Livepeer Subgraph Audit Proposal

Direct Grants
4

Funding lane: Direct Grant

Category: Tooling & Infrastructure (shared ecosystem data infrastructure)

Amount: $6,500 USD-equivalent in LPT ($5,700 audit and technical review, $800 coordination and reporting)

Decision

The Review Team approved this Direct Grant for BuildersDAO (@jmulq) to audit the Livepeer subgraph, delivered as a single milestone: a prioritized final audit report.

Rationale

Assessed against the Network Engineering SPE rubric.

  • Process compliance & scope fit. The SPE commissioned this audit after the Explorer subgraph incident and asked BuildersDAO for an audit-only proposal. That is what landed: diagnosis and reporting only, with remediation, the per-round stake/earnings feature, historical reconciliation, and full benchmarking out of scope. The subgraph feeds Explorer, governance, delegator tooling, and analytics, so it sits squarely in Tooling & Infrastructure.
  • Delivery confidence. The team ships without a long ramp: James M (9 yrs, The Graph ecosystem), Shashwat D (6 yrs indexing, prior Livepeer subgraph work via Messari), Ciaran L (6 yrs), plus InfraDAO for indexer-side baselines. Their familiarity with this subgraph is why they can read the root cause of the incident quickly (an unhandled null to field from Tenderize contract-to-contract calls, latent since ~2021).
  • Clarity & structure. One milestone with a clear definition of done: findings tiered from critical production risk down to larger redesign, each with evidence and a recommendation, non-sensitive items filed as public GitHub issues, and a closing forum retrospective. Targeted for end of Week 2 with one 60-minute community input session.
  • Quality bar & impact. The outage blocked delegator withdrawals and forced a multi-day resync over an edge case an audit should have caught. As the Technical Director put it, the subgraph breaking cost far more than an audit that could’ve prevent this, and it is the delegator who pays when this layer fails. The audit surfaces the remaining edge cases before the next incident, rebuilds delegator trust, sets InfraDAO baselines, and yields a ranked backlog for staged remediation.

Conditions & Alignment

  • Anchor to the real failure. Incident GitHub issues shared with BuildersDAO so the audit is grounded in the actual root cause.
  • Findings public by default. Non-sensitive findings filed as public GitHub issues; live production-risk items disclosed privately first, then published once safe.
  • Remediation stays separate. This grant covers audit and reporting only; remediation is scoped and priced as staged follow-up once findings are ranked.
  • Closeout. Final forum retrospective on completion, per the Monthly Reports guide, in this thread.

Mehrdad, on behalf of Network Engineering SPE

Proposal: Network Engineering SPE