Command Centre: 2021 Improvements

Scope
This post is intended to gauge how effective the Command Centre (CC) is at satisfying your needs by opening it up to feedback. When we first produced the Command Centre we had very little data to understand how people would use RenVM and what kind of metrics they’d want to see.

Throughout Q1 2021, the Ren team will be improving the Command Centre to better serve the needs of its users. As this is the first thread seeking more generalized direct user feedback, suggestions on how to improve the feedback process is also appreciated.

Overview
The Ren Command Centre is designed to track RenVM’s main performance metrics. For the sake of this post, I will divide the CC into two overarching sections: (1) the public ‘Network Statistics’ and (2) the private/individual ‘Darknode Operator Dashboard’.

At a glance, the Network Statistics section of the Command Centre includes Volume, Value Minted, Assets Under Management, Integrator/3rd party volume, Darknode information such as number registered and rewards during the last Epoch, and a primitive block explorer.

The Darknode Operate Dashboard is utilized by Darknode Operators for launching and managing their Darknode(s) and for monitoring and withdrawing rewards per Epoch.

Background
The Command Centre was first designed throughout the end of 2019 and the start of 2020. It was first launched in May and was fully functioning by the launch of Mainnet. Since then, it has undergone some small improvements and maintenance. I hope to collect and consolidate your suggestions here to continue to improve the CC with your needs in mind.

Considerations
The Command Centre has been designed to provide cross-chain data such as mint and burn volume. We believe it is not within the scope of the CC to provide data on tokenized assets such as the volume of renBTC on Ethereum. There are other platforms, such as Dune Analytics and CoinGecko that provide this information. However, if you feel this should not be the case, please leave your thoughts below.

Furthermore the CC is not intended to be a ‘brochure’ style website using verbose marketing lingo. Instead, it speaks in hard facts, demonstrating RenVM’s usefulness. Again, if you feel this should not be the case, please leave your thoughts below.

Users
Darknode Operators*: Those who have bonded 100k Ren to deploy a Darknode helping to secure RenVM and the network. They are typically monitoring the health of the network and the rewards generated by fees.

Traders**:
Those who compare/contrast RenVM’s performance with the underlying tokens (REN) performance.

Developers*:
Those who aim to better understand the technology that RenVM has built, whether to provide feedback or to analyze at a more technical level.

Speculators**:
Those who hope to draw predictions based on the information displayed by RenVM.

Media**:
Those that may synthesize RenVM information to communicate it more broadly and distill data for informational purposes.

Interested Onlookers**:
Those who continue to advance their understanding of Ren Project and determine whether they’d like to participate in discussions, governance, or even dark node operation.

Do you fit into a different category? Let us know in the comment section.

*Primary **Secondary

Areas of improvement
We’ve already been collecting feedback for some time and are aware of areas that could be improved. These include:

  1. Network Statistics

  2. More sophisticated reporting on Darknode earnings.
    1. Being able to view previous Epochs in more details
    2. APY on initial investment (100k REN)

  3. Darknode Operator Dashboard
    1. Withdraw from multiple Darknodes at once
    2. Withdraw all rewards in DAI (or other).
    3. More data and information on how rewards are paid out.
    4. Exporting Darknode rewards as .csv.

Please comment with additional features you’d like to see implemented.

Command Centre improvements
Hopefully the above has inspired some thought as to the kind of feedback and ideas we’re looking for. However, below is a series of questions intended to get you thinking. Feel free to answer some or all of these questions in the comments - or simply leave any feedback!

  1. What do you use the CC for?
  2. Do you find some data missing from the CC?
  3. Do you use third party websites (such as Dune Analytics) to track metrics that you think could be folded into the CC?
  4. Do you operate a Darknode, if so, how often do you withdraw your rewards? Is the process easy?
  5. If you could change one thing about the Command Centre, what would it be?

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I look forward to receiving direct feedback from you all! If you would like to participate in one-on-one interviews and share your ideas in more detail, please reach out to vward@renproject.io

10 Likes

Hi Vinnie, for the darknode dashboard it would be great to have a total value across all your nodes and a history of your payouts, for example, how much your nodes received two epochs ago etc

Edit: for the integrators page it would be good to add a link to official project website if available

8 Likes

Agreed - for node operators, earnings by epoch is one of the biggest features I’d like to see added. Will make accounting / tax reporting much easier.

For network wide, it would be interesting to be able to breakdown individual assets, especially as we begin to mint assets across chains - ie, click on renBTC and see a breakdown of volume & outstanding mints by chain and other basic data. I bet this could be easily accomplished by a Dune Analytics dashboard in greater detail, but just a quick snapshot or trendline would be nice.

1 Like

Thanks Maggie - out of interest, do you use the same wallet for all your Darknodes? Feel free to DM me with your response.

Thanks Harlo - we’ll be adding some functionality like this eventually - would you want to be able to see BTC > Ethereum volume isolated or would it be renBTC across all chains (eg. Ethereum + Binance Smart Chain)? or both?

Command centre should have the feature to convert/swap the darknode income of any asset to DAI/Stable Coin. As we are moving to support more assets. This feature will be very useful to manage darknode income

14 Likes

Thanks Sarvan, will discuss technical feasibility of this - if anyone else feels strongly about this, please like Sarvan’s post. I know a lot of you like earning in BTC because you like holding BTC!

Very nice points. What I would like to see is the BTC amount or USD amount generated for 1 node separately on a 24 level. I know we can divide the full amount by the nodes, but it would be nice add on to be able to track it on a daily basis.

1 Like

On Network page (1b): would love to see a link to Dune Analytics dashboards so its easy to find.

On the All Darknotes page (2c): would love to see aggregate amounts (e.g. total number of BTC, USD, etc…)

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I think the key in @Sarvan post is around the introduction of new assets. Not everyone will be interested in holding these and may like to swap for Dai or Renbtc

5 Likes

Good point, thank you Maggie. In the future there’ll only be more assets too

1 Like

Agree with seeing the history of payouts per epoch. Being able to withdraw all nodes at once may be helpful in the future especially if it saves on Gas. I personally Dont think switching to Dai or other assets in the CC should be a top priority. Thats what exchanges are for.
Keep up the great work Vinnie!

3 Likes

Something like there is now for visualizing volume and outstanding mints, but being able to filter by asset and by host chain would be great. So one could look up all BSC renAssets or renBTC on all chains.

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  1. Ability to withdraw darknode earnings from all nodes in one/minimal clicks.

  2. Ability to add eth to all darknodes in one/minimal clicks

6 Likes

Would definitely like to have few of those charts from Dune, especially “renVM $Fees Per Day” and “renVM mint/burn $Fees Per Day” plus regular REN/USDT tradingview chart. Also would be nice to have epoch history somewhere in command centre all the data about mints, burns, fees, darknode numbers, etc.

1 Like

+1. Couldn’t agree more with this. We don’t want to have to deal with trying to withdraw and liquidate multiple different assets. It will become specially tedious and untenable when you’re running multiple nodes. I personally would like the option to just have the rewards all converted to a highly liquid asset like BTC, ETH or a stablecoin like Dai/USDC.

3 Likes

I think it would be nice if we can download a csv file with node payouts

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you can if you find your darknode eth address go on etherscan search the address then go down to the bottom and export csv

1 Like

integrate hardware wallets so they can be used natively through comand centre rather than through metamask

3 Likes

Ah great tip - thanks Derek