Pre-Proposal - POKTscan Geo-Mesh Reimbursement

Proposals Pre-Proposals
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Hey @deblasis, great to see you on the forum!

While I agree that v0 is mostly in maintenance mode while v1 is being produced, geo-mesh was arguably one of the most significant v0 upgrades to protect against node centralization and preserving POKT’s collaborative node community.

There is history here that I think is important to understand. Over the summer, a few node providers figured out geo mesh, and developed their own closed-source clients. Their numbers put them 2x to 3x above everyone else, and some of those companies had the fastest node growth in POKT history. The node community was scrambling to figure out how it was being done. Since a few providers were getting 3x the rewards, the other node runners were now starting to get substantially less (on top of already challenging market conditions). Huge amounts of technical debt and resources was spent by many to try and figure out how to run nodes in a way to get that level of rewards.

This had a major tole on the node community as a whole, especially on the independent node running community. The few companies that figured it out started gaining market share and signaled no intent to explain, or much less open-source, what they were doing. Rewards become a black box in the community. Had POKTscan not dedicated their team to figuring it out, our node landscape would likely look very different. Over the summer many independent node runners gave up because there just wasn’t a way to compete. No doubt these few provider absorbed many of these demoralized node runners who didn’t have any idea how to compete.

Now, it’s perfectly fine that some providers found a market advantage and took full advantage of it. Kudos to them… no hard feelings what-so-ever, as they were making savvy business moves. But POKTscan’s geo-mesh leveled the playing field from a much larger node consolidation trend. Geo-mesh allows there to still be profitable independent node runners until v1 comes around. It was a significant investment to dive into core-code and figure it out themselves. They did so in a way that did not rely on heavy PNI’s involvement, thus not taking resources away from v1. I don’t believe PNI was involved in any way actually.

So while geo-mesh is strictly a v0 feature (from my understanding), it is vitally important that while the network is in v0 maintenance mode, we don’t consolidate into a few companies with closed-sourced clients. v1 will not have the intended impact if POKT’s decentralized, collaborative culture is demoralized into centralization. No other proposal has been more meaningful with preserving POKT’s node runners community.

I humbly disagree that geo-mesh is something we can live without. We need to protect POKT from centralization, especially from closed-sourced clients, regardless of if it is v0 or v1. The DAO should in-fact incentive innovations that bring equality and preserve the decentralized spirit, regardless of v0 or v1.

Regarding their asking amount, I’m withholding my opinion in the short term while I do background research.

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Thanks for your words @shane

So far, I know based on Core members of Pocket, v1 will not have/support something like Geo-Mesh as part of their code. So, we will extend current Geo-Mesh functionality to v1 asap it is ready to use/try on testnet.

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Hey @Jorge_POKTscan, glad to see this proposal up on the forum! Overall I support GeoMesh’s success and continued development.

I wanted to confirm on this thread, so everyone is aware, that GeoMesh/Global DNS is not a V1 feature. V1 will incentivize low latency through Geostaking. The number of GeoZones any actor can stake for is limited to one to incentivize real geographic distribution. This is another reason why GeoMesh as a “sidecar” to Pocket Core makes a lot of sense from the team’s perspective.

Since you noted that you will support GeoMesh through to V1 and potentially beyond, I think it would be good to be clear if POKTScan will be seeking additional reimbursement for GeoMesh in the future and that this grant only covers the deliverables outlined, or if the grant is also intended to cover initial deliverables + the ongoing support of GeoMesh over time. This will help the DAO and forum readers understand exactly what the funding is allocated for and what they can expect from the product, and their investment in its development, moving forward.

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Hey @shane, thank you so much for the wholesome and detailed reply! I really appreciate it.

I should probably clarify that what bugged me particularly was the amount of POKT in question.

I just felt uncomfortable because realistically I am not sure I’ll ever own even half that amount of POKT in my lifetime :sweat_smile:. I guess it’s only healthy to flag it even if there are no actionables (that I am not expecting anyway from anyone reading this).

Going a bit on a tangent, this conversation makes me wonder what would happen if I worked on something in my spare time (that solves a real problem/adds some feature) and submitted a proposal at some point. Would it be weird if that was coming from a V1 dev? Yes? What if I used an alias? :performing_arts:

Regardless, maybe I came across too aggressive in my message from earlier but I am just passionate and in all honestly, I am here because I care a lot about the success of the project.

Generally speaking, I know that there’s no such thing as fairness because it’s all about perspectives but similarly, I would be happy to be on the receiving end of a passionate “I strongly disagree with this proposal” and have a healthy conversation about it.

This is the beauty of what we are trying to build I guess…

@Jorge_POKTscan, nothing personal or demeaning of your work, of course, I hope you can understand where I am coming from.

That’s all. :v:

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Nah man, understand where you are coming from, but you also have to balance it with respect to the organization that you represent. This is the DAO paying contributors which is independent but could be inclusive of PNI employees being paid as well - that’s up to the voters.

Yes, a bit weird given your organization was given a lucratively amount of POKT from initial token genesis, PNF, and the DAO from the early beginnings. If you have questions on where that USD and POKT went, escalate to your EM and leadership first. I’m not opposed to it, but I do think we need to start diversifying into other communities first.

Anyhow - this conversation can easily derail really fast. If PNI protocol engineers or employees feel unfairly compensated (even after PEP-49), I think we should open up a conversation about that. Jinx has opened up some of these conversations already: Compensation Structure for DAO Contributors - #38 by Caesar

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Much thanks on this clarification. I think this is a very valid point, for both this proposal and the PoktFund LeanPOKT proposal for 7M POKT.

I personally am glad to hear v1 contributors join these conversations, as all contributors should be treated equally in the DAO. This was actually my central point, when LeanPOKT was asking for $2M prior to releasing their work.

Below was my primary point :point_down:

NOTE: I meant PNI, not PNF above.

This is very much why I believe there should be structures in place to evaluate the value of proposals. We do not want core devs to be underpaid compared to high rewards being given to other contributors. We don’t want a feature being added by a dev at PNI to be a Tuesday at work, while feature from another individual out of PNI being a multi-year salary.

In the past, many core contributors were POKT OGs, so they had bags of varying degrees. Now, many contributors to v1 are not OGs and are being vested over time their POKT (which is what PEP-49 was all about). Now that PNI, and v1 team particularly, is a lot of newer contributors, we need to be prudent to how we reward some contributors over others.

This is why a value model is important IMO. It takes the guess work out “why should this contribution be valued more than another” because the value is tied to tangible metrics. I’ve been a part of DAOs outside of POKT and this conversation about value ALWAYS comes up :sweat_smile:

All funds went into the POKT ecosystem, unless there is something I’m missing. You may have different beliefs on HOW those funds should have been spent, but they were spent on growing the ecosystem. Also, PNI’s first proposal for funds from the DAO was PEP-49 as far as I know.

Regardless of one’s belief on how funds were used to grow the POKT ecosystem, it’s a valid point IMO that we find balance in with our incentive models.

Valid point as well and something we want to avoid.

I think it is absolutely fair to compensate a company like POKTScan for work, as they weren’t operating on funds already from the ecosystem (as @poktblade alluded too PNI given early POKT). Finding the right value balance is important, so that companies are inventive to contribute to important parts of the ecosystem, because their time will be compensated, like a contractor.

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Hi @jdaugherty to be clear this is asking the reimbursement for the v0 contribution. We can’t ask money for something that we don’t know how much will require from us and maybe from Pocket core team to get done and working properly like the current one is doing.
For sure this current version will be updated if Pocket core need to update or anything like that v0. Hope this clarify your doubts.

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Thanks @Jorge_POKTscan! So this will cover the lifetime V0 development (rebases, bug fixes, etc.) and TBD if there will be an additional reimbursement for V1 in the future. Appreciate the clarification :pray:

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tl;dr I like everything POKTscan team does but believe the POKT asking amount is too high and proposed other ideas.

Before I chime in, I want to say that I fully support the POKTscan team and everything they do for the community.

  1. Their team builds and maintains poktscan.com, which I use daily
  2. I use their service to stake several nodes
  3. Their team has given me access to their API to help debug various v0 issues
  4. Their team is helping us collect data in various v0 scaling efforts

With that said, I wanted to build upon what @deblasis and @shane discussed and add my own opinion on a couple of topics:

  1. Incentives for core protocol devs
  2. An amendment to this proposal

Incentives for core protocol devs

Even with PEP-49 passed, the asking amount in this proposal is still significantly greater than what any protocol developer at PNI vests over a 4-year cycle.

Until a mature and self-sustaining version of the protocol exists, there is still a need for a core team to manage v0 and build the foundation for v1 to work more effectively, at the cost of not receiving such sizable grants from the DAO.

Seeing such grants being given to community members creates a disincentive for anyone to work on v1 as an internal team member because any core protocol developer can:

  1. Work on more visible & immediate v0 features/tools
  2. Work on V1 bounties while maintaining another full-time job

An amendment to this proposal

Regardless of whether GeoMesh is a v1 feature or not, or whether it aligns with the vision, I believe we can agree on the following:

  1. GeoMesh reduced latency in the network
  2. The tools the PoktScan team builds and maintains are invaluable to the community

My amendment aims to optimize for the following:

  1. Maintaining a DAO treasury for future work
  2. Normalizing the payout

Maintaining a DAO treasury for future work

The DAO’s treasury after PEP49 will be at < 100MM POKT, meaning that this one feature is worth > 5% of everything they can plan to fund (marketing, design, v1 development, other v0 features, etc…) in the near future; I’m not taking newly minted POKT given how much inflation is slowing.

I don’t have a good way to quantify what this number should be, but my gut is leaning towards closer to ~2%.

Normalizing the payout

My guess (correct me if I’m wrong) is that the asking amount was based on “contracted human hours” (i.e. num_hours * $/hour) plus infra costs, which amounted to $325,000. @Jorge_POKTscan If possible, it’d be useful to see the breakdown of where this number came from.

The conversion from USD to POKT was done using a 7-day spot avg close to an ATL, so even if we agree on the fiat amount, it is a large fraction of the existing treasury. Since the exact POKT asking amount was not specified when the project started, I would propose the following:

  1. Agree on what the USD amount should be (based on a breakdown provided)
  2. Pay out the amount in monthly installments (total/12) over the next 12 months using a monthly USD/POKT average every month.
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You cannot compare full-time employees to DAO compensated contributors.

One can say “I don’t have that much $Pokt and have never been paid that much”.
Well, How much have you been paid in USD from Pocket Network Inc.? You could have used that to buy more $Pokt.

I do like this method of thinking. Is the payout percentage in terms of total DAO treasury worth it or how much is it worth?

I absolutely do not agree with this. The work you do over the months is directly contributing to the price appreciation. Essentially, your contributions are directly correlated with the devaluation of your stack.

I think PoktScan could have worded this differently and said that they will be working on many more initiatives and products to push the ecosystem forward. If I were to solely payout for Geo-Mesh, I would say 2.5-3m $Pokt and another 2-3m $Pokt for future contributions/products.

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Another thing to keep in mind, I think individuals employed by a private company have a different work ethic than someone contributing to a DAO. Please don’t lambast me. I come in peace.

Individuals given a paycheck and $Pokt as part of their employment contract likely go home and don’t even think about work, whereas DAO contributors think about present and/or future contributions all day.

*lambaste - dammit mfker :rofl: :facepunch:

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*lambaste

But, I won’t do that.

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So, surprising everyone here, most especially @ethen , I absolutely agree with him. It’s different to work at risk on contract, and the valuation of contract work reflects that risk.

That being said, I think it’s very fair to be a highly qualified engineer on the PNI team, and to feel like your contributions aren’t valued. Worse, you’re held accountable for movements of the greater org when you personally have zero influence over that, and you certainly aren’t personally benefitting from it in the way that the community at large might think you are.

Big props to @shane for pushing hard to make this entire process more equitable.

I have a lot to think about over the weekend. I value both the builders in this community, and the incredibly talented PNI engineering team equally, and I want everyone to feel like they’re winning.

More later.

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I agree this is a great suggestion for guiding the discussion about the reimbursement amount:

num_hours * $/hour plus infra costs

A clarification that could be helpful to include in addition to that calculation would be how many GeoMesh contributors there are (is the asking amount representative of a team or individual effort?). It’s not necessary to break down an allocation by contributor, but thought it could be a good data point for further discussion about the asking amount alongside the man hours. Thanks!

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I don’t want to go too off tangent here- but If a Core Dev does their day job, ‘comes home’ and then starts work on something additional for the Project that is beneficial, I 100% support that and would vote for payment.

I don’t want to be another person agreeing with Ethen in a 24 hour period… but he’s right that we should be doing everything to incentivise good devs to make more + better products, both within PNI and externally as additional contributions. If someone who intimately knows Pocket wants to spend their evenings and weekends doing additional building - we should be throwing money at them.

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Nothing like a hot cup of coffee on a Saturday morning, for some forum contributing :coffee:

I’m very appreciative of where this conversation is going. POKTScan submitted this as a per-proposal, which means it was submitted for feedback before presenting a final proposal to the DAO. Major props to them, and others who submit per-proposals, who are asking for specific feedback before publishing a final proposal. Much thanks to the GRIP team for helping construct this system.

We are at a place were it’s important to show that all contributors are treated equally in the DAO. As @ethen regularly says, “DAOs are in the people business” and I can’t agree more. He’s regularly talking about how the DAO should be investing more into people, which I completely agree with, but in the people business folks need to be treated with equality, objectively, or people become divided and demoralized. Spending more is great, but there has to be a system of equality, which is why I’ve been very consistent with attempting to establish measurable value metrics. I literally called this exact situation back in July with the first LeanPOKT proposal, because in the people business, equality in how folks are treated is paramount.

Yes, you can call me Nostra’sha’mus :mage:

Equality For Client Work

We need to decide if a value breakdown is only to be applied to specific proposals, or all proposals. One of the fastest ways to create division would be if we have a system where some folks can arbitrarily value their proposals, while other have to have value breakdowns.

So far to date, there has been basic expectations for reimbursements to have, at a minimum, a break down hours and expenses. For POKT Lint, there was extra demand that wasn’t required of others, which is why I created the Proposal Value Model, to help quantify more aspects of value beyond just hours.

Right now we have two core client proposals, this Geo-Mesh one, and PoktFund’s Lean POKT. Right now the v1 team has expressed that client work should have a value breakdown but has only mentioned it in regards to this proposal. Does measuring work only apply to Geo-mesh, or should PoktFund be required to provide a value breakdown as well? ThunderHead has said they are going to submitting a proposal for 3M for their work on Lean, so which treatment will they get? Also, what about the v1 team, how are they to be treated in all of this?

These kind of conversations will show up time and time again, especially if we don’t treat all proposals equally with the same standards.

Solution

Reimbursements

These reimbursement proposals be based on measurable metrics that relate to the work done (with an emphases on work hours) and expenses. Any contributor to the POKT ecosystem should be able to look at a reimbursement proposal and understand what it is paying for and justify the amount.

Ecosystem Value Awards (EVA)

The DAO should setup a system to then reward contributors for the extra value their contributions brought to the ecosystem. This is done outside of the reimbursement proposal. The DAO, and potentially in conjunction with PNF, looks at all contributions, regardless of the company that it came from (including PNI) and grants EVA’s to specific contributions.

It would be rather straightforward to create a committee with half PNF folks, and half community reps to reward EVAs. It can be given a large quarterly budget (or a % of DAO income) and community members can nominate contributions they see as worthy of an EVA.

In this case, both Lean and Geo-Mesh could likely get notable bonuses for their outstanding work. In the same spirit, the v1 team could get notable bonuses as well for their work.

By separating EVAs from reimbursement proposals we keep things equal across all contributors. I’d love to see @deblasis get an EVA for outstanding work on v1, just as much as see ThunderHead get an EVA for pushing Lean forward. Regarding Lean, the PNI core-devs that provided blueprints, testing, and code reviews can be treated equally as well. There is no road-blocks to rewarding everyone.

This way, all work is treated equal, while also rewarding the impact the work had on the ecosystem separately. Lean and Geo-Mesh proposals can be reworked to be about the nuts and bolts of the work done, meanwhile we get a structure down for EVA’s, give it a budget, and start moving quickly to reward the extra value these contributions held. We can also start providing EVAs to the v1 team as milestones are hit. This kind of system encourages transparency and communication about what is being worked on and accomplished, which would also be great for the ecosystem as a whole. @jdaugherty and @Olshansky, and many at PNI have been leading examples recently regarding transparency. EVAs would motivate more transparency overall, beyond PNI.

This would be addressed with EVAs. If you do something awesome on a Tuesday that is a novel innovation (or you do it on your off hours) and it has an impact on the ecosystem, you should get an EVA without having to go through any hoops. I personally would love to see @Olshansky share some awesome innovation his team did and nominate the individuals for an EVA. The community gets transparency, contributors get the notoriety they deserve, and the bonuses that are due.

NOTE: The more generous these EVAs, the more inventive there is by all to do more work that has the highest impact on the ecosystem. We can find the balance and drive innovation, while maintaining equality on reimbursement proposals.

Conclusion

I’d love to know your thoughts on this, and thank-you POKTScan for hosting this conversation on your per-proposal :joy: They are a 5 star host in my book :wink:

P.S. I understand parts of this could be hosted on other parts of the forum, but the conversation is here right now in regards to valuing specific proposals and proposal equality. If folks like what I’m proposing with EVAs then I’m happy to start a separate thread.

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@ethen

You cannot compare full-time employees to DAO compensated contributors.

One can say “I don’t have that much $Pokt and have never been paid that much”.
Well, How much have you been paid in USD from Pocket Network Inc.? You could have used that to buy more $Pokt.

I agree with you, I could have used that fiat to buy $POKT I guess… but… lemme be transparent:

My annual gross billing amount to PNI is a :smirk_cat: sexy ~69% of the current proposal ask in $ (I am an independent contractor effectively because I am based in London).

I took a big pay cut to be here and I am not regretting it, I love what I do, the team, mission, etc, etc. where I wanna be/help taking this project, these fiat amounts are going to be irrelevant :peanuts: … but clearly I need to be exposed to that somehow… hope is not a strategy.

Seeing these numbers makes me want to reconsider things and/or reply to proposals like this. Sorry for pestering you all with my keystrokes!

I could make way more fiat (multiples) elsewhere AND contribute externally and get huge amounts of POKT apparently. Sounds like a no-brainer.
I know for a fact that I have the capacity and skills and experience to handle even two completely different full-time jobs simultaneously (in different timezones) and be told that I am killing it in both. :zipper_mouth_face:

When I joined PNI, I negotiated to have 1M POKT (that sounded like a lot) but in 5y instead of 4… that shows how much I believe in the project and also that I am willing to work hard and make things happen. Or simply that I am a terrible negotiator :crazy_face:

My POKT holdings (from a reward or two and high fives) are ~20K currently.

I just wanted to give the full picture because I realise I might sound a bit like of a [insert favourite swear word] or that I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed choosing violence :slight_smile: or both.

Rest assured that if I knew there was the need to figure out the issues described by @shane that lead to the development of GeoMesh and that the prize for doing so would have been ballpark 5.3M POKT, I would have done that as a priority over a second job if that makes sense.

Absent other alternatives, that’s how I build my bag, exposure to the upside, useful stuff for the whole ecosystem. Even better, I would have teamed up with big guns like @Olshansky or some friend with complementary skills that I wanted to get involved with the project to do so.

I understand we want to grow the ecosystem and diversify but maybe someone else looking for bounties (@Jorge_POKTscan perhaps) would have beaten us with speed, quality and/or lower asking amount. Bummer, but that’s just business and markets and it’s totally fine. Ultimately value wins.

Another thing to keep in mind, I think individuals employed by a private company have a different work ethic than someone contributing to a DAO. Please don’t lambast me. I come in peace.

Individuals given a paycheck and $Pokt as part of their employment contract likely go home and don’t even think about work, whereas DAO contributors think about present and/or future contributions all day.

*lambaste - dammit mfker :rofl: :facepunch:

:slight_smile: I see where you are coming from but generalizing work ethic is a slippery slope IMHO. you gotta look at results, quantifiable metrics and the hard to measure “intangibles”.
We are all different and therefore we see things differently.

If my relationship with PNI ended tomorrow, I think I would get another (probably boring) fiat job and continue contributing as a community member (maybe I’d get more exposure to the upside from the looks of it…), that’s because I think about present and future of the project all day. I know for a fact that I am not the only one that’s constantly thinking about it (:blue_heart: the team, one of the best in my 20y career).

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Thanks for sharing @deblasis. You make solid points and I think it’s fair to say that the DAO should remain neutral to what company a contributor works for.

Where I believe it is important to distinguish between contributors is “are they being compensated with an hourly wage during this work?”. For the v1 team, they are given an hourly wage for working on POKT, so there is no reason for individual contributors to submit reimbursement proposals. Even if you did crack geo-mesh, you should not be submitting a proposal for reimbursement because you were already paid. PNI already submitted PEP-49 to help fund your wages.

Meanwhile, a company like POKTScan invested the better part of 3 months into geo-mesh, involving many engineers. That work was paid for by POKTScan and the idea of a reimbursement proposals is to recoup what it cost that company endured. That is absolutley fair.

@deblasis this isn’t a proposal that is to pay individual contributors on-top of their regular wages, this proposal is from a company that invested it’s own resources heavily into open-sourcing what others were doing closed-source. This proposal is not to pay a single developer like @Jorge_POKTscan personally, this is to reimburse a company for the cost they ensured. Framing it as a “prize” is a mischaracterization. What you mean as prize I’m defining as an EVA.

This is why it is important to distinguished what is a reimbursement and what is value add bonus (which I am calling a EVA). POKTScan should be compensated for the time and resources they put into open-source work in the POKT ecosystem, that is what the DAO treasury is for. Instead of a PEP-49 format like PNI did, they are going for a reimbursement proposal and a specific good they did. I agree that with proposals being essentually “black boxes” it is hard to distinguish what is what. The only way to proceed in a fair manner is to have transparency.

@deblasis I would love to hear your thoughts on the structure I proposed above.

With this type of system, companies like POKTScan can ask for specific reimbursement with measure costs associated with it. Then the “prize” factor of contributing to something that had such an important impact on the ecosystem can be part of a separate system, the EVA system. Anyone, including yourself, can be a part of the EVA system.

I’d like to hear your thoughts :+1:

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There is a lot of good discussion in this thread but mostly I think it is veering into broader questions of DAO priorities, values, compensation and ancillary issues. Geo-Mesh is not an avatar for solving these broader questions for the DAO. PNF will make some comments shortly but I think we should try to focus on the specific purpose of this thread: Geo-Mesh.

Please do continue to illuminate broader challenges or ask questions about priorities and values here:

And please direct your unique issues, questions or POV related to compensation and equitable contributions here:

And of course, questions on the specifics of POKTscan and Geo-Mesh reimbursement should continue to be directed to the POKTscan team in this current thread

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@Jorge_POKTscan - Could you please explain what from the current development for which you seek reimbursement survives into v1? Would you bring geo-mesh to v1 with a complete code rewrite with zero anticipated re-use so that the DAO may anticipate a similar sized reimbursement request in the future following geo-mesh v1 or would there be significant carry-over of IP, algos, code or whatever so that it will take much less additional development work to bring this feature into v1?

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