Retrospective Award:
Leading/Facilitating oDAO and pDAO Charter-Writing Process
Who is the proposed retrospective award recipient?
Valdorff
What specific project or work is the retrospective award in recognition of?
For much of 2022 and early 2023, if you’d asked the community what their top priorities for changing the RP protocol were, “reforming the oDAO” and more specifically “reducing oDAO pay” would surely have placed near the top of the list. While there was much talk on Discord (sometimes with and sometimes without pitchforks) about how the protocol was overpaying the oDAO, there was also a recognition that it would take significant work to not only reduce that pay but, more importantly, to establish baseline principles on which the oDAO and pDAO were functioning. It would also, as is often the case with DAOs, require a policy entrepreneur to own the issue and put in the work to get the disparate entities of the oDAO, the Team, and the pDAO on board.
During the 3 months of the process - from conception through to multiple rounds of drafting and a number of real time calls (4 with the oDAO charter working group and a couple of smaller ones with subsets), Valdorff gave his time and energy to start the process and keep it moving. While the final version of the document reflects collaboration and compromise on the part of many oDAO and Team members, much of the actual drafting of it was done by Valdorff, in much the same way that the Declaration of Independence (sorry, sorry, it’s my day job) reflected the will of the Continental Congress and the drafting committee but was mostly written by Jefferson.
In talking with several people who were privy to the oDAO discussions, it is clear that Valdorff played a crucial role in establishing the goals, facilitating compromises, and making sure all parties (including the pDAO) were satisfied with the result. From the pDAO’s perspective, the amount of work that Val put in to interacting with the community through both Discord threads (such as Discord) and forum posts (such as oDAO charter draft and more) was substantial. The resulting oDAO and pDAO charters are seminal protocol documents that would not have come about in the same form, and certainly not in the same timeline, without Valdorff’s work.
Without Val, this work would’ve taken a lot longer and been significantly riskier in terms of creating serious resentment (note that large amounts of resentment from either pDAO or oDAO prior to having defined duties and values could present an existential threat). I would note that Valdorff was uniquely positioned to play the role:
- Incredibly active in pDAO governance
- A member of the oDAO through his RS seat
- A working relationship with the oDAO and dev team
- Temperamentally suited to facilitating compromises
- Engenders trust from multiple parties
- Willing to stand in the way of metaphorical pitchforks to promote cooperation and prevent the process from derailing
Are the subjects of this award entirely open source (MIT, GPL, Apache, CC BY license or similar)?
Yes (or N/A)
Benefits - enter N/A where appropriate
How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given help people looking to stake ETH for rETH?
The answer to each of these sections is the same, so I will answer it once here and then write “see above”. The work that Val did on establishing oDAO/pDAO charters and reducing oDAO’s share of inflation has had numerous positive knock-on effects for various protocol stakeholders. Having foundational documents for both DAOs that establishes the visions, duties, and responsibilities of both DAOs is crucial to the smooth functioning of the protocol in the years ahead. It engenders community and external trust in the functioning of Rocket Pool. More immediately, the reduction in oDAO’s share of inflation allows the pDAO to do more - more incentives, more grants, more RAs, more of whatever the pDAO believes is necessary to help potential and current stakers, potential and current node operators, the RP community, and RPL holders.
How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given help rETH holders?
See above.
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?
See above.
How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given help people already running a Rocket Pool node?
See above.
How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given how does this help the Rocket Pool community?
See above.
How did the project or work for which the retrospective award would be given how does this help RPL holders?
See above.
Payment
How much USD $ is the applicant requesting be awarded to the recipient?
I believe there’s a pretty broad range this could be priced in, but given the importance of it to the pDAO, I am requesting on the high end of the range: $50,000. This is a tough one to put a price on, although I say that in literally every one of these. I can think of two different ways to approach it and they both gave me approximately the same number.
The first would be to think about how much extra the pDAO now receives as a result of the speedy completion of the oDAO revisions and the reallocation of oDAO pay to the pDAO. In the first rewards period since the implementation of RPIPs 23, 24, and 25, the pDAO received an extra 5171 RPL. It is hard to know the counterfactual of how much longer the process would have taken without Valdorff’s facilitation (let alone how much more divisive it might have been), but it seems reasonable to assume it is at least 6 months. Therefore the pDAO has received an extra 31,000 or so RPL than it would have in part because of Val’s work on this issue. In USD terms, the 2 periods that have been paid out amount to ~$250,000 (at $28.20 and $22.40 respectively). Assuming similar valuations going forward, a 6-month delay would be over $750,000 that the pDAO receives. I believe 5-10% ($37,500-$75,000) is a reasonable share of that savings as an RA for the person most responsible for it happening in a timely manner (which is to say regardless of whether one thinks it would have happened eventually or not, just the fact that it happened at the speed and time it did has given the pDAO more funds to work with). Note also, that this is focused strictly on the revenue benefit – while it may be more abstract, having clear foundational documents is incredibly valuable both internally and externally.
The second method, and one that I used internally when on the GMC for evaluating RAs, is to consider how much we would have been willing to pay a grant for similar activities (maybe with an added bonus for the fact that we know it’s been completed and completed well). If someone had offered in March to deliver to the pDAO an oDAO Charter, pDAO Charter, and a significantly reduced oDAO share of inflation in just 3 months with buy in from the oDAO, from the Team, and from the pDAO, and do it with a minimum of recriminations and dissatisfaction, I think we would have been quite happy to pay $50,000 for that.
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 was a former member of the GMC, though the subject of the request (Valdorff) has never been a GMC member. Several current GMC members are also on the oDAO in their role as Rocket Scientists and thus there may be a slight conflict of interest, though if anything it would bias them against the proposal (since the RS oDAO seat gets paid less now thanks to this RA) rather than in favor of it. FWIW, as the proposer I do not believe this to be an issue and do not believe they need to recuse themselves from the discussion - if anything, they have a better insight into the work Valdorff did in private oDAO channels than I do. One other conflict of interest which has popped up in the three days I’ve been drafting this - last night Valdorff left a comment endorsing the RA I submitted for myself for GMC work. I wanted to be explicit in saying that I started working on this prior to knowing he was going to do that and that there was no discussion about any sort of quid pro quo for nominating/supporting each other. I believe we both have strong enough reputations in the community for our integrity and transparency that that’s a credible claim, but I thought it important to explicitly make it.