RSR stakers research checklist

Ideas & suggestions
1

I think it would be good to publish a suggested research checklist for RSR stakers, to help people get started in assessing the risks when they are new. I took a stab at that here, and am interested in further suggestions for what should be included. Feel free to grab these points and share them wherever in their current form, and I will hopefully refer back to comments on this post to expand the list and then try to get it into the docs on reserve.org.

  • Is the code safe?
    • Are there any recent additions, like new collateral adapters or recent upgrades to protocol contracts or governance contracts?
      • These all happen via governance, so check governance records.
      • If so, were they audited?
      • How complex were they?
    • How long have the core contracts held a lot of value? How much have they held?
  • Is the collateral safe?
    • Are the underlying tokens safe? If stablecoins, consider checking Bluechip or other economic reviews.
    • Are the lending, LPing, or other mechanisms involved safe? How long have they been around?
      • Would be great to have something like Bluechip for this layer. Defi safety?
  • Is the governance safe?
    • What form of governance does the RToken use?
    • If token voting, who seems to be staking? Diversified or just a few parties?
    • Are there any special roles? if so what are they, and who holds them?
  • Is the revenue interesting?
    • How much is it generating?
    • What portion is going to stakers?
    • Is the revenue consistent? Might not be worth it for a few weeks of revenue given cost and hassle of unstaking.
  • Are the other parameters set well?
    • What’s the unstaking delay you would be committing to?
    • Etc
    • Etc
    • (Go over all the params with Taylor or someone knowledgable to make sure we cover them all)
  • The core team does not take responsibility for these things — we don’t try to make it so RTokens are safe, we just put the tools out there for others to use, and they can use them in safe ways or risky ways, so you need to assess these things.
  • We also don’t take responsibility for assessing these safety levels for you. Perhaps over time there will be 3rd party info sources on some or all of these which could be good if done well. Bluechip is an example, for assessing the underlying stablecoins involved. But we think it’s best to let that happen in a decentralized way rather than trying to have one authority that could end up directing financial decisions single-handedly and could turn into a single point of failure.
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