GIP-138: Should Gnosis DAO fund the maintenance of node-sentinel.xyz?

Governance GIPs
1

GIP-138: Should Gnosis DAO Fund the Maintenance of node-sentinel.xyz?

  • In Favour
  • Against
0 voters 
GIP: 138
title: Should Gnosis DAO Fund the Maintenance of node-sentinel.xyz?
status: Phase-2
type: Funding
created: 2025-09-16

Introduction

NodeSentinel provides node operators with easy-to-use tooling to monitor validators.

We’ve simplified validator monitoring to its maximum by integrating everything into a Telegram UI + a web dashboard. It is simple, powerful, and effective.

Backed by constant user feedback, we’ve iterated on every suggestion to deliver exactly what validators need. We continuously index the beacon chain to deliver key stats: validator statuses, balances, claimable rewards, and APY (CL + EL) over daily, weekly, and monthly periods. We also provide an integrated claiming feature that allows operators to claim rewards directly from Telegram.

The setup is super simple: no login or software installation required, just start a chat with our bot and start adding validators by withdrawal address or validator ID. Once a user has connected their validators, the bot will provide a real-time dashboard and alerts such us drop in performance, inactive validators, and others.

Screenshot 2025-09-12 at 9.53.25 AM
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We also have a great community, a dedicated Telegram group that gathers feedback to improve the tool, and serves as the hub for important chain notifications.

Our impact

Over the past two years, we’ve provided this service free of charge to the entire Gnosis Chain validator ecosystem, with no limits on the number of validators a user can monitor. Here are some testimonials from our users:

An excellent tool to monitor our validators on Gnosis and Ethereum; stable, fast, and accurate. It saves us time and improves our response capacity.

– Noa, Director at SEEDOrg | Node Vertical Lead

Love the fuss-free alerts sent directly via a Telegram bot! I heavily curate my Telegram experience and this fits right into my workflow. Was using the Gnosis Node Sentinel bot and recently started using the Ethereum version as well–My experience with both were pretty seamless. Aside from missed attestations, whats really useful is also the alerts when the performance of my monitored validators fall below a certain threshold, allowing me to take action when that happens.

– Stakesaurus, Lido Community Lifeguard

I run hundreds of Gnosis Chain validators at home on a DappNode (since forever), and at BootNode, we keep tabs on many more. Node Sentinel nails it: alerts only when it matters, right when it matters. No noise. No bloat. Just the signal I need.

– Manu G, co-founder and CEO of BootNode

These are some of our current metrics:

This table shows how withdrawal addresses are distributed across validators and the share monitored by NodeSentinel.

Screenshot 2025-09-16 at 8.18.05 AM
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Funds Requested

  1. Retroactive Funding (paid up front)
    Over the last two years, we have invested in research and development, fixing bugs, adapting to chain changes, and scaling our indexing to handle massive data volumes. Our community now relies on a mature and reliable tool.

Amount requested: 35,000 DAI

  1. Future Support, Maintenance, and Development
    We propose that the DAO stake 3,000 GNO in a StakeWise vault operated by NodeSentinel, configured to apply a 100 % vault-staking fee on all rewards. Those rewards will be fully allocated to cover our infrastructure, development roadmap, and support costs. The stake runs for one year and will automatically renew each year unless a cancellation proposal is approved.
  • APY: 9 percent at maximum node performance (8% realistic for a domestic setup)
  • Average GNO price (last year): $160
  • Estimated annual reward: 3000 GNO × 8% = 240 GNO
  • Estimated USD value per year: 240 GNO × $160 = $38,400 ($3,200 per month)

We base our calculations on an average GNO price of $160 since the beginning of the year.

Notes

  • The DAO retains full custody of the staked GNO.
  • Our maintenance model has no real cost for the DAO, as it relies on idle GNO that will be put to work running validators from Argentina, adding security and geographical distribution.
  • We welcome biannual check-ins with the core team. If we fail to present an update, the DAO may initiate a cancellation proposal.

Closing

This budget will be used to upgrade our hosting infrastructure for better performance and scalability, and to improve service reliability by creating a dedicated staging environment for testing. With these enhancements, we’ll be able to expand NodeSentinel’s reach to the largest possible community of Gnosis operators.

These funds will also helps us to keep developing our roadmap:

  • Create a staging environment:
    This will allow us to securely test new features without compromising the productive environment.

  • Telegram mini-app development:
    A mini-app is an application which is accessed directly from telegram, it has the power of a tradicional web app which will make more practical the access to our extended dashboard to present dashboards, charts and other information where the Telegram bot UI falls short.

  • Automatically detect new user-validators:
    If a user registers their validators through a withdrawal address, our tool will automatically detect new validators.

  • Missed-Rewards Visualization
    Add a chart to the web dashboard that shows missed rewards over time.

  • Configurable Reward-Threshold Alerts
    Send a Telegram notification when accrued rewards hit a user-defined threshold (e.g., 1, 2, or 10 GNO).

  • Validator Clustering
    Enable operators to group validators into clusters, view cluster-level metrics, and receive cluster-specific alerts.

  • Weekly Performance Summaries
    Every week, deliver a Telegram report summarizing node performance—rewards earned, rewards missed—and compare against the previous week.

  • Quickly adapt our systems to protocol upgrades.

  • Open Source our Beacon Chain Indexer
    We are building a lightweight, auto-pruning indexer that runs on any computer with 8GB RAM and >15GB Disk. It will be:

    • Easy to configure (less than 10m)
    • built in TypeScript
    • Flexible for developers (choose the indexing starting point)
    • Based on interactive state machines, making the logic easy to follow not only for developers but also for beginners or non-technical users, showing which actions and data are needed to index the beacon chain

    You can get a sneak peek here: Stately

Ideas to expand the roadmap are welcome.

NodeSentinel address: safe=gno:0xDA74B77BA4BE36619b248088214D807A581292C4

Thank you for considering our proposal.

7 Likes
GIP-137: Should Gnosis DAO renew the Delegate Program?
Staworth Limited - Delegate Platform
2

As a gnosischain validator I use both node-sentinel and beaconchain to monitor my node. Both work well with some adavatages of one or the other in some details, but for the main need I have (rapid notification of problems that need me to take care of my node) they are both working well. This proposal is much cheaper as beaconchain, and especially I like the payment in validator rewards instead of stable coins. For sure I will vote for. Thanks Nico for building this!

7 Likes
3

I’m not yet an expert in solo stacking on Gnosis (I use stakewise) so I may not have much relevance to judge whether or not this is a good proposition.

Especially as the timing is funny in terms of the “competition” between you and beaconchain.

In any case, the amount requested seems fine to me, BUT especially in my eyes, as mentioned above

The funding application with validator rewards, I think that’s a great idea!

And it really shows a community and GNO-centric approach, which I think moves away from wanting to extract funds from DAO.

More people should be inspired by this kind of thing.

Thanks a lot!

3 Likes
4

We’re in favour of this proposal.

We provided some feedback to the Node Sentinel team in the early phases of preparing this proposal. After a detailed review, we concluded that this is a useful service and indicated that we’d lean towards supporting it.

This service is highly tailored to active node operators seeking quick, easy, and recurring updates on the state of their validators. It makes the experience straightforward and informative. In a world where more and more chains are launching as rollups—and with Gnosis’ validator network being a key strength—we believe it’s important to keep improving the validator experience through helpful additions like this.

We asked the team to gather testimonials from validators to support the utility of Node Sentinel, and we’re glad to see those included. We also suggested regular check-ins as a review mechanism to allow for termination if any issues arise, and we note the proposal now includes biannual check-ins with Gnosis’ core team.

One point we haven’t discussed, but which may be relevant, is the consideration of alternatives to DAO funding. For example, could Node Sentinel monetise by charging validators in whole or in part (estimated at ~$400 per year based on proposal numbers, with the possibility of a lower fee supplemented by DAO funding)? That said, we feel the feasibility of charging fees would need to be carefully evaluated and gradually introduced, and it’s unclear whether validators would tolerate bearing this cost. As such, we wouldn’t propose holding up the current proposal but instead encourage consideration of this point as part of their roadmap.

1 Like
Staworth Limited - Delegate Platform
5

Hello @staworth, thank you so much for the feedback! It has been very useful for us to improve this proposal.

It makes total sense that users with larger stakes (above a certain GNO threshold) could have a paid plan. Still, this is something we need to carefully design to ensure pricing is fair and sustainable. It wouldn’t make sense to charge a fee that takes away a large portion of operators’ rewards, since they already have to cover hardware costs, electricity, internet, and so on. At the same time, these operators are providing a valuable service to the chain, which is why we believe it makes sense for the DAO to subsidize NodeSentinel’s operations, at least in part.

Regarding the ~$400/year estimate: this number might seem high at first, but it does not reflect the potential scale. Until now, we have intentionally kept distribution conservative because we covered all expenses ourselves and limited onboarding to avoid overloading hardware. If the proposal passes, our goal is to expand reach. As shown in the table above, there is still plenty of room for growth.

If we focus on users with up to 500 GNO, and a conservative objective of onboarding just 20% of them, the per-user cost drops significantly:

1 to 10 GNO: total 1,625, current 35 → target 325 (+290)
11 to 20 GNO: total 85, current 8 → target 17 (+9)
21 to 50 GNO: total 71, current 7 → target 14 (+7)
51 to 100 GNO: total 38, current 4 → target 8 (+4)
101 to 250 GNO: total 47, current 14 (already 30%)
251 to 500 GNO: total 23, current 4 → target 5 (+1)

This approach would drastically reduce the effective cost per user, bringing it down from the ~$400/year estimate to under $100/year.

2 Likes
6

Yes, this is a no brainer. A good network needs good tools for its validators. This is necessary funding for core infrastructure. We are voting for it.

3 Likes
7

I’ve been a home validator since day 1. I used to use Gnosischa.in to monitor a few of my nodes, as there was a charge after 100 validators (which for Gnosis wasn’t a lot of $), even after receiving a grant from GNO holders. It felt like a double-charge. Then I started using node-sentinel, which allowed me to monitor all my validators, and it did exactly what I needed: provide actionable alerts (plus GNO price). That’s all I use.

For me, this proposal is also a no-brainer, and I fully support it. I am voting for it.

5 Likes
8

I like the idea of funding via staking yield from the GNO in the Node Sentinel Stakewise vault — it’s well aligned with the ecosystem. But at the same time, we are talking about $35k/year for a service currently used by 94 accounts, which feels disproportionate.

The network already has sufficient validator coverage, and decentralization means that smaller operators can afford some downtime, while larger ones are incentivized to use their own or paid tools. Node Sentinel is also not the only option available.

So while I appreciate the Telegram integration allowing anonymity and the funding model, I’m not convinced subsidies are necessary. Tools have emerged without them so far, and it might be healthier to let the market decide which solutions are sustainable. As I don’t have a clear position I will abstain from voting here.

9

Hello @it4world, thank you for the feedback.

As mentioned a few comments above, we never did a campaign to make this product known, because if it grows more, we would need to acquire more hardware, which has been at our cost for 2 years now.

For comparison, if the new proposal from beaconchain passes, the total across the previous proposals plus the new one would amount to 1.3 million dollars over 4 years of service. ($500k GIP-74, 100k GIP-105, 700k GIP-136). That is around 27k per month. We are asking for less than 2 months of beaconcha.in’s costs to run the service for 1 year. Also, the DAO is not spending any money. The funding is obtained by running validators and getting rewards from that.

That’s why I think it’s important to fund an alternative. Otherwise, the DAO is forced to pay a disproportionate amount of money because of the lack of alternatives.

2 Likes
10

Is this tool open source? If not, it’s going to be an automatic “no” from me, as I feel like this would go against everything Gnosis stands for. If not:

I’m not a huge fan of the retroactive funding. You guys developed this for yourselves, which is nice and makes a lot of sense. I don’t see why this now needs to be “reimbursed”. If I’m not mistaken, this was already submitted as a grant proposal from Bootnode some time ago and was also declined.

Saying that this doesn’t incur any “real” cost to Gnosis DAO because it’s validator rewards is also a bit of a stretch, as validator rewards are entirely subsidized by the DAO. I do however agree that the cost would not be excessive. That being said, if you’re running a decent validator in a good location, I might agree on this proposal, but would still like to see the amount of GNO decreased by half.

For the sake of comparison: Dappnode recently introduced their Dappnode Premium plan, which costs 9.99€ / month and offers a similar service in addition to many other things. With your current 94 node operators, that would amount to ~940€ / month to your tool, without costing the DAO anything. Granted, the Dappnode package is constrained to a certain environment, but based on its pricing I would say that the DAO would be overpaying for the current proposal.

I would encourage you to try to monetize your tool outside of the DAO, which would also give more information about whether this is actually something the community needs or not. Also: how can you be sure that it’s actually used by 94 operators, and that it’s not just random people adding random addresses to monitor?

11

I’m a node validator who use this telegram bot and the dashboard daily. It helps me a lot to have a quick notification on the status of all my nodes (I can’t with beacon chain due to the amount of validators). It also provides very good information of the rewards earned.

I personally support this request. I kinda agree that if the DAO is going to pay retroactively, the code should be open source, as all the Gnosis code. If only is going to pay the maintenance with the proposal of paying with the GNO rewards, I’m ok with the code not being open source.

12

What we’re building with NodeSentinel goes beyond a “premium plan”. Our focus is to provide a tool that anyone in the community can use, from solo stakers with a few validators to larger operators. All of them contribute their time, infrastructure, and resources to the chain, and they deserve reliable monitoring tools to validate effectively. This is the kind of tooling that I believe the DAO should support.

This grant is not about covering costs for 94 operators today, but about scaling our infrastructure, improving and expanding features, and inviting the whole validator community to use the tool. There are over 1.8k operators for whom paying $10 per month for a Dappnode plan simply does not make sense, because once you add up all the costs, that fee would consume most of their rewards. We see huge potential to onboard many more validators, especially those with up to 500 GNO. Onboarding just 20% of that group would already bring the per-user cost down by 4x.

I do not see much incentive for people to waste time adding random addresses, but I invite you to join our community at Telegram: View @node_sentinel
where you can see for yourself. Our users are real, they provide feedback, and they are genuinely happy with the tool.

Yes, during all this time we have learned a lot and we want to make this tool powerful for the whole Gnosis community. That is why we started a full re-write of our services, where all layers will be open source. We already started with the indexer and API, which are about 70% finished. Next comes the bot and the web dashboard.

Repo: GitHub - NodeSentinel/beacon-indexer: A lightweight beacon chain indexer

2 Likes
13

TL;DR
uncannyowl.eth supports FOR, contingent on (i) monthly public metrics, (ii) shipping open‑source milestones, and (iii) a Year‑1 renewal gate tied to delivery. The ask is 35k DAI (retro) plus staking 3,000 GNO whose variable rewards fund ops while the DAO keeps principal. Tool is live (Telegram + web) and already used across the validator set.

Rationale (facts from proposal)

  • What we fund: NodeSentinel is a validator monitoring tool (Telegram bot + web) showing status, CL+EL APY, claimable rewards, and alerting; it also enables reward claims.
  • Budget model: 35,000 DAI retroactive. Forward maintenance via staking 3,000 GNO in a StakeWise vault with 100% fee on rewards (principal remains DAO‑owned). Est. ~8% APY (variable) → ~240 GNO/yr (≈ $38.4k at $160, variable). Auto‑renews yearly. Cancellation possible. Team welcomes biannual check‑ins.
  • Adoption signal: The post cites 94 active operators, ~60,249 validators monitored, and 650 subsidized claims to date.

View (why FOR)

  • Improves validator UX and uptime = better network reliability for users and apps. Funding via staking aligns incentives and limits stablecoin outflows, while keeping GNO with the DAO. Adding/maintaining an alternative to other monitoring providers reduces single‑vendor risk.

Conditions / requests before renewal

  1. Monthly public metrics (posted in this thread): active operators, validators monitored, alerts sent, alert accuracy, service uptime/SLA, and count of subsidized claims. Include a link to any dashboard. Start the first full month after approval.
  2. Open‑source milestones for Year‑1: publish the beacon indexer + API (noted as “~70% finished” today) with docs, then sequence for bot and web dashboard components. Please link repos here as they ship.
  3. Year‑1 renewal gate: continue the rewards‑funded model only if (1) and (2) are met. Otherwise, the DAO cancels or revises the stake at renewal. The proposal already references biannual check‑ins. Let’s formalize this Year‑1 gate.

Process note
Please also clarify the current phase label in the thread header (Phase‑1 vs Phase‑2) and confirm the Snapshot window in the governance portal (SGT) so voters can plan.

2 Likes
14

The Proposal has been created and is open for voting until Oct 7, 2025, at 7:42 PM.

2 Likes
15

So this tool has been available for 2 years, and yet it only has 94 unverified node operators. How do we know that the community actually wants this? How are you planning on improving your active user base? Would you consider tying funding to your actual, verified user base?

1 Like
16

Numbers as of today are:

  • 100 unique and active users
  • 15% of the total validators are using our tool
  • 19% of the total GNO validating is using our tool

I’m quite proud to have reached these numbers with zero support from the DAO so far.

That’s easy. You can check directly in our community at t.me/node_sentinel. You can also see the support from other communities, like SEED Nodes and the Gnosis validators Discord, where many users have expressed their satisfaction with the tool.

We are already active in different communities of node operators. So far we did not push for big growth because our infrastructure has been modest. This grant will allow us to expand our user base.

You mean the model beaconcha.in uses? Asking the DAO for 1.3 million dollars for 4 years of service, while also charging a high premium plan? That approach is disproportional. I strongly believe that a tool that helps node operators monitor their validators should be supported by the DAO. The current number of operators on Gnosis could hardly cover development, infrastructure, and support costs on their own.

From my perspective, funding ~3k/month for such a service is a no-brainer.

2 Likes
17

No, I meant in terms of KPIs. Your funding should be dependent on reaching certain milestones, both in terms of becoming open source and in user growth. I’m not sure why you’re trying to push this beaconcha.in narrative so much, I’m clearly pushing strongly against it, as I am for this here proposal.

But if you’re pushing so much for this narrative: does your tool actually achieve 10% of what beaconcha.in does? From what I can tell, it only stores a very low amount of data, whereas beaconcha.in is a fully-fledged explorer. The hosting costs for both of these would be vastly different. Happy to be proven wrong though.

I agree. Which is why we’ll deploy a gnosischa.in fork publicly before their deployment closes down on October 25th. For much less than $350k / year. Without being extractive to the DAO or its users.

Apart from all of this and the suspicious timing of this proposal, I’d also like to see what changed between this proposal and the previous one. I’m assuming that the current version doesn’t rely on Beaconcha.in’s API anymore? Or is that what you’re planning on doing with the grant?

And of course, I again have to highlight that Gnosis is not in the business of funding closed source tools. Open sourcing it should be the first step before even thinking about asking for funding.

18

Just to clear doubt around this, I can attest that the first draft of this proposal was shared with me by @nicosampler in July this year to gather feedback.

3 Likes
19

I don’t know, I haven’t seen any user metrics from beaconcha.in.

Thanks for giving me the space to prove that you are wrong.

My solution is quite different from what beaconcha.in does:

  • It indexes the whole beacon chain, and quite fast.
  • Beacon data is not persisted in a raw format. Instead, it parses and organizes it into semantical tables (Epoch, Slot, Committees, etc.), which makes it easy and performant to recover information later.
  • We run cron jobs that summarize and compact old data, so previously indexed data takes less disk storage and can be queried faster.
  • We have developed an API that serves data directly from the database.
  • We have developed a Telegram bot which provides a practical UI.
  • We have developed an extended web dashboard to show data that doesn’t fit in a Telegram message.
  • We have developed optional pruning cron jobs.

The only key difference with beaconcha.in at the moment is that we haven’t developed the explorer UI.

To keep our tool lightweight in terms of infrastructure we:

  • Use our pruning cron jobs.
  • Configure the indexer to start indexing at any slot that makes sense.

Correct. The current version does not rely on beaconcha.in’s API anymore.

I shared this proposal with key members of the DAO, like @refri , and with several delegates well before beaconcha.in proposed GIP-136. They can vouch for my words.

This is already a fact. In my previous comment I even shared the repository.

2 Likes
20

Likewise, we can also confirm that we were contacted about this in July and gave feedback that was proactively received and incorporated.

We note that this topic was raised in the forum 5 days after the beaconcha.in proposal was raised, so it is possible that the timing of going to forum and Snapshot is linked to beaconcha.in’s proposal. We can understand that some DAO participants may view these as comparable expenses and be reluctant to fund multiple initiatives. That would create a timing constraint to ensure one proposal doesn’t dampen its chances by following after the other is already approved.

However, we don’t think this is an especially relevant consideration. The two proposals do not do the same thing. In a world of abundant resources, both can deliver separate simultaneous value, and even work together, to create a better experience for validators.

Ultimately we feel that the quality of the initiative and accompanying proposal are more important than its timing. We have carefully evaluated 138’s value proposition, and feel that this is a pretty strong and well-framed proposal.

We’d encourage all participants to keep this conversation focused on the merits and drawbacks of 138, and to avoid becoming a tit-for-tat debate between 136 and 138. There is no need to artificially frame two separate pieces of DAO governance as a competition when both can succeed together. To do so risks creating an unpleasant governance environment, and discouraging good proposals that may be reluctant to be thrown into open competition.

2 Likes