A good post by Inflex. Clearly explains the struggle many new participants are facing, and certainly shines light on what is actually happening in reality.
We are a team who joined the graph network as a fresh participant of the MIPs program. The thing that inspired us to do this was the initial aim of the graph team to welcome new indexers. We had no locked GRTs from previous missions (as many old indexers have them), so we bought a good deal of them. To make a good infrastructure, we have been using several of high end servers to serve multiple chains for the MIP program. Our initial plan was to invest some for the first chain, then wait for the reward, and use the same reward to stake more for serving additional chains, and so on. But this has obviously not gone according to the plan. What we though would be a win-win situation for both the team and the new participants has been nothing other than a big failure. Already six(+) months into the MIP program and the participants have not even received rewards for the gnosis chain. So yes, Inflex is 100% right, the MIP program can be a big dismay to many of the new indexers who are wanting to join the graph team in a long term basis.
First issue has been the scoring mechanism, which has been held as a top secret. I still don’t understand what is there to make it a secrecy when the whole graph network is open sourced and aimed for decentralization. The second issue is missing information about simple things like (1) How total score is distributed across multiple chains? I mean serving one chain for 1 week vs. serving another chain for 3 weeks is obviously takes two different levels of involvements both in terms of expenses related to infrastructure maintenance and amount of time used by the participants. But what we see is a leaderboard with some “numbers” and nothing more. No explanation of how they were calculated and how they have been distributed across chains. (2) Does anybody out of the participants knows for sure when the MIP program will end? I mean this information is very important to make future plans, budget allocation/distribution etc. (3) If somebody knows clearly (with certainty) how the scores get translated to GRT tokens, then a document should be complied and made available to all the participants. Actually, it is the responsibility of the team to provide such an information. But there is none. If the team is ready to use “secret formula” for calculating the scores, how can we be sure that some other “secret formula” won’t be used for translating the score to GRTs?
Now the third point is, the team should understand and acknowledge a simple fact. The fact that we have really dedicated a lot of our time for the MIP program. Everything has not been sweet and smooth sail, but the opposite, many things have been unclear, unmanaged and not working. And that’s the exact reason why we have to use a lot of our time for the MIP program. The truth is that even the graph team has had issues maintaining timeline. And this comes to me as no surprise. It is understandable. This is a test program, and the very first thing we should expect is to run into trouble. We have, we have definitely run into big time troubles. All of us, every MIPs participant.
So, should we get rewarded in a more sensible way to justify this? I think we all know the answer to this question. I highly appreciate Inflex’s suggestion to increase the MIP reward pool to make it more realistic.
As a new indexer trying to merge in, I expect transparency and honesty from the team and I certainly expect that the team will acknowledge the had work we have put into the MIP program. I hope simple things like not being able to be transparent won’t be the root cause for the graph team to lose many motivated new comers.
