Hey guys, as always thanks for the quality of your work. Thanks also for completing the impact scorecard which gives everyone an opportunity to discuss the impact behind the proposal without it feeling personal.
When it comes to impact, PNF would like to call attention to some areas where our view diverges from yours.
Utilization: We believe the score of 7 is too high when considering the actual use of pokt.info across the community. 7 would be a very high score and more akin to universal use. Can you provide more info on the full history of Monthly and Weekly Active Users for pokt.info and not just the most recent month? As we understand from the info listed in your proposal, it’s conceivable that with the 3 members of the TH team using the product regularly this equates to 25% of the 12 Weekly Active Users shown. And just on a quick review of web/seo traffic it seems quite small when compared to something like poktscan which had over 47,000 views last month: https://www.similarweb.com/website/poktscan.com/#overview
Rather than us speculate too much we think it would be good to hear from other node runners regarding their own utilisation of the product and the value it creates for them (and noting that we are grateful to see some testimonials in the proposal already, but at the requested value we’d hope to see strong and wide support).
Ecosystem significance: The score of 7 is also too high. We do not believe this is a tool that many in the ecosystem have been acutely aware of and it is not clear what impact there would be if it was gone tomorrow. It may be a “nice to have” tool for node runners to optimise their setups but to say it is a “game changer” feels like a stretch.
Novelty/Innovation factor: This score of 7 is much, much higher than we would score. There are references to datadog and other tools like Poktscan already providing some similar functionality and we understand others in the community are currently considering creating similar tools. A novelty and innovation factor would be more akin to creating a new product rather than replicating and improving on the functionality of another. It would be a bad precedent to pay $75k for this tool when it is conceivable that someone else could replace or compete with it for a similar value or less. It’s great you saw an opportunity to create value for the network but we don’t believe it follows that the DAO should necessarily pay for this tool and certainly not the amount requested.
In a more general sense to compare this request to others, Poktscan received an initial $70K grant to create their tool and subsequently has expanded and operated that product without any further funding from the DAO. Given the comparison above in terms of traffic and usage we would argue that any grant to Thunderhead for pokt.info should either be much smaller or come much later when it can be seen to be an essential tool in the ecosystem.
And to provide a further reference point for development work and impact, wPOKT will cost approximately ~$50k to develop and has far greater consequence for the ecosystem given the access it provides to liquidity and tooling across the entire EVM ecosystem.
Taking into account all of the above, PNF would adjust the impact score to 19/50. This is around the midpoint in the stated $10-50K range shown in the scorecard, and so a reimbursement in the ballpark of $25K would make more sense to us. Given the focus on delivering v1 and aligning most of our resources behind this, we would not support this proposal at the requested value given the product is more of a “nice to have”