old post from circa 3 weeks ago is still null and voidāour focus is on the new proposal. Looking forward to hearing the communityās thoughts
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Just confirming that the old post from circa 3 weeks ago is still null and voidāour focus is on the new proposal.
Confirmed. 
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Commenting on @Valdorff 's proposal (RPL Staking Rework):
I support this grant and think this grant should be higher (at least double). In general I think RP needs to incentivize change and improvements. This feels like relatively low to pay out for the amount of effort that was involved as well as the risk that it (or the subsequent grant) would not pass.
A habit of paying people for researching, designing, proposing, and convincing the community of RPIPs should be adopted (and the payout should be proportional to the benefit it provides RP).
I acknowledge that we probably canāt incentivize this too much, as it may risk people pushing things in the hopes of getting paid. However, I donāt think this is a real problem unless we increase it significantly more.
Alternatively, it may point towards the need for hiring some kind of project manager that performs a similar role.
Conflict of interest: I am a named recipient of the grant
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Ser ā this is the point of the incentives. Unless you mean āpushing things that arenāt helpfulā, in which case I agree.
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Hey, here are the answers to these questions:
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What examples do you have of your community following today?
As an example, HashKey hosted Web3 Festival with Wanxiang Blockchain Labs, saw over 50,000 attendees, 300 speakers globally, 100 exhibitors and nearly 200 side events. Itās widely acknowledged as a breaking milestone for Hong Kongās Web3 industry.
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What examples do you have of success working with other projects to do educational onboarding in Asia?
We have collaborated with various projects in the blockchain space, such as Neo, Avalanche, and Flow, you have organized multiple brand promotion activities in recent years. These activities have focused on market-relevant topics and aimed to introduce public chains and encourage stakeholder engagement. As a result of these efforts, you have achieved significant outreach, reaching a diverse audience of over a hundred individuals. The effectiveness of these promotional campaigns has contributed to raising awareness about the public chains and fostering interest and participation in staking activities.
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How many new node operators, rETH investors, and/or projects do you expect to bring to the community with this grant?
As the focus of the grant is primarily on brand promotion and expanding awareness, it is challenging to provide a specific guarantee regarding the number of new node operators, rETH investors, or projects that will be brought to the community. While the grant aims to increase visibility and generate interest, the exact number of new community members or participants cannot be accurately predicted.
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Have you seen the Bankless Academy Quest that was funded in Round 6? If not, can you please review and see how your grant can use measurable gamification and your grant reward to be given to new community members directly? (aka if your grant asks for RPL or LUSD, 50% of the reward goes to new community members who perform measurable tasks?
We prioritize brand marketing over course production so we wonāt develop such a course. New community members who attended the event can receive the HashKey Group ecosystem ERC-20 token HSK, and HashKey DID designed for RocketPool.
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Here we goooooo. Might update this or add another based on further submissions.
[retro] Management Committee Gas Reimbursement
Makes sense, support
[retro] RPL Staking Rework Research and Facilitation
Conflict, Iām the main person here.
I wanted to note that the āRapid Research Incubatorā is struggling to get enough participation to even give out all the desired money and itās got like one day left to close. Iām worried weāre not effecting the behavior we want enough. I think this is a mix of awareness and $; GMC has an opportunity to show valuing the latter here.
[bounty] Rocket Layer - The Rocket Pool Eigenlayer Integration
I have two totally separate things Iām against.
First, letās pretend I like the end goal.
In this case Iām against spending on something that might not be used.
Iād want to see clear support from Eigenlayer (community? team? not sure who matters here) before spending.
Second, I donāt like the end goal.
Eigenlayer is dangerous and I think it runs counter to 3 of the pDAO charterās values:
- The pDAO SHALL prioritize protocol safety
- The pDAO SHOULD prioritize the health of the Ethereum network
- The pDAO SHOULD prioritize decentralization
5:
I strongly appreciate that the proposal has been drafted to protect rETH.
That said, right now it allows a 100% rug of NO ETH.
Eigenlayer currently has no AVSes running on mainnet. Even with them running, slashing is somewhat trust-based.
While NOs are making their own open-eyed choices, I donāt believe RP should help fund ādegenā behavior.
6:
If Eigenlayer is successful, they will give better APY to validators using Eigenlayer.
This means staking becomes more attractive, which means more validators.
This means lower pure staking rewards, which disincentivizes staking in the absence of Eigenlayer.
Pushing out safety maxis and ETH maxis is, imo, damaging to Ethereum health.
If Eigenlayer is successful, they will give better APY to validators implementing the most AVSes and getting the most delegations.
That is clearly centralizing.
Eigenlayer has been a bad actor so far imo.
- They have locked over a billion dollars without any intent to use it for anything yet.
- They are a key component of the harmful āpointsā fad, which has people locking TVL in early ruggable contracts based on the promise of points that are potentially related to potential future airdrops. This, to me, is very far from the ātrustlessā ethos we should aspire to.
- They have purposely caused confusion by referring to native restaking and LST delegation with the same word (restaking)
7:
I believe Eigenlayer is centralizing due to warping APY as described in the #6 section.
I believe LST delegation, is extremely centralizing.
See, eg, https://www.mintscan.io/cosmos/validators ā this is a network with a long history of airdrops to people using non-CEX, non-top-10 validators, but we still see the top 10 at 49% of stake.
Minor - question from another thread
The premise is that EigenLayer would add a smart contract to accept RP withdrawal addresses, and not just validator withdrawal addresses.
In that case, RP would have senior debt and Eigenlayer would have junior debt.
cc: @KentuckyFC
[grant] HashQuark
Dunno.
This is tough for me to value tbh. I struggle both to understand how many NOs and rETH holders we could expect per āunit of awarenessā and also how much āawarenessā weāll get from this specific effort.
Iād suggest thinking through things like āhow much impact do we think this will have vs running ads on and how much does that costā?
Beaconcha.in and r/cryptocurrency banner might be easy ones to look at.
[renew grant] Rocket Rescue Node
This thing is a great service.
Besu example showed it being a great service.
[grant] Keybox.AI
This team has provided no reason to expect them to be able to optimize what the core dev team has worked on.
There would be significant complexity to having this team make smart contract changes while the core dev team is working on features.
[renew grant] Rocket Fuel
The cost is significant. The community building is significant. I know some folks rely on this.
Iām not a user, so gonna go with āpass, lean positiveā.
[grant] Unhosted Wallet
High level the value is from the ā1-clickā walled garden. But Iāve never heard of this wallet, so I wouldnāt value the walled garden much. Eg, Iād rather tell people to go to cowswap than here and I donāt think many are starting here.
[grant] Audit of Rocket Split
The value of this has changed with the incoming āRPL withdrawal addressā feature.
In particular, itāll remain valuable for anything that has a split other than āRPL to RPL investorā and āETH to ETH investorā.
Iāve been reaaaally disappointed by interest in this (and the Myso version of contributing to another pesronās node).
It seems like thereās occasional interest, but not enough to likeā¦ act.
In the end, Iām ok with both ācutting lossesā and not funding, or funding based on still believing thereās latent demand.
[grant] rETH Restaking Analytics Platform
Against.
This information is Eigenlayer information, not RP information.
Itāll apply to every restaked LST, not just RP.
Eigenlayer itself has dashboards, which cover much of this (eg, the linked one has operator names, TVL, number of stakers; clicking in shows TVL per LST).
I suspect those will improve, get filters (eg per LST), etc.
Seems redundant and not-RP.
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Hey @Valdorff - Anthias Team here. While we obviously are not favorable of your review, we appreciate you reading through and caring about the quality of grants. We will reach out to you to discuss how to make this grant more valuable from your perspective.
Do you maybe mean
While I understand your other arguments against Eigenlayer, this one seems unfair/invalid. Basically the only thing that separates Rocket Pool and Eigenlayer in this specific regard is that we trust Rocket Pool (am a validator myself) and donāt trust Eigenlayer or even accuse them to be bad actors (I know little about them, so canāt judge).
All my opinion ofc: So, this is actually fair. Rocket Pool is preferentially competing vs solo staking by using leverage (borrowed ETH). It is in turn preferentially competed against by Lido and CEX staking because they have infinite leverage (itās all borrowed ETH without a bond). In a world where there were only solo stakers, RP would be the baddies. As it currently stands, we are not because people wanna liquid stake and the other options are worse for Ethereumās health. In fact, based on the existing context, I go so far as to say that staking with RP is better than solo staking ā if a potential aligned solo staker uses 32 ETH to make 3 LEB8s, that absorbs 72 ETH that would otherwise go to Lido and makes 3 validators that are independent and wonāt participate in a hypothetical cartel.
I donāt see an equivalent benefit for Eigenlayer here.
Posting on new bounties/grants/retros since my last post.
[bounty] Non-custodial Staking as a service
I wrote this. I would love feedback from others on the milestones (the first is meant to be quite easyā¦ itās a bit gamable however ā could ask for it to be 10 different known discord members maybe; the second is meant to be like āyouāve made it wooā) and the money (easy to argue higher or lower tbh).
[bounty] Treegen Testing Support
This feels essential at this point 
[renew grant] RP Community Call Hosting on Twitter Spaces
9 RPL/fortnight is just not a lot if itās bringing any community value, which Iām led to believe it does (despite almost never personally going).
[grant] Rocketpool Mechanistic Modeling Research: Universal Variable Commission
My take is a little nuanced here. I want the GMC to grant something, or work with sckuzzle on something to research. Supporting research is important and trying to tie the research into action (or from the opposite PoV, trying to derive action from research) is valuable.
My main concern is that the map is not the territory. I have real worries that reality will not play nice like a model. On the IMC, weāve seen periods of irrational behavior where options weād consider āsaferā got more yield (seemed to attract fewer market participants) for months. This is fine insofar as weāre still roughly right ā things move when expected, they move in roughly the direction expected, etc. Iām not even confident of that much though.
That said, as Iāve brought up in other discussions, we have to assume something, and roughly rational is the best weāve got. So my main question then ends up being not āshould we do thisā, but rather āshould we keep it somewhat shallowerā? If Iām right that modeling is only a very rough model for reality, then thereās no point refining it much. In other words, are we better off gunning for 2 quick iterations in a month and $16k rather than refinement at $30k? This need not mean less research funding total ā we can move to a new topic.
Miscellaneous work by Patches during Round 8
Little things that add up and a kind-to-the-dao rate.
Treegen work by Patches during Round 8
This is too low. BA052301 pays $1500 per spec for testing support. Patches did that, plus spec writing, plus working with joenax to get things merged. Itās true he had a lot of this figured out ahead from spec research which made the number of hours low, but I donāt think āwas very knowledgeableā should be held against him. I would be disappointed to see less than $1500, and could argue a little higher.
Miscellaneous work by Patches during Round 8
Again, a kind-to-the-dao rate. The timeliness here was really important. The first foray into adding unit tests is noteworthy. Iād pay a little extra to acknowledge. $500?
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Bounties
Rocket Layer
Fund it. Sounds like EigenLayer is open to considering accepting junior debt. Let node operators risk their collateral if they want, not our problem. Just the announcement that Rocket Pool node operators can join EigenLayer will attract a lot of interest. Letās jump on the hype.
Non-custodial Staking as a service
Fund it. Allnodes is great. Competition to Allnodes is even better. I think it makes sense to help bootstrap it, like Rescue Node started as a public goods service for Rocket Pool and now itās available to solo validators.
Treegen Testing Support
Fund it. Double it.
Grants
HashQuark
Ignore it. Sounds like a spam/grift. They canāt even spell Rocket Pool correctly. I havenāt seen these people on Discord and theyāll be responsible for creating branding for Rocket Pool and educational materials? When they use āRocketPoolās servicesā it sums up their understanding of Rocket Pool. Also theyād likely focus on promoting rETH while itās not a bottleneck right now. If this gets funded they should be compensated on impact e.g. they get their $30k if they can attribute x rETH deposts to their effrots or X node operators.
Rocket Rescue Node
Fund it. Itās such a useful and impactful project. Theyāve also been very humble and have only asked for the minimum. Give them $1000/m or more. They can use it for redundancy.
Keybox.AI
Ignore it. Sounds like spam. Nothing concrete in the proposal. They should be compensated on impact e.g. if they find something or detect a security issue and alert it before it happens then they get paid.
Rocket Fuel
Fund it. I watch almost all episodes. Itās part of the culture. Heās also been increasing the quality of the production. The best part is consistency. $6000/m sounds fair ($300 per episode assuming 20 episodes per month), $10k/m would be even better. Although you could argue heās already benefited more from it just by being an influencer (e.g. DIVA tokens).
Unhosted Wallet
Donāt fund it. Poor application (they canāt spell Rocket Pool properly and bad formatting). Itās also not clear what theyāre going to build exactly. Sounds like they want Rocket Pool to pay for the foundational work so that they can integrate rETH. Iāve never heard of this project so I donāt think we should fund it. Thereās no indication to me it looks promising so I donāt think the GMC should take the risk to fund it. They can add rETH and apply for a retroactive grant instead.
Audit of Rocket Split
Application doesnāt use the required template. Auditing costs more than the project itself. Idk. Since itās already built itād make sense to audit it but itās a lot and it goes to a 3rd party. Idk. Iād not fund it.
rETH Restaking Analytics Platform
Donāt fund it. The screenshot is nonsensical (look at the squiggly line of rETH holders). The official EigenLayer looks much nicer, has way more information and could easily add this. Iāve seen their previous work. Itās basic. No soul. Theyāre requesting $18k for a few screens. In comparison, Rocketscan got $70k.
RP Community Call
Fund it. Double the funding.
Rocketpool Mechanistic Modeling Research: Universal Variable Commission
Donāt fund it. Normally these things should get funded but they canāt even spell Rocket Pool properly. I also saw it as one of the options to get GMC funding from the rapid research incubator, I donāt understand why itās duplicated here.
Denver Lift-Off
Love it. Budget sounds reasonable. Because of serendipity I believe the protocol will get much more value out of it than what it costs. Iād say double the catering budget and make sure the food is great and the coffee is good.
Retros
Management Committee Gas Reimbursement
Fund it. Since GMC members are not paid this makes perfect sense.
RPL Staking Rework Research and Facilitation
Fund it. Double it.
Miscellaneous work by Patches during Round 8
Fund it. Triple it.
Treegen work by Patches during Round 8
Fund it. Pay him $5000 or even $10,000. Without him this would not have happened so soon. It felt like the team forgot to add this to their tasklist i.e. they prioritized the onging Smartnode v2 refactoring over this depite this passing the pDAO vote.
CID work by Patches during Round 8
Fund it. Double it.
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Thank you Val first off for contributing to the bounty and moreover for providing useful commentary for all.
On the first point, we have seen engagement from several Eigenlayer team members about their excitement regarding the idea on this forum and theirs. I have been privately engaging them on this idea for many months now and if the current response isnāt satisfactory I would be happy to go further. We have also seen strong demand for the use in our community and theirs given strong feedback on my Twitter thread and two polls Iāve done; one on Twitter and one on Discord.
Now for argument 2 regarding Ethereum health. I will respond in two views - first with the view that restaking is not inevitable and then with the view that it is inevitable. I believe the latter view, that restaking is inevitable, is the more likely world we are to occupy but for completeness, I will address both.
I believe this argument is ill fitting. The protocol overall is not damaged in the case of a node operator getting rugged. The protocol isnāt paternalistic in key management and we already have situations where node operators opt into trusted situations where they could get rugged. As long as there is no risk to the stability of the protocol or its existential survival, then the pDAO ought not to block node operators from degening, just as we donāt prevent rETH holders from degening. Further, I donāt think the moral question of ādegenā behavior should factor into what is funded vs not funded vs. protocol value. In this case, potential protocol value seems to outweigh moral hazard unless a concrete reason the protocol would not be secure is presented.
If we further take the view that restaking is inevitable, then with time the system ought to decentralize alongside ETH and rug risk to node operators eventually trends to zero a la the oDAO.
I agree with the general thrust of this idea, however, I believe there will be a strong cohort of solo stakers who never opt into Eigenlayer. Further, concerns around dominance will emerge as Eigenlayer approaches 33% of stake where social pressure should push back against further adoption. It is unclear how this will transpire, however, unless it hits massive dominance levels or attracts a large multiple of stake, then security maxis will not be pushed out. If Eigenlayer remains at a low dominance level and still attracts new operators to the network, that is a massive win.
If we take the view that restaking is inevitable and further that it will dominate massively, then Rocket Pool will be one of the services that bleed out for being security maxis. A world with a successful Eigenlayer is improved with a successful Rocket Pool co-existing.
On this topic of success, itās worth noting that we largely agree that CEX providers will not engage with Eigenlayer most likely and so this will disproportionately help the network defend against some centralization vectors.
I tend to agree. Eigenlayer is a dPoS system built on top of a PoS system. In the world where Eigenlayer is modestly successful, we still maintain a long tail of operators outside their scope. In the world where Eigenlayer is massively succesful, the world is still better off if RP is around to help. Currently, you cannot delegate to an entire network, but with future collaborations, we could have the delegation include networks like RP such that delegation isnāt always inherently centralizing.
That said, I think the network will tend towards some centralization from restaking. The cat is out of the bag and too many applications seem to be interested. My major concern is that we are in the world where Eigenlayer has massive adoption and no robust decentralization delegation option on it.
Yeah, they have done some questionable marketing things. Agreed on all three subpoints.
This section is largely a rehash of the earlier centralization tendency section, which I admitted is the likely outcome if Eigenlayer is successful. My response to that outcome was to suggest that the world will still net benefit if Rocket Pool is a successful protocol and option to delegate to within Eigenlayer.
If Eigenlayer is a dud and we enable opt in, then no harm no foul we lose out on some value and the network remains decentralized. In this world if we donāt opt in, we net ahead the cost of the bounty and some social capital.
If Eigenlayer is a modest success only and we enable opt in, then we may gain some small size to compete with stETH and the network remains decentralized. Solo stakers will only be slightly diluted. If we donāt opt in in this world, then we are largely insulated from any negative externalities.
If Eigenlayer is a large success and we enable opt in, then we may gain a large amount of size, but the network will lose some decentralization. However, early RP adoption will mean that RP could be a large network delegation and provide a significant amount of decentralization to Eigenlayer. The solo stakers will be painfully outcompeted including Rocket Pool nodes if we choose not to opt in. This would be the catastrophic route in which RP could bleed away to centralized opponents.
I argue that RPās adoption or rejection of Eigenlayer has no bearing on whether Eigenlayer itself will be successful. Thus, the above calculus tends towards acceptance to me with only very moderate risks and large upsize.
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