[Proposal] LDN Allocation Step Increase

[galen-mcandrew]

Note: this proposal has been mentioned in multiple discussions, issues, and governance calls (such as #327), so skipping an additional discussion topic

Current Status
Once approved, large dataset clients receive DataCap in calculated allocations. These allocations start smaller and then increase with each subsequent allocation. Currently, there are three steps:

• First allocation: lesser of 5% of total DataCap requested or 50% of weekly allocation rate
• Second allocation: lesser of 10% of total DataCap requested or 100% of weekly allocation rate
• Third allocation onwards: lesser of 20% of total DataCap request or 200% of weekly allocation rate

Proposal
Add two more steps, as follows:

• Fourth allocation: lesser of 40% of total DataCap requested or 400% of weekly allocation rate
• Fifth allocation onwards: lesser of 80% of total DataCap request or 800% of weekly allocation rate

Reasoning
We have heard from multiple clients that 2 weeks of DataCap at maximum is not sufficient runway for enterprise-level investments. There are times when a clients deal-making traffic may spike, and times when tooling or notary availability are not consistent. Making this change could get enterprise-level clients up to 8 weeks of runway for DataCap.

We feel it is important to maintain the stepwise increase (compared to a larger initial allocation of DataCap) so that new clients can scale-up as they on-board onto the network. This can help mitigate potential fraud risk, and allows notaries to audit deal-making behavior of clients early on, with smaller amounts of DataCap awarded to a client address. While there may be other ways to address these concerns, the lowest technical lift would be to increase the percentage allocations (minor technical changes to bots).

Timeline
We plan to discuss this in the next notary governance calls (12/21), and depending on community opinions would like to ratify and implement in January.

[dkkapur]

Flagging that this was discussed in the last set of governance calls and there was support from everyone attending.

[dkkapur]

https://github.com/filecoin-project/filecoin-plus-large-datasets/pull/212/files details the changes from this proposal. Given that this was flagged in at least 2 sets of governance calls and received support from the community, barring any additional feedback to this, @galen-mcandrew let's merge this + push the associated changes this week. Thank you!

[galen-mcandrew]

This should be deployed, marking as closed.