text:
# § Blog

## § October 26, 2021

• / root endpoint was down as crawler produced fautly result which lead to a crash in the chart generation.
• The error is caused by the pricing calls to our Ethereum node being unstable. We're observing dropping connections as we had set up the crawl last night with unlimited concurrency. To address the problem, requests are being throttled to five concurrent requests.
• Parallelize retrieval of data token holder information

Through parallelization, we've now managed to speed up the entire crawl from a total run time of 18 minutes to only 58 seconds. In simpler terms, this means that the entire rugpullindex data base including all pricing records can now get updated in under a minute.

This is the achievement I've been waiting for to increase crawling frequency from daily to e.g. hourly. But more on that another time.

If you're using RPI to automate anything, please consider that from today on our crawler stability may be worse over the next few days as we've done a lot of changes. Fingers crossed that it all works well!

## § October 25, 2021

• Speed-up crawling on-chain pricing of assets through parallelization

## § Thank you, next (problem)!

### § October 23, 2021

It's an incredible thing to say, but I think we're getting close to our first anniversary. That's incredible but serves in this post merely as a hook for the topic I'd like to write about.

This being the increasing throughput of problems I have to face on a daily basis to drive the project further.

Just last year, there weren't merely any. I was working on the thing myself, and also, for the first few months, I didn't even get paid to host the site.

Now, this has changed drastically and so today RPI contracts a surprising 4 people part-time. We have 49 members on our Discord - and even without me ranting on Telegram - we have a steady influx of users to our site. We've got about 15 applications for a more than sparse hiring appeal on HN's "who's hiring?" thread, and last round, something like 5 million USD voted YES on us.

All of this is pretty bonkers, particularly when scrolling down and looking at some of the old posts and the sentiment I had just months ago.

But in that time, and especially now that the dust has settled after last month's round, I've come to realize (or accept) my faith as a project founder. Building and shipping, keeping things going is basically just handling a stream of never-ending problems flying towards you.

It's daunting. Sometimes it's crazy scary. But also, many times, it's incredibly rewarding and fun.

For me, when I don't code: It has also become more difficult to track and understand progress. It's almost like being the frog in the pan that gets boiled. Without the boiling part, maybe (/hopefully).

You solve problems and work to make things happen, and those things do happen, but somehow you also don't understand what changed. It's almost like being blind. Worse, it's like seeing but not being able to interpret. Dream-ish.

I don't dread this experience - so far, I've come to enjoy it. But I've become more anxious about the project's future and the fact that I seem to carry much more responsibility than I had imagined.

It's really weird and may also sound tone-deaf for some users not being involved in our production process. The website's still the same. Everything looks as it "always has."

But looking internally, things are shifting at incredible speed, and measures are being taken daily to grow and improve.

I'm overwhelmed by the passion and precision of our contributors and by how they pump out knowledge, insights, and code continuously. It's nuts!

So maybe all these words had the following purpose: To thank everyone that has helped and believed in Rug Pull Index over the last year.

I'm grateful for you to be with us, and I'm in joy seeing that we share ideas and goals. I'm curious as ever to see where we'll go!

Thank you!

## § User Profiles & Motivations in the Ocean Ecosystem

### § October 18, 2021

The below outlines 8 types of users for rugpullindex.com.

Some users may represent one or more of these profiles at any one time however we have segmented them into different groups for easier analysis.

The 8 user profiles are:

1. Ocean Stakers
2. Data Token Investors
3. RPI Community Members
4. RPI API Users
5. Other Data token platforms
6. Ocean DAO Members
7. Data Providers

Written by Scott Milat & Tim Daubenschuetz

#### § Ocean Stakers

Context

As these users have gotten to know more about Ocean Protocol they have realised it could be beneficial for them to stake their Ocean tokens on data sets. They have discovered RPI as a potential tool to help them with this decision making process.

Motivation

They are trying to maximise their rewards for staking Ocean tokens.

Pain Points

There’s both a high learning barrier to overcome and a lack of accessible, clear information. There also may be some uncertainty when it comes to the quality of information and likelihood of generating an ROI on what is a new and volatile asset.

Mental Models

The user has so many options when it comes to allocating their capital within new crypto projects. If they have gotten this far they probably understand the value proposition and vision of Ocean Protocol quite well and are wanting to get into something in the hopes of generating a good ROI.

What I want from RPI:

• What are the staking rewards?
• What are historic staking returns?
• What’s the risk level (rugpull, other)?

Questions I might have when landing on RPI now:

• What does this chart mean?
• What do these columns mean?
• Which columns do I care about?

#### § Data Token Investors

Context

As these users have gotten to know more about Ocean protocol they have realised it could be beneficial for them to invest in data tokens. They have discovered RPI as a potential tool to help them with this decision making process.

Motivation

They are trying to find valuable data tokens to invest in assuming that both Ocean and the data set will do well over the long term.

Pain Points

It’s really time consuming to go through each dataset and try to find the ones that are most valuable. It’s also unclear exactly how to ‘value’ a data set as there are many factors to consider i.e. data provider’s reputation, number of sales, staking rewards, is the data set being maintained, does the dataset have buyers, who is the dataset targeting, is the data actually valuable etc etc...

Mental Models

The user has so many options when it comes to allocating their capital within new crypto projects. If they have gotten this far they probably understand the value proposition and vision of Ocean Protocol quite well and are wanting to get into something in the hopes of generating a good ROI.

What I want from RPI:

• Where are the good datasets?
• How many purchases have there been for this dataset?
• What are data tokens? (for converting ‘potential’ data token investors)

Questions I might have when landing on RPI now:

• What does this chart mean?
• What do these columns mean?
• Which columns do I care about?

#### § RPI Community Members

Context

These users are active or thinking about becoming active in the Web3 ecosystem.

Motivation

These users are looking for cool/interesting projects to work on &/or become an early adopter of something which could grow into being much bigger in the future presenting a potentially high economic incentive.

Pain Points

Hard to find quality projects with good teams to collaborate with/active engaged communities that I can become more engaged with.

Mental Models

If this is a cool project or something which I believe could grow into something much bigger, then I would like to keep engaged with the community, potentially help out or get more involved as the project grows.

#### § API Users

Context

These users are developers &/or business people looking to integrate the RPI API into their work/product.

Motivation

They want to build a product using our data. RPI has more than 9 months worth of pricing data. By querying this data directly from our API, they can save time and money building a custom solution.

Pain Points

Some users are coming to RPI because they’ve been left behind by Ocean Protocol. We’re a technically driven product that’s quite approachable by developers. They know what they get from RPI when compared to the more advanced-looking tech stack of the Ocean Protocol.

Mental Models

API users's way of thinking is highly utilitarian. They want to build something and so they’re looking for the most cost-effective way of getting it done. RPI’s simple and approachable API gives them a dopamine hit because they immediately get it.

#### § Other Data Token Platforms

Context

Other platforms have forked/created their own data marketplaces and data platforms (separate to the Ocean ecosystem). They too are looking to acquire users/investors/contributors to their platforms. They see RPI as targeting the same audience they are interested in.

Motivation

They understand the value of data marketplaces naturally and by getting listed by the Rug Pull Index, they see it as a way to acquire new customers and push their data consume revenue up.

Pain Points

Accessing the right target audience can be time consuming and difficult. First you need to find where the target users are, next you need to collaborate with the platform to negotiate terms and execute the plan/integration. The data investor community is very small. So far, only Ocean has managed to grow a little community of early adopters. So anyone that’s in this market too has to either associate themselves with the OCEAN community or seek out to create one by themselves.

Mental Models

Other Data Platforms are motivated to join RPI if the value proposition is right. They are interested, have budget and an aligned interest to be on RPI and to leverage the network that’s already there and that will hopefully be there in the future. Still, currently Other Data Platforms are struggling to partner with RPI as it's not a legally incorporated company and since the value proposition of their investment is unclear.

#### § Ocean DAO Members

Context

Ocean DAO members have varying levels of interest/engagement in Ocean Protocol but a number of influential players have a much larger influence relatively speaking.

Motivation

Important OceanDAO members are primarily big holders of Ocean tokens. They want the Ocean Protocol Ecosystem to flourish. They are looking for projects that have a good ROI and will continue to support the ones they believe do.

Pain Points

OceanDAO members are mostly concerned about the OCEANs that they hold. They want as many well-maintained projects arising from the OceanDAO as possible. Their interest is less in the survival of individual projects and more in the correct strategic functioning of the OceanDAO’s funding mechanism. Their ultimate goal is to make a return on their initial OCEAN investment. OceanDAO members have limited time to do due diligence given the sheer amount of projects. Hence it’s often hard for them to keep on top of projects and see which are adding value.

Mental Models

OceanDAO members want to see RPI succeed given that it continues to make technical process and helps guide the Ocean Protocol mission. With the rising number of participants in the OceanDAO, members are starting to get less chance to do proper due diligence. They may also simply vote to burn Oceans if they see no proper engagement.

#### § Data Providers

Context

Data Providers are looking for ways to make their datasets more appealing to potential stakers, investors, buyers. Data Providers want to make money. If RPI is seen as a key source of ‘quality datasets’ within the Ocean ecosystem then they want to know how they can be a part of the action and make their datasets ‘better’ or rank higher.

Motivation

To get more Ocean staked on their datasets, increase the discoverability of their datasets and increase number of sales.

Pain Points

Data providers' biggest problem is that they can't make a good value proposition to data consumers. Data consumers always face the risk of buying a rug pull in disguise.

No Data Provider has made a return on a tokenized piece of data yet. It is difficult to understand if a single sale can make a data set worthless. It's hard to find stakers and buyers for data sets, expecially when purely focus on technical innovation and e.g. not marketing.

Mental Models

RPI allows a data provider to get (relatively speaking) many eyes on their data token. For the top data providers, being listed as a top project on RPI is of significance as it directs lots of attention and clicks to their web presence (Click through rate). Additionally, RPI can serve as an additional benchmark for how well a data provider's token is doing in the overall market.

Context

Data buyers are likely still far and few between but when they do arrive to the ecosystem they will be looking for a quick and easy way to find/browse the datasets that they need (or might need).

Motivation

They will have a specific use case in mind and be looking for data to help address that use case. We speculate that Data Buyers have highly utilitarian motivations too. If they know they can make more money through buying a data set, they'll pay its price.

Pain Points

The problem with finding data is that it almost directly has to be created for your specific use case for it to be relevant or valuable. Already when having a hypothesis, we humans tend to solve it “by proxy”, meaning we answer different questions and not the original one instead. For data sets, this is the same problem. A data set’s value is not universally the same for any one as some buyers are able to extract significantly more value from it than others.

E.g., if you had gotten ahold of the Cambridge Analytical data set before the 2016 US election, would it have provided you the same level of utility as it did to the Trump campaign team?

Finding the data set they require is an immense and time consuming challenge for data buyers.

Mental Models

If I find a dataset that might be useful: How do I know it's useful/trustworthy/valuable? How do I know that the Ocean Protocol works as I expected it? What information can I access to give myself a high level of confidence that this thing is even worth purchasing and that I'm not getting scammed.

## § Focus

### § October 15, 2021

In turbulent times, I sometimes tend to undervalue focus. Some people value focus much more than I do. I think focus is worthless when there's no confidence in knowing the right direction. Figuring out what to do next is more important than focusing, sometimes.

But now, it's time to build (and focus). And here's what we want to spend time on:

• We want to further annotate Ocean Protocol data sets through @rugpullindex/list-metadata. Our overarching goal here is to create trust through transparency. We think l2beat.com does a fantastic job on that with L2 infrastructure. For as long as Ocean's provider mechanism is unsafe, we must promote the option to enable recourse through traditional means (e.g. the law) to increase Data Consume Volume.
• We want to create a smart contract consumable version of the Rug Pull Index API. We don't care for "write" yet. We aspire to do "read" really well. An inspiration is zeriontech/defi-sdk.
• We want to spend significantly less time on raising funds. Since 2021-10-01, I (Tim) spent a total of > 40h on campaigning, fundraising and updating the project standing. This ended up being necessary given the OceanDAO process. We want to short-circuit that process to spend less time and get the same amount of money to build more and do less politics.

Best, Tim

## § October 8, 2021

• We're in the process of open sourcing our front end design system
• The website design changed

## § September 28, 2021

• Increase estate to activate nagivation expansion on mobile
• Adjust position of currency switcher ("USD, EUR")

## § Is Competition For Losers?

### § September 27, 2021

A common believe in the startup scene is that competition is for losers and that one always should setup shop in a "blue ocean" rather than a "red ocean."

There are countless famous proponents like Peter Thiel arguing publicly about the virtues of positioning oneself in a competitionless market rather than trying to fight for scarce resources.

But "is competition really for losers?", I asked myself when swimming in one of the croweded and fast-paced lanes of a public pool today.

See, for the first time in months, this morning I visited a public swimming pool again. Given that during the pandemic those only had limited availability, my summer consisted mostly swimming in many of the nice lakes around Berlin. Now that fall and winter are around the corner, today I thought: Why not train indoor again.

If you've ever swum freestyle in the fast lane of a public swimming pool, you probably know your fellow swimmers aren't joking around. They're usually super fit, have amazing technique and they absolutely don't shy back from overtaking you mid-lane. They don't do it for a prize or praise. They just do it. To train I guess.

To me, just the hecticness of that situation makes swimming and training quite intense. Just a few strokes after entering the lane, I start keeping an eye on my back and I start to feel anxious to get overpassed.

However, other than a competitive zero sum game would suggest, I actually don't get sad about losing to others in the pool. Instead, being passed by others makes me want to improve my technique and breathing. They motivate me. So logically afterwards, I ended up thinking about the concept of competition.

In many of my previous jobs, competition has been a complete turn-off. It's when I feel that I don't want to engage in aggression and extra effort just to reach a goal that usually requires less engagement. In those moments, I feel that competition is wasteful and for losers.

And in many startup self-help books, like Peter Thiel's famous "Zero to One", that line of thinking is thoroughly confirmed. But is it universally true that "competition is for losers"?

A nice theoretic resolution to the anecdote would be to introduce and define the different kind of theoretic games. Through simplifiying the swimmers to a length, speed and comparing them to the physical properties of the pool - surely we could find an optimal strategy, e.g. one that minimizes overtaking and maximizes the distance swum.

However, exactly that thought would require assuming that all actors fundamentally behaved completely rational to either increase their economic status or gain some form of homogenious utility. But specifically in the swim lane, I'd argue that everyone's motivations are so fastly different that a simplifying model could only poorly capture everybody's real intents. It wouldn't produce an effective strategy.

It's because I, for example, liked today's hectic "vibe" as it allowed me to have a more intense training. Other swimmers could have had similar intention or their's could have been totally uncorrelated. For me, it was to swim faster and to compare my fitness. Next time it may already be different. And why not - there's entirely nothing at stake either.

I'll admit; closing this essay now with a logical conclusion about what I've learned is difficult. But I'll say this: "competition is for losers" is an unnecessary broad generalization and it's most definitely not universally true (who would have guessed). Rather, today's experience suggests that some competition is worth and fun engaging with.

## § We're NOT A Startup

### § September 21, 2021

In less than two months, on November 13, 2021, RPI will celebrate its first anniversary. Being someone that loves playing around with ideas and never having the patience to commit to any project long-term: Rug Pull Index is special.

But it started as was typical for any side project of mine: I read an issue on GitHub and thought, "Hey, that's something I wanna work on." And so, just a few days later, the first version of rugpullindex.com went online. In fact, if you keep scrolling down on this page, you'll find that very first entry I made on November 13, 2021, on this document.

During those days, I set out to solve a specific problem that the Ocean Protocol community had: I wanted to enable users to stake OCEAN with less rug pull anxiety. And so, from day zero, when I first launched the app: I ended up doing exactly that. I hosted a website where Ocean Protocol stakers could go to compare data sets using the Gini coefficient.

I'm expanding the context of what my goal was here to highlight a particular property: I shipped a viable solution to users from day zero. I chose an ultra-iterative approach towards building product. I find it important to make this distinction as I'm now seeing more and more people discover the speculative value of a product like Rug Pull Index.

Others ask me what the company's vision and mission are. There's an expectation of raising funds from venture capital. And in general: I've been confronted with the idea that the project's future value is influenceable by taking more risk now and investing funds into its growth.

But I'd like to vehemently push back on these ideas: Rug Pull Index is not a startup. It needs no vision, no mission, and no explosive growth. The last thing I want is to be a spineless digital coordinator of yet another tech startup.

I'll admit; I've fallen prey to these ideas too. I've raised money over the last year by over-focusing on vision rather than execution. Now I regret doing so. I should have known that predictively galvanizing others with potential can't satisfy my ideals.

What I'm doing now is backtracking. Changing course.

I don't have a name for what I want Rug Pull Index to be and in which direction I want to steer it. I know the path; I just don't know what it's called.

For the dramatic purposes of this article, I think calling Rug Pull Index an anti-company may provoke some interesting thoughts. And no, I haven't done any Googling for the existing definition of what an "anti-company" describes; I'm assuming to be the original creator of that term, and I'll now go ahead and explain what it means to me:

An anti-company has no employees; ultra-lean operating costs, and technically it doesn't even exist on paper. An anti-company measures the value it creates in the present; it doesn't leverage the future for growth. It has no salaried employees because it hates liability and unbalanced risk. It minimizes liabilities.

An anti-company manages risk very carefully: Its major goal is to guarantee ongoing operations over a very long period. It creates value now. That's why the anti-company has no sense of urgency, deadlines, or future expectations. It just is and was; it never will be.

An anti-company is not a startup.

## § September 20, 2021

• Shipped new svg-line-chart features that were added from external and paid open source contributors. Awesome work guys!

## § September 17, 2021

• We're in the middle of participating in Gitcoin GR11. We're looking for funding to sustain our operations. You can fund us through this page.
• We've paid our first two technical contributors today. With the help of our public handbook, we've now approved 3 offers and paid out two via invoicing.request.network.
• Switching from EUR to USD is now possible on the main page and in the API.

## § September 07, 2021

• Now showing the top 40 data sets (change of +15 from 25)

## § September 05, 2021

• Successfully replaced a large part of the old crawler with the rewritten one.
• Remove reliance on Aquarius entirely. We now get data token addresses through the subgraphs.
• Adjust /specification to mention correct data sources

## § August 28, 2021

• Fixed: Failing crawl

## § On Building The Infamous "Version 2"

### § August 25, 2021

The last month or so has been frustrating to develop RPI. I'd say there are a couple of reasons that I'd like to pinpoint and address in this post. Firstly, I think that with the current structure of the RPI backend, we're somewhere in the middle of an upgrade to a "version 2". If you're building software professionally, you might be able to relate to what I mean. But let me explain.

If you scroll on this page all the way down, you'll see that I've laid the groundwork for this codebase sometime in November. This markdown document is still the same as the initial "changelog.txt" file.

So far, I've worked on RPI with a rather conservative midset. My goal was to arrive at something focused, stable, and functionally useful. It usually meant squeezing the solution into an existing legacy codebase for extra features or addressing immediate problems.

See, I shied away from bigger refactors of the code base's structure as I generally don't see much value in that. Hardly any customer gets value simply because I renamed a variable or introduced an internal abstraction.

As we see now, that's a rather short-term biased view. Namely, as the time to make changes to the code base has increased. Its overall complexity has risen too. However, I can't even remember the last time the site was down either. So arguably, the original stability and reliability I've set out to produce have been achieved at the cost of stagnation.

Still, since in June and July, I had the chance to dig into the unknowns of building rugpullindex, I'm now REALLY discontent with its current architecture and where the project's standing overall. I'd love to ragequit, and I have to resist the urge daily.

Here are some of the known unknowns I dug into over the last two months:

• In Germany, can I launch any ERC20 token without much legal hassle? Also; How much would it be to incorporate here, and what are the benefits/risks? What are the benefits of incorporating elsewhere?
• How is it to have employees? Am I even capable of managing them? Will I be able to pay them in time? Will, they immediately rage quit because I'm annoying them?
• To build honeybatcher, how would an architecture look like? E.g., to get all L1 transaction's call data, what infrastructure would a sequencer require? An L1 full node?
• Is it even practically feasible to build a product akin to the idea of a pessimistic rollup, or is it just a pipedream of mine?
• For rugpullindex to make money in the short term without too much risk: What are the options towards monetization, and where and how should we position ourselves in the market? (and many more).

You wouldn't believe how time-intensive and challenging it has been to answer all of these questions. Additionally, when looking at the project's progress over the last few months, I still cringe. From the outside, we haven't "shipped much." But now also, since we've learned about our known unknowns, we'd now like to change more than is realistically possible with our resources at hand. Like very few shiny new features and nearly none of the original goals that came from the initial market research by Scott, we have been able to implement over the course of the last two months. A list:

• Report on the number of swap fees any data token can capture, e.g., monthly
• Report on the number of "data consumes" a data token can capture
• Improved the graphs on the main website to e.g. compare prices
• Optionally show the USD value or other fiat currencies
• Have more sophisticated methods on our API that attract paying customers and track any metrics on API usage.

Seeing that we can do none of this yet is frustrating. There's never been more TODOs on RPI than today. Did I have ten people to hand out tasks? I probably could make them all work half a year! Realistically, that's, of course, not feasible:

• Right now: I can't pay them
• I'm not sure I could manage them all myself
• Why would they be interested in contributing in the first place.

So here we are, a project of almost a year of age with lots of untied loose ends and some minor amount of money left in the bank. Next oceanDAO round incoming, right? Actually: no.

Instead, let me tell you how I want to tighten things up:

• RPI won't try to raise funds from the oceanDAO in round 9. I don't want to spend time fund raising.
• RPI has sold all its remaining OCEAN to establish a runway of roughly another month or so.
• RPI is actively seeking collaborators that are willing to pay, e.g., API addons or other features.
• I want to deliberately distinguish between spending time on RPI vs. spending time working in the oceanDAO. I'll invoice the oceanDAO via proposals separately if necessary.
• I want to onboard one technical contributor who can help so that I'm less thinly spread.

In addition to that, I'm also looking forward to a month without having access to an Ethereum account full of money.

I mean, consider that I've tried to consume as many funds as possible by continuously applying to the oceanDAO since February. And since I won't have more money in September, I also won't be motivated to do more. To me that sounds like a great plan to focus some development to correct course. And it, of course, isn't to say that I'm quitting the oceanDAO funding permanently.

I'd rather say it's an effort to relax development, correct course, and generally improve navigation. Maybe I'll reapply in round 10. But mainly, I hope to have more time to finally finish the crawler rewrite and show how awesome "version 2" of rugpullindex can be. Knock on wood!

## § August 17, 2021

### § Loadtests on Erigon Node

Since we're dogfooding our latest addition to the RPI API, namely its shared Erigon node, we found a performance bottleneck when rapidly requesting transactions. A multi-day optimization effort identified the following issues:

• The file descriptors of a client's operating system need to be tuned towards ideal performance (more := better).
• The API authentication mechanism using Bearer tokens ended up slowing down all of RPI's infrastructure as any request ended up being manually authenticated. We've added caching on August 5, 2021.
• For benchmarking Erigon or other Ethereum nodes, it makes sense differentiating between "hot" and "cold" data. "Hot data" is in blocks that have just been requested or created. "Cold data" is in blocks that are hardly ever in the server's memory.
• RPI's internal infrastructure communicates through Cloudflare, which ends up being the currently last remaining bottleneck. We're investigating solutions.

Below a benchmark's summary using Apache ab:

Server Software:        nginx/1.18.0                                                                                [11/2806]
Server Hostname:        node.rugpullindex.com
Server Port:            443
SSL/TLS Protocol:       TLSv1.2,ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384,2048,256
Server Temp Key:        X25519 253 bits
TLS Server Name:        node.rugpullindex.com

Document Path:          /
Document Length:        103 bytes

Concurrency Level:      100
Time taken for tests:   8.536 seconds
Complete requests:      10000
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      2620000 bytes
Total body sent:        3500000
HTML transferred:       1030000 bytes
Requests per second:    1171.46 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       85.364 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.854 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
400.40 kb/s sent
700.13 kb/s total

• Note: We request eth_blockNumber ("hot data").

### § Separating Crawler Code

• We're in the process of separating all crawler related code in the RPI backend into a standalone package. The process is on-going but should allow a better performing acquisition of data. Please stay tuned.

## § August 9, 2021

• All pricing related data is now retrieved from RPI's erigon node.
• A list of curated meta data for the top data sets on OCEAN Protocol and Big Data Protocol is now available as npm package or for download on GitHub. Our website makes use of those conciser names in the table view on the front page.

## § August 5, 2021

• Speed-up Authorization header validation in API

## § Improving the Gini Coefficient Formula's Accuracy

### § August 2, 2021

Just a few days ago, to my big surprise, Vitalik released a blog post about a topic critical to the functioning of Rug Pull Index. A blog post titled: "Against overuse of the Gini coefficient."

While I'm super interested to learn more about V's thoughts - I haven't had any time to read it yet. Still, a friend of mine, and also ex-BigchainDBer, Ryan Henderson, first made me aware of an inaccuracy in RPI's Gini coefficient calculation for small and/or extreme case populations as e.g. a population of two with incomes of 0 and 1. He, too, had recently used the Gini coefficient in a paper on neural networks.

Originally using Wikipedia's formula, for a maximally inequal populalation e.g. of 0 and 1, the Gini coefficient calculation ended up being $G=\frac{1}{2}$, where as we'd expect it to be $G = 1$.

However, after having some more discussions with Ryan and my friend Jost Arndt, we settled on a more intuitive derivation of the Gini coefficient for Rug Pull Index that should also produce reasonable results for small or extreme populations. For anyone interested, I updated the /specification page with the latest formula.

## § July 29, 2021

• Releasing a new product as part of our API offering. Rug Pull Index's API access now includes access to an ETH mainnet Erigon node. Find more details in our API docs here.

## § On The Value Of Product And Distribution

### § July 29, 2021

Quite some time has passed since I last wrote a coherent article on this blog. Most updates since the big "Build on Stolen Data " post have been minor development updates. And so, I'm scared that it may look like the project has stalled from an external point of view. No new blog posts, no new software updates - It must mean the project's dead.

But, of course, it's not. However, I've been more hesitant to build over the last month. It's been another one of those moments where I deliberately took quite a step back to think thoroughly about what should and can be next.

Already during oceanDAO's R7 vote, I sneaked out - caught a plane to Italy, and had a week of holiday relaxing on Mediterranean beaches. That vacation was direly needed and super nice - but I'm not going to lie - the week before boarding the plane ended up being quite stressful, particularly as I had to make an extraordinary decision:

1. Take the laptop with me and potentially ruin the vacation.
2. Leave the laptop at home and hope for the best.

See, running a web server is no joke and not something "fun". On the contrary, it's a duty that requires a large capacity of time and mental commitment. For example, there's my personal blog that I've hosted on GitHub Pages. I honestly never worry about it as it consists purely of static pages hosted by GitHub. I don't use a custom domain, so its online status is almost fully in the hands of GitHub's engineers. However, I also don't try to sell things on there, and I'm not trying to build business relationships on it either. It's personal.

That's quite different for rugpullindex.com. It's all self-hosted and I've deliberately framed it as a highly reliable and performant service. Of course, I could choose to frame it differently. I could even choose to build it the easy way too. But I like to think that I'm gaining a competitive edge by DIY'ing my infrastructure. Additionally, I take quite some pride and gain motivation because I'm able to deliver on these personal goals.

But then what to do in case I direly need some vacation from my 1-dev startup? And indeed, that was the dilemma I found myself in before going on vacation. So the short answer to a rather long story is that I've prepared myself to go without my laptop:

I messaged some of my data providers and asked for planned breaking changes in the upcoming weeks. For months now, I've improved the crawler's reliability by building redundancies. In addition, I made sure to have some backup plans for some of the worst-case scenarios.

And what can I say: It all worked out (gladly). I ended up being in Italy for one full week on a fantastic and relaxing vacation while rugpullindex.com continued to deliver its service. So that made me happy. But then also recently, and thanks to the fact that I could step away for one week, I've also started to reflect more on what's important for a project like RPI.

Historically, and that's true for many of my prior projects, I've prioritized building product and utility before anything else. My idea had always been that a great product distributes itself through, e.g., word-of-mouth marketing. And while I don't doubt the existence of such a distribution effect - I also don't believe it to be a very effective marketing strategy for a product's audience of RPI's size.

Indeed, over months of observation and testing, I've learned that mostly the opposite is true. The attention economy is real, and this blog's reach is tiny, especially when compared to what huge quantities of media we consume elsewhere.

And that's why, after my vacation, I've prioritized "softer" goals over "hardcore" product development.

1. Thanks to Scott's work, we gained valuable insights into how we want to position rugpullindex on the landscape of online data and finance companies.
2. I've opened a Discord server with the mission of knitting the RPI community more tightly.
3. I'm starting to work on "professionalizing" our web presence by, e.g., aesthetically improving the website.
4. I'm trying to improve RPI's API UX and by serving our customers directly.
5. I've started committing more to business partnerships, and I'm trying to explore where collaborations are possible.

If you'd picture me a month ago, I'd probably be this guy with a wrench in his hand and a hardhat on his head. Today, I'd suggest that I'm at least wearing a tie or a fancy shirt. I'd probably look pretty weird, wearing both tie and hardhat. But whatever, both are valuable roles for sure - sometimes, one is more important than the other.

To conclude this rather complex post, I'd like to leave you with something more simplistic from yet another self-help startup book I've recently discovered. It's called "Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup" by Rob Walling. On an early business's priorities, he claims that:

"Market comes first, marketing second, aesthetic third, and functionality a distant fourth."

## § Multiuser API support

### § July 23, 2021

Hi,

I finally managed to implement a minimal user system to handle more than one user for the API. I've now sent out two additional keys to community members that asked for API access. If you, too, are interested in using the API, please shot us a message on Discord or email.

Best, Tim

### § July 22, 2021

• Improved footer on website
• Started a Discord server
• Remove ad rows from front page

### § July 7, 2021

• In the gini coefficient calculation for did:op:7Bce67697eD2858d0683c631DdE7Af823b7eea38, the addresses 0x655efe6eb2021b8cefe22794d90293aec37bb325 and 0xce7be31f48205c48a91a84e777a66252bba87f0b, their total share in the pool is summed up. Simply put, in the gini coefficient calculation they're now treated as the same address.
• The above mentioned method hasn't been applied to any potential all time low gini coefficients. To learn more, visit /specification.
• RPI continues to be committed to bringing transparency to markets. By measuring and highlighting the qualities of OCEAN’s data sets, we improve the market’s overall health and performance.

## § Built on Stolen Data

### § July 2, 2021

A few days ago, GitHub released a new tool for developers called CoPilot. It's a software plugin for text editors as VSCode that allows developers to "Just Hit Enter" to autocomplete the code they've written so far. I recommend checking out CoPilot's website. Their showcases are pretty incredible.

In fact, they're so awe-inspiring that I had a few chats with people about it in recent days. "Man! We're the next to get replaced by AI!" and so on, where the initial reactions. I'm sympathizing with those emotions - but I was also fairly skeptical. I immediately had doubts about that bot helping me write helpful unit tests - which I find the most tedious and analytically-laborious task in writing software. I don't think it'll understand different testing contexts.

But some people on the Internet managed to get ahold of this program quickly and started exploring its outputs. Suddenly it became conceivable that the "public" data GitHub had used to train CoPilot may include restrictively licensed code like those residing under ,e.g., the GPL.

github copilot has, by their own admission, been trained on mountains of gpl code, so i'm unclear on how it's not a form of laundering open source code into commercial works. the handwave of "it usually doesn't reproduce exact chunks" is not very satisfying pic.twitter.com/IzqtK2kGGo

— eevee (@eevee) June 30, 2021

Shortly after, another person followed up by having CoPilot generate the infamous fast square root algorithm from Quake III (GPL licensed).

I don't want to say anything but that's not the right license Mr Copilot. pic.twitter.com/hs8JRVQ7xJ

— Armin Ronacher (@mitsuhiko) July 2, 2021

Indeed, the later tweet author even tricked the auto-completion algorithm into suggesting a license for the code as well.

Now, I think it shouldn't come as too big of a surprise that the inputs of a machine learning algorithm can reappear as fragments in output later. I guess that for ML-generated images, our brains are just not good enough to compute matches. Hence, we credit most contemporary algorithms as "pretty original". In contrast, it seems relatively easy for code-copy-cats to be debunked. Particularily, when this one suspicious-looking random-ass hex value "0x5f3759df" is auto-suggested.

For me, what I found much more scandalous is, however, this other dimension where it appears we've caught Microsoft stealing from all GitHub users. Could it be that it simply had dumped all sorts of restrictively licensed open source code (including MINE!) into their model? Could it be true that they're now profiting by stealing from my work?

That'd be outrageous! And so, as I was informing myself some more, this subtle anger - triggered by my sense of justice feeling hurt - started growing.

It only got worse when I read more Hacker News comments. Specifically, one which claimed that many image recognition algorithms were likely just trained with copyrighted image data too. I mean, I don't even know what to say about that.

Indeed, now when I'm writing these lines - it's so absurd - I feel like doubting myself. Is it really that bad? But see, for me, it didn't even occur until now that training a model on copyright-protected images is an option. My most prolonged understanding of how these models were built was: (1) Launch a successful social network. (2) Setup shitty T&Cs. (3) Harvest data from users legally (but maybe immorally).

However, to now learn that a giant like Microsoft dares to just release a product built on looting is genuinely a shock. Particularly when considering that I could be part of the wronged ones. Or; that I could be part of the damaging party by having accidentially used such an illicit algorithm .

Right now, it feels absurd. I'm classifiying the usage of copyrighted content in machine learning as deeply immoral and illicit. Involuntarily, an image of a blood diamond comes to mind.

I think it should be illegal and pursued to distribute such a piece of code.

Edit on July 8, 2021:

GitHub Support just straight up confirmed in an email that yes, they used all public GitHub code, for Codex/Copilot regardless of license. pic.twitter.com/pFTqbvnTEK

— ✨ Nora Tindall 🪐 (@NoraDotCodes) July 7, 2021

## § June 29, 2021

• Improve real estate of index table by creating a customized cell to display publisher, symbol and rank in one place.
• Allow checking out a data set's historical price between Jan 1, 2021 and today. Click on the little chart icon next to the name.

## § Generating valuable insights from speaking with RPI users

### § June 25, 2021

#### § Long time listener, first time caller

I only just entered the blockchain world professionally having watched closely from the sidelines for a number of years.

I've worked in corporate Advertising and Tech consultancies over the last 10 years and tried my hand in a number of different startups.

I recently joined the Ocean DAO and met Tim. I could see that what he was doing would be successful if Ocean is successful and while the index was technically sound, I knew I could contribute to its development by helping to round out Tim's strong technical skillset by paying special attention to user's needs.

#### § The Approach

Firstly, I wanted to identify the opportunity available to the index and answer the following questions;

##### § How were users using it and how where they thinking about it?

Knowing this gives us a much clearer idea of what we're building and why we're building it. Opinions are great, but it's better to have actual feedback from real users. That way you know you're building something for real people and not just building the thing you want to build (something I've been guilty of doing in the past!).

##### § We collected 77 pieces of feedback from users

Some were simple suggestions like 'I think you should change the name' while others were more illuminating and got to the core value proposition from the user's perspective like, "I don't currently use the site because I'm not looking to invest in data tokens."

After adding all 77 one liners to a spreadsheet I went through and tagged an associated theme to each piece of feedback (e.g. Risk, Education, Marketing etc).

##### § A macro trend emergered where 64% of comments were 'investment' related, 16% were 'educational' while 20% were 'other'.

I made a note of these finding and plan to feed them into marketing initiatives and prioritisation decisions in the future.

After digging deeper into the findings it became clear that an imediate opportunity exists to help users make better $OCEAN staking decisions. I personally wouldn't have seen this as being RPI's primary opportunity to begin with but approaching users with an open mind and enabling insights to emerge from speaking with them is a great way to unearth hidden jems. The secondary objective was to help users make better data token investment decisions which was more in line with my expectations. ##### § Sorting the wood from the trees After breaking the raw user feedback data down further I identified 9 key action items. I then added these to the table below and prioritised them using the RICE prioritisation framework. This helped us identify the relative priority of the various tasks at hand and plan accordingly. The 9 items have been broken down further into a Now, Next, Later table enabling us to be clear on the areas of focus. It's unlikely we will follow this table completely as things will inevitably change over time. However, this does give us a great foundation to build upon and start delivering value to users soon. Tim was able to publish an article explaining how the ranking algortihm works already. You may need a PhD in Mathematics to understand it but that's besides the point. We've got more work to do in order to break down these one liners into actionable user stories. For now though, we have a new and refined focus - helping users make better$OCEAN staking and datatoken investment decisions.

...watch this space.

Written by: Scott Milat

## § June 25, 2021

• Database controller refactor: Enable retrieval of e.g EUR prices of data set over a date range

## § June 22, 2021

• Use KaTex in Markdown files. An example: $f(x) = x$
• Update old blogposts from 7/12/2020 and 30/11/2020 to use KaTex.
• Updates to honeybatcher since intro blog post:
• Implement and test deposit and withdraw functions
• Construct StateTree library for handling state transitions using a Merkle tree.
• Start testing unlucky paths.
• Many discussions with other rollup developer about ideal architecture model.
• Add /specification to create more transparency on how rug pull index's algorithm ranks data sets on BDP and OP.

## § Blog Post: "When Scope Blows Up"

### § June 18, 2021

• Release a blog post on my personal blog about "scope" in software development. It's related to the experience I make with building rugpullindex.com and honeybatcher.

## § Introducing Honeybatcher

### § June 10, 2021

In several previous updates, I talked about how difficult it is for RPI to monetize considering the uncertainty surrounding Ethereum gas prices. A few weeks ago, I said that deciding on a scaling solution is difficult. I mentioned that I'm doing my own research too.

Today, an important moment in this process has come. I've been able to put a tiny amount of my idea into code. Introducing honeybatcher, a pessimistic (or as I'd prefer: "strongly-consistent") rollup.

Now what's the idea here? The idea is that both zero knowledge proofs as well as building optimistic consensus mechanisms is incredibly difficult. Hence, instead of using cryptographic proofs or building my own distributed system, I thought about what I could leverage today to minimize gas costs and complexity.

First of: The EVM - it's awesome. It allows to run completely deterministic code. That's useful, as the complexity of our system is reduced immensely if we just assume a smart contract to be the permantent leader within our distributed L2 network. Not only does it make writing sequencer code easier, as just a single contract has to be monitored, it also allows a user to withdraw their funds at any time. If the an Ethereum smart contract is the leader of our distributed L2 system, any possible write or read can be done at any time without losing a consistent view over the system's state. This is different from optimistic rollups where consistency emerges from delayed economic finality mechanism that is incentivized for using fraud proofs.

Now with regard to minimizing gas cost, I found that a single Ethereum transaction costs at least 21k gas. More is required for special EVM executions. If we observe transactions on Ethereum, however, we'll see that many addresses do the same thing: they either swap or transfer their tokens. Hence, if we'd be able to batch-execute multiple transactions in one, we could safe a second user up to 10.5k gas and a third user 14k, and so on. Furthermore, by building the rollup in a usecase-specific manner, we could safe further gas (e.g. by tracking balances in Merkle trees and by authorizing ERC20 transfers using ecrecover (only 3k gas)).

Now, for the code I've published today - it's not a big deal. As you may be able to infer from the above-linked repo, the contract merely a single function. There's not even a repository for a sequencer node yet.

Still, I created a new entry in this blog to celebrate my achievement. It's with its existence and the honeybatcher GitHub repository, that I'm finally able to share an idea that so far has been purely stored in my head. Today, I'm happy because I managed to express a complex thought in words and code. I'm happy as judging from my experience, it means that the amount of complex thought I'll have to go through from now on, will be less than today. It'll be downhill from here.

So what's next? Next is that I'll continue contributing code to the honeybatcher repository. I'll keep you posted on my progress here.

Best, Tim

PS: This blog post was written in Berlin's pitiless June heat. I'm, hence, hoping that what I wrote can be considered a coherent thought and not some brain melted icecream lol 🍨

## § June 8, 2021

• Add structured meta data for better search engine results

## § Adjustment to Gini Coefficient Calculation

### § June 7, 2021

Hi there,

I mentioned in my last entry that the gini coefficient seemed too positive for some data sets. In particular I talked about VORSTA-2 and how was able to enter in rank #3 with only 3 token holders, the richest one owning 98% of its pool. Below is a picture of VORSTA-2's share distribution. I don't think there's a lot of math needed to understand that this pool has no equal distribution of liquidity.

When I implemented the gini coefficient score at the end of last year, I defaulted to a formula from Wikipedia that uses the income distribution of a population and a relative mean for the incomes' absolute differences (see below).

Essentially, it compares each LP's stake in the pool and then divides (roughly) by the mean stake. For VORSTA-2 (and similar ones), the formula allowed it to rank highly on rugpullindex.com as any small share in the pool counted. For VORSTA-2, 0xda2d9's stake (roughly $35) contributed as much to the calculation as the stake of 0x89717 ($12k).

Using pen and paper, I sat down to think about a solution. I think I found a simple one that I'd like to share now:

• For a data set with more than 100 LPs, any share that's greater than 0.1% is considered in the gini coefficient calculation; and
• For any data set with less than 100 LPs, only shares that are greater than 1% are considered.

The new ranking went live before this blog post. You can check it out on the front page. In my opinion, the solution improves the ranking's results. Small sets with an apparently positive gini coefficient are filtered, while we're still giving data sets with a bigger community a fair chance.

Looking at the results, I found it curious how many data sets had "sneaked up" in the ranking over time. Obviously, I can't say anything about any publisher's intentions. It could have been that some moved some liquidity to improve their scores. It could have also just been regular liquditiy providing. It could have been chance.

In any case, however, I'm now motivated to further improve the gini coefficient's safety by tracking data that's capital-inefficient to manipulate. I already have some ideas. Until then, feel free to continue playing mouse if you dare :)

Best, Tim

PS: Thanks so much for voting in OceanDAO's Round 6!

## § June 4, 2021

The crawler failed tonight due to a potentially invalid assumption of mine. Both the BDP marketplace as well as OCEAN's instance of Acquarius returned data for "VORSTA-2", when in my view only Big Data Protocol's instance should have returned anything as the data set was launched there.

I addressed the problem in a workaround and filled an issue over on the Ocean Protocol GitHub.

Finally, regarding the calculation of VORSTA-2's gini index, it's easy to see that its composition of liquidity providers shouldn't yield such a positive gini index of < 0.7 as it does today. If we look at its balances, they're roughly equivalent to:

a: 1000

b: 1

c: 1

I haven't had time to look into the math of why its such a positive gini index, but I'm guessing that it has to do with the the small amount of LPs. In the upcoming days, it's likely that I'll, hence, increase the minimum amount of LPs a data set pool needs to have (e.g. 5). I'll also look into how I can make the gini index calculation favor popular pools over less populated ones.

## § May 27, 2021

• Fix page layout towards better readability. / has max-width: 70rem while other pages have max-width: 50rem.
• Include <footer> in all pages.
• Improve content pages system by allowing to write all pages in markdown.
• Refresh /about page and introduce /faq page.
• Ad slot prices on on rugpullindex.com are now up to 6x cheaper 300€ to 50€ per week.

## § May 26, 2021 Changelog

• Release API docs over at /docs.

## § How "Plausible" are Our Website Analytics

### § May 26, 2021

From rugpullindex's first days, I made its website analytics public by using plausible.io. I'm a huge fan and paying customer of their service. I like the idea of making my website's stats public. And, I'm a fan of using a solution that's privacy-friendly. Actually, I liked plausible's product so much that I've presented this website's stats as a voting criteria in all OceanDAO rounds.

Recently, however, I became aware of a problem with plausible's web analytics, that I believe is important to share here. It has to do with the fact that many ad blockers are now blocking plausible's tracking script.

If we take a look to RPI's six month unique visitors, we just see that its been fairly stable. Between February and May, there's been roughly the same amount of unique users per month (around 500).

We can also look at pausible's 30 day view to get a feeling of how many unique users visited in the last 30 days:

Indeed, the stats look plausible. Since I started to deliver my website through Cloudflare on April 21, 2021, however, I noticed a large deviation on their website analytics frontend for the same timeframe.

While plausible logs 596 unique visitors, Cloudflare displays 2,81k! I found this difference quite interesting, given that both services use a completely different technique of tracking unique website visitors.

Here's how they differ: (1) As Cloudflare is a content delivery network (short CDN), it can track unique visitors e.g. by checking everyone's IP on a request level. (2) Plausible, since it's not part of RPI's infrastructure, has to rely on an embedded JavaScript to send data to its servers.

And though plausible is a publicly-committed company towards privacy-friendliness, they've publicly stated that their script has started to appear on blocklists. This means, that for any ad blocking browser, their users might now show up as unique visitor in our plausible.io stats.

Seeing this, I thought it may be interesting to compare both sets of data side-by-side and so I did using a Google Spreadsheet:

And, indeed, the difference is huge. But it makes sense. According to some napkin math, Cloudflare has counted 87% more unique daily users on average than plausible.io.

Plausible's co-founder Marco Saric came to a similar conclusion when a year ago, he blogged about an observation that 26% of a tech-savy audience blocks Google Analytics over plausible.io's tracking script.

Seeing these facts, I found it reasonable to assume that a similar effect may happen to rugpullindex. And that's what I was able to confirm with my napkin math.

Given that users can't directly influence Cloudflare's unique visitors metric by e.g. installing an ad blocker, we can assume that on average, the daily count of unique visitors from plausible.io deviated by a wopping -87%. Instead of plausible's 590 unique visitors since April 26, 2021, it's more likely that rugpullindex had a total of 3767 unique visitors.

Plausible has reacted to the problem by allowing users to submit stats through a proxy. As rugpullindex's stats are vital for its community to determine its future funding and value, it has hence become my recent priority to address the problem. Step one was writing this post to inform everyone.

Finally, I'd like to say that I'm a bit sad about this situation. I personally care about my privacy online and I hate that tracking has become a sound business model for many tech companies. It's the reason I've always been excited about data sovereignty, OP and rugpullindex. I find it stupid that my project's stats are distorted because others are extracting millions through non-consensual tracking. Is this why we can't have nice things?

Additionally, I believe that merely tracking user flow isn't falling into the category of "privacy-invading" technology and I'd therefore like to say that blocklist maintainers should start offering more opinionated views (e.g. support plausible.io but not GA).

Finally, I'd like to say that I don't want to blame anyone directly for the situation. Rather, I believe that it's a systemic issue may be addressed by finding better business models for cyberspace that don't rely on ads.

I'm hoping to correct the stats tracking soon. And, that's all for today.

Best, Tim

## § May 20, 2021

• Private API endpoint /api/v1/indices/OP-COMPOSITE-V1/ranks/ was failing the daily integration tests. It's fixed. Starting to improve API tests structurally now.
• Improve tooltips logic on frontpage and on mobile, table doesn't break page layout anymore.
• svg-line-chart started failing to scale the input data points recently such that the most recent poins were cut of on the right border of the chart. Should be fixed now. v0.1.2 released.

## § Quick Update

### § May 13, 2021

Here's a quick update on the things that I've been up to in the last few days:

• I've taken a deep dive into Ethereum rollups. I want to understand rollup's readiness and if I could use one for RPI.
• I've created an official GitHub organisation: github.com/rugpullindex and I transferred all existing projects to it.
• I tested compressing simulated rollup data with brotli. I thought, if rollups are about compression, why not use the tools we already have. Find the benchmark here.
• I've started a project to download a contract's storage fast and for free. I want to look into the balances of e.g. DAI or USDC and I want to research user behaviors.

From the outside, these projects might look arbitrary. To me, however, they're helpful to gather more information about the state of scalability. I want to find out: Can we truly build scalable dapps today? Dapps that don't have insane gas costs. And if so, how?

The reason for taking a closer look is to have clarity that building a scalable dapp is possible today. You see, I'm sceptical as I've been burned with scaling promises both in the "permissioned blockchain" era as well as when "Ethereum Plasma" was a thing. Now, rollups seem to make a lot of sense from a scalability perspective. But let's not forget that previous scaling concepts made sense too. In the end, what matters is the rollups going into production and how much throughput they'll truely able to have.

I'm looking into rollups, as for me, there's no point in having my users trade assets for $100 transaction fee. But not only that. I think that it's starting to become an obligation to stand up as blockchain developer and take responsibility for the terrible pollutive nature of PoW chains. Sure, mining could be done with clean energy. But is it? To have a positive impact, I think it's important optimizing for efficiency. Any tx that can be shaved off should be. And, hence, just building yet another simple Dapp simply doesn't cut it for me this time. It'll have to scale. And so yeah, hence the research into rollups. It's been fun and I'm excited to continue improving the project. Cheers, Tim ## § May 11, 2021 • Send a PR to classless.de to add tooltips. • Add tooltips to explain some of the metrics on the front page. Thanks @Scotty for the suggestion! ## § May 9, 2021 • Price and liquidity of BDP data sets was calculated incorrectly. Fixed. ## § May 8, 2021 • API endpoint GET /indices/OP-COMPOSITE-V1/ranks/:did failed integration tests and is working again. • Add multi marketplace support • Big Data Protocol assets are now listed. Note the green and pink link color mapping on the listing. ## § May 5, 2021 • A data set can now be priced in OCEAN or other currencies (e.g. BDP) This is a backend change that you won't notice on the website currently. ## § Meditations on Monetizations ### § May 3, 2021 Hi yall, I feel like its been a long time I made time to write something in this journal. That's because, as I may have mentioned, I favored building over communicating in April. I saw a strong need to do so and now that I've been able to speed up the page, I'm enjoying the fruits of my work. However, there's a certain thing that's been on my mind a lot recently. As you may have seen from the front page, OceanDAO's Round 5 is in progress. And with that, there's another opportunity for rug pull index to receive income so that I can pay rent. In the beginning, I shrugged of the vote easily as the project was young and since I wasn't convinced in its importance. In the recent weeks, I've realized that it, too, became an important part of my online expression and a regular part of my life. I love doing things my way. I feel empowered. Working for RPI feels great. But with that additionally gained freedom, as usually in life, there also comes a fear of losing it. I learned that when applying for OceanDAO R5 the last week. Simply put, I've been surprised to see that through its competitive nature, most proposals have risen in quality. The fund raising, too, has become more complex and time-consuming. There's now more capital voting than before. And while I have no doubt that this capital can also work in RPI's favor, it makes me anxious to see that its existence is directly coupled to vote's outcome. That makes me anxious as, if I ran out of money, justification for spending time here would become difficult as I'd earn more from serving freelance clients. This leads me to the point of this article, which is monetization. Or shall I say diversification and the spreading of risks? In Peter Thiel's "Zero to One" there's a section where he goes on to say that building a business is mainly about surviving throught progress and time. Along with that he states that PayPal has made more money in its recent last year than all other years of its existence combined. For him, it's all about continuity. I feel the same about starting a project. Service and its quality is 99% about showing up and about consistency. Its about continuing to build trust. I know this as I've been part of BigchainDB GmbH and ascribe in their first years. I've witnessed the doubts from potential customers first hand. Sure, we faced problems building the product. But convincing customers to commit to our product was more than just writing code. It was about the team's quality, committment and the perceived chance of the company's survival. A customer trusting in us was a customer buying from us. I've made that experience in 2015 - 2017. I realize it now and I want to act on it by making time and external progress the friends of rug pull index. It shall have limited downside and unlimited upside. Practically speaking, I can execute on that by removing weak parts and by improving the good parts. A weak part I've discovered is its dependence income through the OceanDAO. Hence, for the future, I want to commit myself not only towards building and communicating but also towards to the goal of increasing and diversifying the project's income and funding. A preliminary idea: Sell ads. Because why not? Building the ad spots took me 5 minutes. I've added outbound click tracking too and the results are starting to come in. Last week, there was a 32% chance that a user clicked a link on rugpullindex.com. At least for last week, it confirms that this newly created estate holds value. I'm open to discuss rates. Contact me. Additionally, it means opening my wallet else where. It's not by accident that I've recently toyed around with web components and packaging web3 into a minimal JavaScript bundle. A web3-based signature feature is coming. Conviction voting sounds appealing. And with that, a new opportunity for revenue opens for me too. Es bleibt also spannend! To conclude: yes, you've heard it right I need the cash (to) flow! I need it now. If you have ideas too, please get in touch! Best, Tim ## § April 26, 2021 • Improve front page layout • Curate extra information on front page ## § Major Performance Improvement is Live ### § April 21, 2021 Hey, over the last month or so, the site had started to slow down significantly for a few reasons: • I've included an additional library to draw the graph on the front page, • I did not cache the site globally through a CDN, • By adding the chart, I had to do even more database queries • And finally, I was still computing the scoring upon delivery of each request. That last one ended up taking 4-6 seconds uncached now. You may never notice it as I'm using Cache-Control, NGINX cache, and now also Cloudflare's CDN for caching the page all day. However, I noticed the annoyingly slow page loads, so I decided to do something about them. Not only were they a problem for general usability, but they also stood in the way of adding other features, e.g.: • Looking at indexes in the past • Looking at individual assets and their ranks in the past • Retrieving assets from private API. Hence, on Monday, I decided that computing scores on the fly have to stop! And since then, I've been heads down adjusting the database such that we get sub-second latencies for loading / on an uncached browser window. Last week, I already took care of reducing the number of extra round trips by also finalizing a specially made library for drawing SVG line charts. svg-line-chart is integrated server-side and hence adds no additional overhead on delivery. We end up with the following: The delivered data when accessing rugpullindex.com has a total footprint of 50KB, making it fastly available from almost any network! Speed is a killer feature. I truly believe in that, and I hope you now come to rug pull index happily, knowing that the browser will load the page in no time. Best, Tim ## § Recent Updates ### § April 20, 2021 • The crawler has started to fail more frequently again. I'm assuming that it's related to users accessing the website around the time of the crawl. I don't do any database connection management at the moment lol. • I'm starting to think about a practical implementation of a smart contract index pool of assets. A major questions is how to use a little gas as possible. As an exercise, I did some research and published it on my blog: "Saving Gas on the Ethereum Mainnet." • I'm still improving the implementation of svg-line-chart • The crawl has started to take longer. Hence, the page is now refreshed at 1am every midnight. This may change again in the future. I want to see if I can address the crawler's problems with this fix. ## § April 13, 2021 • Got rid of dygraph.js by using a library I built myself with zero network dependencies: svg-line-chart ## § April 8, 2021 • Received grant of OceanDAO Round 4 and swapped it to USDC • Started work on svg-line-chart to improve website performance and reliability. • Started enabling Cache-Control headers for all static assets ## § Termux Maintenance ### § April 5, 2021 I felt stressed before easter. Through COVID lockdowns and all, I ended up mostly working anyways. I mean, there isn't much more to do really. But then for easter, I decided that I don't want to spend time on the computer. I felt like wanting to do a small digital detox when visiting my parents in the south. So instead of my computer, I ended up packing lots of books and even some utensils for drawing. Now that easter's done, I'm happy I've tried! The main reason, I wanted to bring the computer was indeed rugpullindex. What was I supposed to do when the crawler went down or when other problems arose? "For one, the crawler works fairly stable now," I thought. But another reason I felt comfortable leaving the Macbook Pro at home was that dev tools on Android are starting to become interesting. To be able to maintain the rugpullindex server, I ended up generating a ed25591 SSH key on Termux and uploaded it. I tried SSH'ing into it and it seemed to work perfectly. I also played around with Termux and related apps in the F-Droid store. They start to look quite promising. It's like having a full-featured shell on your phone. Some people even use it with a Bluetooth keyboard. It sounds like such a cool idea for a product. Make phones more like computers. SSH over mobile internet. Anywhere! Anyways, apart from some minor edits to the page, I didn't have much to maintain, fortunately. But using vim and SSH, I managed to write this little post, reflecting on this experience. Happy Holidays everybody! ## § Recording from Town Hall Meeting ### § March 30, 2021 In the last OceanDAO town hall, I talked about rug pull index. Here is the recording: ## § The Interview ### § March 26, 2021 Last week, Kevin from datapeek.org asked me to do an interview with him. As I found the idea fun, I said yes and we had an email-based chat. The interview ended up being mostly about rug pull index and how I ended up working on it. It was my first time ever being interviewed. And what can I say; I enjoyed being in the limelight for once! You can read it here. That's all for this week. I'm wishing you a nice weekend. And hoping for myself that the crawlers stay online this time around. Best, Tim ## § Minor Updates ### § March 23, 2021 When you garden plants, sometimes just a little trimming of one or two leaves or branches is required to allow the plant to grow further. Today, after having a call with one of my users, I felt the need for trimming. I updated to the latest version of classless.de, my CSS framework, and I rearranged the front page to show the information more quickly. Just a while back I read an essay called "Speed is the Killer feature". Today, I feel like it reflects my principles for building web apps well. I hope you like the updated front page. Best, Tim ## § The Crawler Crisis ### § March 22, 2021 Good morning, oh how I wish to have a solution to the crawler problem that rugpullindex.com is currently experiencing! As I said, I've switched from Ethplorer to Covalent recently, as I had experienced a bug with Ethplorer. Well, now it turns out that Covalent is less reliable than Ethplorer. In fact, Ethplorer came back with a bug fix recently. So since it seems that I shouldn't rely on neither of them 100%, I'm now changing the code to use them both. Distributing my risks. Dogfooding my own mantras. If one fails, I'll just use the other. Hopefully that'll solve the problem for good. That's all for now. Planning to do some further updates this week. Best, Tim ## § March 20, 2021 Tonight, the crawler broke when our service provider Covalent returned a non-JSON response. I fixed it by now catching that error and by re-starting the crawl. ## § The Performance Graph ### § March 15, 2021 In OceanDAO Round 3, I announced building towards a graph that shows the index's historical performance. But for the last month or so, most of the changelog I published on the blog was about improving database queries. Indeed, I had to adjust all of those to show the following graph today: Here, you can see a first try at displaying the index's performance starting on February 15, 2021, to March 15, 2021. X-axis showing the dates of measurement, y-axis the index's price in EUR. Please note that I haven't had time to confirm its correctness yet. However, it looks roughly correct. So how did I create this graph? • I assume an index value target = 100 (in EUR) • For each data set's score, I calculate a relative score relative_score = score / SUM(scores) • For each data set, I then calculate a share amount share = relative_score * target / price • A share represents the number of tokens the index holds for a given data set. After buying a target of 100€ in tokens, all I do is note down daily all token prices. By summing all token prices per day, I get the index value per day. And those values, I plotted in this graph. I know, for now, that might sound not very easy. But I've plans to improve this communication. Anyways, that's today's update. Best, Tim PS: Another change I made today: • Continue improving ranking algorithm's data base queries. It should now finally be possible to get a reliable ranking querying the data base by any past date. Next up is aggregating all these results and dumping them in a chart. ## § March 13, 2021 Good morning, this whole deal with the service provider is turning into a bit of a disaster. Since tonight, it's returning a 400 error for even more assets. I've received a response to my email that I sent to support. "We will investigate the issue and fix it in the case of a bug.", they told me on Thursday. For me, the whole thing is starting to frustrate me. I knew the risk of being dependent on a third-party service provider. And, I already had plans for my own crawler in place. I feel I'm quite unlucky that this is happening now. But it's not in my control and so I'm currently trying to fix the problem in another way. I've thought about building a crawler myself now. But I don't think I'll be quick enough. Maybe, there's other providers with similar functionality that I could use. I'll keep you updated. ### § Update 11:20 CET I researched online and found a similar provider. I can't speak to its reliability either, but using it addresses the problem for now. I've deleted the crawl of tonight and re-crawled. The website now displays the correct ranking again. The issue is resolved. ## § Mar 11, 2021 Tonight the crawler threw an error when retrieving the top holders of 0x5e9939f6D959ffE9B328243DfaDBEED9C46ac197 (token: EXCANE-93). Below is an image of the API service's logs. You can see that the request stopped working tonight and instead threw a 400 error. For now, I've added an exception route that allows the crawler to continue when receiving such an error. I've reached out to the service's support too. For the time being though it's likely that EXCANE-93's information is displayed incorrectly. I'll keep you updated. ## § Mar 10, 2021 • Working towards displaying the index' performance as a chart • Improve structure of main data base query. A small portion had static data embedded. This was moved into prepared statements. ## § Thank You For Voting ### § Mar 7, 2021 On Friday, March 5, 2021, OceanDAO's round 3 vote finished. If you browsed the website last week, you might have noticed the yellow call-for-votes I had put on the front page. I can't prove that it had much of an effect on the voting outcome, but I can say that there's an essential difference between the votes of rounds two and three. Let's look at the data. In round 2, 63.08k OCEAN tokens or three addresses voted for rugpullindex. That's 5.28% of all votes. This time around, 233.54k OCEAN tokens or two addresses voted, making it 7.73% (+2,48% or an increase of 47%, relative to round 2) of all tickets that voted. I doubt that we can draw many insights from the above-presented data. Still, in the spirit of gathering data for self-improvement and record some insights for posterity, let's look at what deliberate optimizations I made between rounds 2 and 3: • I approached potential voters directly by adding a little yellow note to the front page. I also reached out to voters directly. • I spent more time working on rugpullindex.com in February than any month before. • I actively wrote about the project on this blog and circulated my thoughts on social media. • I kept my R3 proposal concise and clear. • As I said, I don't think there's much meaning behind these statements yet. But I wanted to note them down anyways and maybe come back to this post in the future. Lastly, I'd like to thank all of my voters! Your vote allows me to spend quality time on issues that I think are worth exploring, thinking about, and fixing. Thank you! That's all for today. Best, Tim ## § Scaling Ethereum One Tx At A Time ### § Mar 1, 2021 With regards to building rugpullindex.com, there are currently two problems bugging me. One is that gas prices on the main net are insanely high right now. And two is that the Ethereum front end space has become even more hostile than what I was used to before. In a recent post over on my blog, I've made the argument that "Ethereum isn't fun anymore" and that "web3 is a stupid idea". Though I've earned some criticism for these posts, I'd now like to double down. I have an alternative vision for web3. Purely from a pragmatic, architectural point of view. I've written it in long-form over in the Ethereum/EIPs issue section already. We need to start thinking practically about light clients now. Ironically, full nodes are costing developers real dollars today. And building truly decentralized applications is hardly possible anymore without a credit card—the irony. I guess nobody designed the Ethereum protocol with light clients in mind. Still, I think there are small fixes, applied here and there, that could help dramatically improving user experiences in web3's front ends. So what's the plan? #### § Scaling Web3 via WebRTC Just recently, WebRTC was made a W3C and IETF standard. WebRTC (or Web Real-Time Communication) is a concept for sharing data directly between users' web browsers without going through middlemen like servers. "Over the past year, WebRTC has seen a 100X increase of usage in Chrome due to increased video calling from within the browser.", the article states. But WebRTC cannot only be used for distributing video. Reasonably, we can use it to spread any data. And one data that I've ranted about not being distributed well enough is that of the Ethereum blockchain. #### § ... and Via WebTorrents WebTorrents allow us to download torrent files directly from the web. instant.io, for example, enables a user to paste in a magnet link to download it within the browser instantly. A client could now easily send a magnet link to start syndicating files. In general, torrents have a rather bad reputation, mainly as they've been a driver of piracy in the past. However, speaking of their technical properties, torrents are like one of the coolest technologies around. • They guarantee file integrity through hashing (similar to content-addressing) • They have built-in incentivization that can drive seeding • Their scale increases with the number of participants (or seeders) increasing • They are "proven" technology. So how does WebRTC, WebTorrents and Web3 fit together? #### § ethtorrent, A Decentralized Web3 Provider WebTorrent utilizes WebRTC in browser environments. It can fall back into a webtorrent-hybrid for server-side usage. What's fantastic is that WebTorrent has a distributed hash table built-in. It even allows specifying a custom hash function. So what's the plan? For now, the plan is to democratize the access of blockchain data for regular web3 apps again. The first step towards this will be creating a lean component that we can use with web3.js. Its goal is to cache and store all requests from web3.js that have to do with a full transaction or an entire block. We will await the response, cached for these requests, and offer it for download on WebTorrent via a custom DHT. If a second client comes along, for each request they make towards the full node's RPC endpoint, it will be interrupted, and instead, will consult the WebTorrent's DHT first. In case the retrieval of a transaction is possible via torrents, it will make no RPC endpoint call. That is good for a few reasons: • Infura and others bill by requests/day. For an application that needs scale, this can incur relatively high costs. Decentralized applications shouldn't be bound to the creator's solvency. After all, smart contracts aren't. • Infura is centralized. If it stops working, the reliant dapp starts working too. • Many dapps need to send the same data to the same users. It's mostly related to the application's state at a specific moment. If all users could come in sync quickly when starting up the application, that'd improve a dapp's user experience dramatically. #### § What Needs to Happen Now? I'm not sure if I'll handle this project as part of rugpullindex.com. However, only through it, I had the idea for it. In any case, I think building the project shouldn't be too much of a hassle as WebTorrent comes with batteries included. As a start, I'll attempt to create a library that can bootstrap the Ethereum WebTorrent network for sharing transactions and blocks. Then, I'll build a simple bootstrapping node capable of talking back to an archive node for eventually missing transactions or blocks in the DHT. Then, I think it's a question of whether the idea is accepted and used by the Ethereum community. However, a web3 provider could significantly reduce the number of requests a dapp does daily; I could imagine there be a will to give it a try. And that's how I want to contribute to scaling Ethereum for now. I hope you enjoyed reading. Feel free to let me know your thoughts by reaching out to me. My email is on my blog. That's all for today. Best, Tim ## § Feb 24, 2021 • Bug fix: Yesterday, I added anchors to each headline on this page, e.g. https://rugpullindex.com/blog#the-algorithm%3B-it's-working!. However, for links that have a punctuation character at the end, Whatsapp and Telegram didn't end up making them clickable. They think a user wants to end a sentence with the exclamation mark character and not that it's part of the link. I now fixed the problem by removing all special characters from anchor links. • I designed and added the rugpullindex.com logo. It's a rug with a # :) • I submitted my proposal to the OceanDAO's Round 3 • Bug fix: Crawler used to run at midnight in "Europe/Berlin" time zone and not UTC. That has caused numerous problems in the past. To make it all work, I had to perform an unscheduled crawl before relaunching the server. It could have been that the site was down for a few minutes. Anyways, now working in the backend should go more smooth. ## § The Algorithm; It's Working! ### § Feb 23, 2021 On Feb 18, 2021, the maintainer of the "Oceancap - Datapool Evaluation and Charting" (ADASTA-60)" data set tweeted: 1.) We decided to close our Oceancap pool on 21/02 due to the market situation. We are pretty sure that @oceanprotocol is working hard on preparing an updated Marketplace in the near future. We are waiting on the sidelines and take a break for now. — Oceancap - Datapool Evaluation and Charting (@OCharting) February 18, 2021 Since rugpullindex.com listed ADASTA-60 in its TOP 25 index for a while, I was curious how the ranking algorithm would react to the announcement. Remember, the algorithm ranks a data set based on its market's performance. It works "autonomously" and isn't capable of comprehending the statement—instead, it's rating each data set by its market's performance. Our thesis is that if a data set's market is strong, its value is high too and vice versa. Here is ADASTA-60's performance within the context of the announcement: Date Score Gini Liquidity (OCEAN) Price (OCEAN) 2021-02-17T23:01:04.300Z 0.62 0.98 38969 20.80 2021-02-18T23:01:03.913Z 0.60 0.98 37664 19.60 2021-02-19T23:01:03.956Z 0.55 0.98 37549 19.47 2021-02-20T23:01:04.073Z 0.57 0.98 37549 19.47 2021-02-21T23:03:56.286Z 0.45 0.97 21411 11.10 2021-02-22T23:01:03.474Z 0.22 0.96 9148 4.74 Looking at the market's data, we can see the following: • The share equality of liquidity providers to ADASTA-60's pool has historically been somewhat on the centralized side, meaning a few LPs had lots of control. The factor "Gini," close to 1, shows this clearly. • Within just roughly a week, ADASTA-60's liquidity dried up, resulting in a 4x decrease. • Its price tanked too; ADASTA-60 fell from 20 OCEAN last Wednesday to 4 OCEAN (5x). #### § Conclusion rugpullindex.com's initial thesis that markets are a proxy for data sets has found some evidence in this particular case. rugpullindex.com successfully forecasted an investment risk (Gini-Index close to 1) before it manifested itself. Its algorithm is now automatically decreasing ADASTA-60's stake as the market reacts to the announcement. I find this result excited as it's the first time we can see the collected data and my work in action. 🥳 In the future, I want users to gain the same insights I was able to acquire today. I'm excited to continue working on that. Best, Tim ## § Feb 17, 2021 • Further adjustment of ranking algorithm. I had forgotten adding liquidity in EUR in one subquery. • Added data base index to improve performance of uncached request to root / ## § Feb 16, 2021 • Refactor some code: I simplified the query that constructs the index ranking. Over the long term, this change will allow me to make adjustments with more confidence about the system's correctness. • Ranking now uses Liquidity in EUR to create a relative ranking among data sets. See post from Feb 12, 2021 for details. ## § Feb 15, 2021 As announced on Feb 12, 2021, liquidity and price are now displayed in EUR. However, EUR values are not yet used within the ranking algorithm. ## § Feb 14, 2021 Midnight: After months, I made some changes to the crawler again which lead the page to be down the last two nights. The reason was a bug in the price crawler. I was trying to get OCEAN's current EUR price and I was using Coingecko's historical API, that didn't send back any results (because it's "historical" and not "present" time). The crawler is now using Coingecko's simple API to get the price. A few reflections on what I learned by having to open my laptop before breakfast and before going to bed on a Saturday: • Having to be responsible for a website on the weekend is painful. • Running a crawling script at midnight is good for the user and bad for me. I only ever find production bugs at night or in the morning. The users probably never notice... Working on a website that always displays new information is fun. I check rugpullindex.com myself daily. I like the feeling of gardening the website. But soon I want to find ways to improve upon the above mentioned issues. It may just be a matter of improving the crawler's tests. Best, Tim ## § Feb 12, 2021 Today marks an important day in the life of rugpullindex.com and OCEAN. When I was trying to compartmentalize the crawler's myriad subqueries, I noticed that, as intended, all data sets are normalized based on the all-time highest liquidity a data set pool reached. What I had neglected was that I used OCEAN as the unit of liquidity. It makes no sense, though, as the goal is to compare any data set relative to the all-time best performing data set. With a fluctuating token, however, this may not work well. Consider the data set QUICRA-0 that had 499,296 OCEAN in its pool yesterday—assuming that OCEAN/EUR traded at 0.5 EUR yesterday, QUICRA-0 had roughly 250,000 EUR liquidity in its pool. Now, consider that today the price of OCEAN increased by another 0.5 EUR to 1 EUR. But no change has occurred in QUICRA-0's liquidity pool. It means that while the number of OCEANs backing QUICRA-0 didn't change, its performance increased as the price of OCEAN doubled. Compared to yesterday QUICRA-0 is doing 2x as good! Hence, I plan to measure a data set's liquidity now in fiat or specifically EUR. I've already finished the adjustment of the crawler. I wasn't able to finish integrating the change into the UI. But once the update is live, I'll inform you about it in detail. Best, Tim ## § Feb 8, 2021 👋 Today marks the first day that I'm "getting paid" for working on rugpullindex.com. It's because I came in seventh place in OceanDAO's round 2 of grant proposals and was rewarded 10k OCEAN. My original plan was to use the DAO's grant as a freelance budget to work on rugpullindex.com properly. Hence, I swapped them to USDC. Having a stable supply of digital currency now means I can "invoice" rugpullindex for the work I'm doing. It's really just a fancy way of doing accounting. There's no official company or anything. Still, it's a big step as it means that I'm now able to justify spending time on the project during "my working hours." And it shows because I've been already working on it for a day. I've expanded the navigation and slimmed down the landing page. I've done it to get better results on PageSpeed Insights and make rugpullindex.com perform better in search engine results. As a result, there's now an about page and this blog. I'm planning to deprecate the old /changelog.txt. Another SEO-thing I've done is that I've added a /sitemap.xml for crawlers. I'm tracking the website's performance on Google's Search Console now too. My plan is to make the website more informative over time. And that's all I've to say for today. I hope you like the changes. And I also wanted to thank everyone that voted for me in the OceanDAO too. Thanks! Hoping to see you around here soon again. Best, Tim ## § 01/02/2021 • Renew SSL certificate ## § 20/01/2021 • Add Substack widget for newsletter subscription to website. ## § 20/01/2021 Wow, it's been a while since I wrote something here. Still, I was busy thinking about next steps for rugpullindex.com. Mainly, about receiving funding to being able to continue the project. And, indeed, I'm recognizing a promising opportunity ahead with Ocean Protocol's "OceanDAO" [1] having its second grants funding round on Feb 1, 2021. On Monday, it lead me to write a first draft for a grants proposal [2]. OceanDAO recommends submitting an "Expected ROI calculation" in the grants proposal to make voters understand the potential and future returns of the project[5]. However, it turned out, that DeFi Pulse Index isn't able to capture a significant market share within the DeFi ecosystem (0.03% or$55M). When applying the percentage to rugpullindex, the prospect became even bleaker as 0.03% of $600k would only amount to$183 of market capture for rugpullindex.com

Even though, it did disappoint me that the math wasn't working it, I'm still bullish as ever towards the project. Especially, as I recently read in one of Matt Lavine's "Money Stuff" newsletter posts, that tradiitonal index funds can become huge anti trust problems as soon as they start to hold majority shares in certain market segments [3]. When, for example, the S&P500 is suddenly capable of voting on board decisions of FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google), I think it's no surprise that they wouldn't incite any of those companies against each other. After all, that could lead to a decrease in the index's value.

To me, that truly sounds like an antiquated problem. Technology allows the sensing of a crowds opinion already. Within blockchain, such governance scenarios have long been a topic of discussion. Actually, they work today [4]. And that's why I think that building indexes on blockchains is a cool problem that can address real-life problems.

In conclusion, I would like to say that I'm still eager to continue development here. I hope to receive a grant. So if you're reading this, make sure to vote!

That's all. Have a nice day.

### § References

• 1: https://github.com/oceanprotocol/oceandao/wiki
• 2: https://hackmd.io/uli0VPaVQiGtww5FoUWKrA
• 3: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-19/maybe-the-index-funds-don-t-vote
• 4: https://uniswap.org/blog/sybil/
• 5: https://github.com/oceanprotocol/oceandao/wiki/On-ROI

## § 02/01/2021

• Research how to draw interactive plots on website (SVG is a nice option)
• Compartmentalize data base (sub) queries. Test them individually.

## § 01/01/2021

• Update copywriting of main page after user feedback (add more explanation).
• Add tests to parts of the private API that were previously untested.
• Truely always get all data sets by using unfiltered Aquarius query

## § 16/12/2020

To increase virality of the service, I've decided that I want to have some type of badge for a data set provider. I ended up using shields.io. By visiting the FAQ, you can now add a badge for your own data set. It's a beta features that I haven't testet too much. So I'm curious on how it goes.

## § 11/12/2020

Released the rugpullindex.com launch blog post on my personal website: https://timdaub.github.io/2020/12/11/rugpullindex/

It got lots of attention which made me happy. Lots of people have reached out since then.

## § 09/12/2020

• Proposed new ranking is live. Will give more details another day.

## § 7/12/2020

This morning, when I had my coffee in the park, I thought again about what I wrote last week regarding the inclusion of liquidity into my risk model. I'm specifically referring to the changelog.txt entry on the 30/11/2020, where I proposed to use the absolute currency value of liquidity within a pool to multiply it with the Gini score.

Thinking about it again, I realized that I don't like the approach I proposed then anymore. The reason being, that by using e.g. the EURO value of a pool's liquidity in a multiplication seems fairly arbitrary. Why e.g.

• should we denote a value that gives information about a pool's liquidity provision equality in an EURO value? And why
• should we multiply the amount of liqudity by the Gini index when neither are put into relation within comparable markets?

After all, the Gini score and each market's liqudity are independently-provisioned quality measurements. Hence, this morning, I started thinking about how to improve what I proposed last week.

I believe that a relative quality measure that is a combination of liquidity and equality distribution is still useful for investors. I think it should not be denoted in a commonly known unit, unless is makes a specific quality statement about it.

For example, in the future, I could imagine a quality measure called "Safe liqudity" that is denoted in OCEAN, EUR or USD and that gives information about the absolute amount of liqudity that is safely distributed within a pool.

However, for now I'm not interested in that measure. Instead, I'd like to use a comprehensive and relative measure of liqudity over all markets as a measure of an indivdual pool's liquidity. Actually, my friend Jost Arndt proposed a simple algorithm to find a relative measure for all pools' liquidity:

1. Among all pools, find the one with the highest liquidity: $L$
2. For each pool, where a pool's liquidity is $l$ and the relative liquidity score is $Rl$, $Rl = L / l$

His argument was that now, since all pools' liquidity is within the bountries of $0 < Rl < 1$, this measure could be used to find an overall score s to rank all data sets:

$s = Rl * (1 - gini)$

The properties of this model are great because:

• For a data set with a large amount of liquidity ($Rl = 1$) and high inequality ($gini >= 1$), the score $s <= 0$ and so really low on the index.
• For a data set with a mid-sized amount of liquidity ($Rl = 0.5$) and good equality ($gini <= 0.5$), the score $s >= 0.5$ and so moderately high on the index.

However, I'm not only a fan of the algorithms properties. From the get-go of this project, I've been convinced that a simple measure is key for the meaningfulness and utility of the index. I believe that the above formula passes those criteria. Hence, for the upcoming weeks, I'm planning to integrate it into the website.

And that's all for today's thoughts on rugpullindex.com. If you've found this entry useful or have feedback, feel free to reach out via [email protected]

Best, Tim

## § 1/12/2020

The root endpoint / now includes a "Cache-Control" header with a maxAge around the time of rugpullindex.com's daily crawl. This means that a user's browser is now caching the site. But additionally this allows a CDN or reverse proxy to cache the site too. For now, I've configured my reverse proxy to cache according to "Cache-Control" headers which speed up page loads significantly. Since for most of the day, statically-cached content is served up now, this should allow handling lots of traffic too.

## § 30/11/2020

Currently, I'm still thinking a lot about rugpullindex.com and how to grow its audience. I believe that in the future, it will be really important to be able to automatically filter and sort blockchain-based markets on some sort of metric, similar to how the Web is sorted by algorithms today (social media algorithms, Google's page-rank, etc.).

In terms of improving the site in the short term, I'm hence driven to do two things in particular:

1. Improving the scoring method;
2. Improving the site's documentation and transparency.

Regarding (1), improving the scoring method, I already had a particular idea that I'd like to motivate briefly.

Most decentralized exchanges using automated market makers currently use liquidity to measure a pool's overall performance. However, as we've discussed already, this ignores the fact that distinct liquidity can have distinct quality. As we've assumed from the beginning, the distribution of liqudity shares within the pool can be used as a qualitative metric. Some examples:

• A pool can have lots of liquidity, provided by one incompetent liquidity provider that doesn't get arbitraged because the asset isn't widely used.
• A pool can have lots of liquidity with lots of small and large LPs that are each competing for the pool's arbitrage opportunity.
• A pool can a mediocre amount of liqudity that is equally-distributed among its providers such that there's perfect competition and arbitrage opportunities become seldom.

Hence, instead of sorting the index only by a pool's liquidity distribution, I'm now thinking of using the score as a weight on the pool's liquidity:

$Score_{new} = Liquidity(pool) * (1 - Gini(pool-shares))$

For a pool like TREPEL-36, this would mean the following (values from today): At a score of 0.69 and a total liquidity of 40900.54€, its new score is:

$40900.54€ * (1 - 0.69) = 12679,17€$

whereas for TASLOB-45, having a score of 0.88 with a total liquidity of 224665.20€, it meant:

$224665.20€ * (1 - 0.88) = 26959,82€$

This change, as can be seen above, would then favor large pools over small ones, while still being significantly biased towards an equal distribution of shares.

If you've made it so far: Thanks for reading! And if you have feedback on this idea, feel free to contact me! My email is [email protected]

That's all for today.

Best, Tim

## § 27/11/2020

• I noticed that query the page is kinda slow (up to 900ms), so I started to look into database indexes. I've prepared a performance-measuring test internally, but so far wasn't able to produce any improving results by adding indices.

## § 24/11/2020

• Started conducting user interviews. I've asked a few people what they'd improve on rugpullindex.com. I'm trying to gather a list of possible features to add in the next few weeks.
• Added a 1 day difference/delta of rank to the overview (the colorful value next to the rank value)

## § 21/11/2020

• No new changes since Thursday. Just a status update that the crawler now ran automatically for the last two nights. I did have to fix any bugs right after getting up. Seems the application is overall now running quite stable.
• I keep looking at the website and its stats (check them out: https://plausible.io/rugpullindex.com), and I'm wondering what features my users would wish for.
• Personally, I'd want an additional column that shows me the difference of "Rank" and "Score" from the last day.
• I'd also find it nice to display the data set's name directly and not only its token name.
• What immediate changes are you wishing for? Write them to me tim(at)daubenschuetz.de!

## § 19/11/2020

• Crawl performed reliable this night. However, data sets still weren't shown. Below is description of bug.
• Fix bug: Data sets for a day weren't shown because crawl was at midnight but on retrieval, sqlite3 was working in UTC time. This lead to two different dates, the UTC one always being in the past.

## § 18/11/2020

• Improve crawler's reliability
• Improve main page reliability (even when there's no data)
• Start backing up data in a simple way

## § 17/11/2020

• Fix bug that stalled last night's crawl
• Change order of "Price" and "Score"

## § 16/11/2020

• Set scaling header in HTML to render website nicely on mobile devices
• Setup a daily cronjob that re-downloads all data and re-calulates the score
• Integrate purgatory data in crawl
• Change "Token name" for "symbol" in index list page
• Start hosting changelog.txt
• Exclude data sets from index that have less than 35 liquidity providers
• Did some copywriting for the landing page
• Re-integrated Plausible Analytics script
• Include rank as column on index table

## § 14/11/2020

• Adjust data set queries so that only the latest crawl is shown to a website visitor

## § 13/11/2020

• Launch rugpullindex.com