[rugpullindex.com] Improving the Data Economy's Safety

[rugpullindex.com] Improving Data Trading Safety

Fact Sheet

:globe_with_meridians: Website: rugpullindex.com
:round_pushpin: Address: etherscan.io/address/0x005241438cAF3eaCb05bB6543151f7AF894C5B58
:e-mail: Email: tim (at) daubenschuetz (dot) de
:de: Residence of project lead: Germany
:building_construction::mega: Category: build/outreach
:chart_with_upwards_trend: Metric: Network revenue
:speech_balloon: Chat: discord.com/invite/hBQVJY9Me6
:1234: Stats: plausible.io/rugpullindex.com
:mega: Pitch: "Rug Pull Index helps Ocean Protocol users to invest in data safely."

Product

Executive Summary

The founding goal of rugpullindex.com was to reduce the risk of data token investors/stakers getting rug pulled.

As the data economy grows, we expect the number of new risks and their impact to grow also.

We want to continue helping data token stakers, investors, and consumers identify the best data assets within the Web3 data economy.

By continuing to expand our analytics offerings, we believe we can help to promote a healthier ecosystem.

Growth and Outreach

We’re able to show continuous growth over the last 12 months. To see more details, visit our public web analytics at: plausible.io/rugpullindex.com

Unique visitors are growing

Outbound clicks are growing

The number of daily active users is growing (We used the median as we had to account for traffic spikes (e.g., HN front page))

Sources: plausible.io (& evaluation)

Additionally, we’ve written blog posts as part of our content marketing strategy:

(Blog posts on timdaub.github.io aren’t funded by the RPI budget. We’ve added them here as they contribute to our overall story.)

Achievements/Deliverables

We had an insanely productive month. I’m not kidding; we got so much shit done, it’s difficult to list it all here without boring everyone.

UX Improvements to the Website

To make our users’ understand that both “Rating” and “Inequality” are numbers in a spectrum from 0% to 100%, we’ve added the following visual aid:

The change is the outline of a circle representing the percentages. We think that makes users differentiate better between assets. Changelog entry.

Improving the Website Design

From our previous proposals, you might have also noticed that we’ve started onboarding a UX designer. Welcome, Florian, everyone!

Among other things, Flo spent some time in November collecting all the requirements to update our main page and to design a “data asset profile page.” Below are some previews. You can also look at the redesign on figma.

“Marketing Week” & Blogging System Refactor

As part of a marketing stunt (“Marketing Week”), for one week, all contributors were advised to focus their efforts on marketing the product. During this effort:

A screenshot of the new /blog page:

We also released a post titled “About the Urgency of Building Web3” that was well-received by Hacker News and trended on the front page for a while.

Additional results include newly designed readme.md files for our most popular GitHub repositories eth-fun & svg-line-chart:

Operational Changes

Y’all, we now have an actual vision and mission statement that we’re executing against. Scott did a multi-month long sprint to align everyone: “RPI Vision and Goals for Current and Future Contributors and Community Members”.

We ended up trying out the rationale in several public appearances. Primarily, we called for “Illuminating the Dark Forest” over on /r/ethereum.

Spending & Payouts to Contributors

We want to dedicate an extra section to how our funds have been spent over the last few months. The diagrams below are numbered (1, 2, …). We’ll give a short summary of each:

  1. (top-left) Our monthly expenses in USDC have been stable until June (month number: 6), when we started to engage with external contributors. Work in September (9) was paid retroactively in October (10).
  2. (top-right) The second chart shows all payouts to external contributors (that’s everyone but me, TimDaub). Payouts occur when contributors complete their work. We invoice through request.network like the OceanDAO. It’s our goal to stabilize and steadily grow payouts to contributors.
  3. (bottom-left) Chart number three summarizes all payouts and liabilities from the project’s beginning to December 2, 2021, by contributor name. You can observe that a large part went to me, TimDaub.
  4. (bottom-right) And the last chart shows all payouts excluding me, TimDaub, so all payouts to “external contributors.”

We’ve been openly discussing using the relative payout numbers as a fundament to issuing sweat equity later on.

It might seem crazy that all external contributors could only capture 10% of all funds paid out. But please consider that I (TimDaub) had a jump start of 8 months working on the project full time. Additionally, I’m bearing the tax and funding risks of frequently converting from OCEAN to USDC and paying everyone retroactively. But I’m confident that contributors will catch up or potentially even take me over one day.

Financial Situation and Requested Amount

As a basis for the financial situation discussion, we’re going to use our latest accounting statement from December 2, 2021 (find all here).

In November 2021, we have accumulated a debt of -17,333.43 USDC. Please do note that we consider ourselves retroactively funded, meaning that I’ve personally advanced all funds spent in November 2021 to build the above-outlined achievements. This proposal should be seen as an invoice to the OceanDAO.

To reduce the statistical error between the funding amount requested and received, we calculate a continuous average historical funding error using a public methodology.

Hence, the final amount we’re requesting from the OceanDAO in R12 is:

position USD
Accumulated debt based on accounting statement from 2021-10-28 17,333.43
Average historical funding error† 189.33
TOTAL Debt 17,522.76

† Check the proposal’s appendix for more details on calculating the number.

So we’d like to request a total of 17,522.76 USDC to settle the debt with all contributors and to continue our operation.

Value-Add

Are We Driving Ocean Usage?

In a blog post from November titled “Heureka!”, we found that our website visitors correlate positively by 0.4 with the visitors of the Ocean Marketplace.

Additionally, we concluded in our R10 proposal that data sets prominently displayed on RPI’s website attracted 402,904.72 EUR more in market cap than an imaginary control-variable website we created for benchmarking.

Are We Succeeding?

From my personal point of view, we are one of the prolific projects in the OceanDAO. We’ve been participating and ever-growing since our first round in February. Our website has consistently been online for more than a year now, we have attracted multiple dedicated contributors. And additionally, we’ve been shipping like crazy this month.

Is Our Community Active?

Yes, our community is alive and well.

  • We maintain an active Discord server with 65 members. There are new messages daily.
  • We have issued six keys for our API, and we have a prolific OceanDAO project building on it (DataWhale with Alga).
  • We are seeing more and more open-source engagement on GitHub. E.g., check the massive list of PRs that just were bug fixes (“Deliverables” section).
  • We’ve paid out thousands of USDC to external contributors that have sent in offers according to our paid task process.

Are We Adding Value to Ocean?

  • We’ve personally opened numerous constructive GitHub issues, and I’ve helped discuss complex subject matters in the Ocean Protocol GitHub organization.
  • We’ve been driving and supporting numerous positive changes in the OceanDAO. E.g., in R9, we “Finalized Votes4LPs”. We’ve been a driving force behind “further rationalizing the ROI > 1 criterion”, and we’ve implemented the “Project Summary” feature in the DAOBot, etc.
  • We’re providing the backend for DataWhale’s ALGA.
  • We’ve released software that is potentially useful for e.g. the Ocean Marketplace: did-op and svg-line-chart.

Are We Aligned with Ocean Mission & Vision

Through being active bloggers and engaged in the Ocean Community, it should be evident that we’re largely aligned with the Ocean Protocol’s Mission and Vision. For affirmation, kindly read our blog or handbook to understand our values.

Team

Please Vote For Us Because…

  • we’ve been shipping and iterating from day zero.
  • we deliver reliable market insights 24/7 and have made data trading safer since November 2020!
  • we give you transparent insights into our proceedings by writing blog posts, by shipping regularly, and opening up our accounting.
  • we’re actively engaging in Ocean Protocol Core development.
  • with your vote, you’re helping us make a living and bootstrap a real crypto startup :sparkling_heart:

Appendix

We’re trying to statistically reduce the difference between “USD amount requested” and “USD amount received” (caused by the volatility of OCEAN/USD). Check our methodology to learn more.

Round USD requested OCEAN received receive date USD swapped swap date USD delta USD error
R6 9360 13000 2021-06-08 7546.43 2021-06-09 -1813.57 -1813.57
R7 10080 22400 2021-07-21 8390.49 2021-07-22 -1689.51 -1751.54
R8 10276.61 19391.00 2021-08-16 15742.78 2021-08-17 5466.17 654.36
R10 16536.65 21933 2021-10-15 17475.51 2021-10-18 938.86 725.48
R11 17,039.88 16,116 2021-11-25 15,084.57 2021-11-16 and 2021-11-22 -1,955.30 189.33
  • In R11, not all of the 16,116 OCEAN was swapped to USDC as some had to be paid back. But the inferred price is: 3363.7/4400*(4400/(4400+3865.60))+3843.97/3865.60*(4400/(4400+3865.60)) = 0.936 OCEAN/USDC
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Hi there,

For transparency, starting R12, all proposals will have to be funded within 2 weeks of winning a grant.

The funding deadline is December 27th 23:59 GMT.

You can read our wiki and how to submit a funding request to learn more.

@idiom-bytes To update our project standing, we’re as always retroactively funded. Hence, can you please add the section “Deliverables/Achievements” until the headline “Spending & Payouts to Contributors” to the project standing dashboard. Thanks!

Done! Please review Airtable to confirm. All the best!

1 Like