Decision
After reviewing the submissions to the Delegator UX Analysis (Self-Custody vs. Custodial Staking) RFP, the Review Team has decided to award the work to RaidGuild.
Thank you to both submitting teams for the time and care put into the proposals. Each helped clarify what will be important for this work to succeed.
Rational
RaidGuild was selected because their proposal was the strongest overall fit against the RFP criteria: delivery confidence, familiarity with the Livepeer Explorer, implementation-aware framing, clear tranche structure, and a practical path toward follow-on work. Their prior Explorer experience reduces onboarding risk, and their proposal showed a useful distinction between Explorer-controllable friction, protocol-level friction, and broader ecosystem constraints.
The Review Team also saw strengths in the Rahmani team’s proposal, especially their preliminary Explorer observations, user-group framing, documentation/content recommendations, instrumentation thinking, and example design work. We appreciate their submission and would welcome their continued participation in the Livepeer ecosystem, including future RFPs or contribution opportunities where their skills may be a strong fit.
Scope alignment before signing
The award is subject to final scope alignment before signing. The RFP already defines the required comparison areas: major exchange staking experiences, decentralized staking/delegation products, and the current Explorer delegation journey. RaidGuild’s Tranche 1 audit phase should be used to confirm and sharpen the benchmark set, comparison depth, scenarios, and access assumptions before the main teardown and design work begins.
As part of that alignment, the Review Team would like RaidGuild to explicitly address user-group segmentation, evidence standards for recommendations, and practical funnel instrumentation showing where users start and where they fall off. They should also consider whether additional benchmarks such as The Graph, deeper Keplr/Cosmos monitoring and exit comparisons, or non-US Binance access would improve the analysis. The work should also identify KYC, regional availability, ecosystem-level, and protocol-level frictions, and explain how each limits the delegator experience.
The design brief should focus on the minimum adjustments needed to create a lower-friction LPT staking experience through Explorer, rather than a broad redesign exercise. Where workflow changes are proposed, the Review Team would like to see lightweight reaction testing or walkthroughs, such as asking users where they would click next, to validate whether the proposed changes actually reduce confusion. Deliverables should be maintained in a Foundation-accessible workspace, such as Notion, so the Review Team can track progress and comment as the work develops.
We believe this gives Livepeer the best available path to an evidence-backed handoff for future Explorer improvements, follow-on RFPs, and broader work around delegator participation.
Honorarium
In addition, the Review Team intends to explore — subject to the Foundation’s normal approval process — a $500 USD-equivalent honorarium in LPT for the Rahmani team. This is a one-off exception and not standard practice: non-selected submissions should not expect funding, and this is not a precedent for future RFPs.
Their proposal created standalone value during review by sharpening scope, particularly around concrete Explorer/UI tweaks (e.g., clearer primary actions and decision hierarchy), the pre-Explorer discovery path (how users encounter exchange/token pages before Livepeer-owned onboarding), the four user groups they outlined, and the preliminary product observations they surfaced (token page onboarding clarity, orchestrator selection complexity, and hidden CTAs). Reviewers found these inputs substantive and actionable; the honorarium is solely a retroactive acknowledgement of that impact, and it does not change the award decision or create any obligation for future work or future non-selected RFPs.
Next steps
- Kickoff with RaidGuild next week.
- Process honorarium
- Progress updates posted on this thread by RaidGuild.
Questions on this decision or the next phase — drop them below.
— Mehrdad, on behalf of the Network Engineering SPE