Are Competitions Better?

[Gonna.eth]

I think the Optimism Foundation knows this is the next step, which is why part of the future council has 3 members dedicated to approving developer events like hackathons.

Quote from:

[Special Voting Cycle #9a]: Grants Council

As outlined in Guide to Season 3: Course Correcting, the current Governance Fund grants process faces significant challenges. Luckily, there is a lot of room for optimization. Some goals for Season 3 include: creating a more streamlined and consistent process for proposers setting a pace for grant distributions defining a clear scope, with clear differentiation from Partner Fund creating accountability via smaller grant sizes and milestone-based distributions reducing the workload on delegates…

• Builders Sub-Committee:
  • Goal: maximize the number of developers building on Optimism
  • Non-goal: retroactive funding
  • Possible RPFs: prospective builder grants for new projects, hackathons, technical content
  • Format: proposers receive grants, suggested to be <50k OP, which are locked for a period of 1-year. If access to upfront capital is a blocker for applicants, Optimism may put them in touch with alternative resources to support teams in this position.
  • Budget: 850k OP / Season
  • Reviewers: 3 (see below)
  • Consensus: 2/3 vote required to fund a grant

@Michael

How would a community-run competition work?

There are already plenty of DAOs and developer organizations we should reach out to. For example, Secureum makes a developer race every month:

RACE #12 of the Secureum Bootcamp Epoch∞ • Ventral Digital

This is already happening we just have to incentivize moving it to Optimism.

@Michael

Could anyone apply to create and host a competition?

Yes but I think either the competition should be ready so we can verify how it works, or the hosts already have some background in doing this kind of thing.

@Michael

Would these organizers be compensated for their work?

This one it’s tricky because they are promoting their own brand with OP prices so this is mostly a win-win situation without payment. If they charge for any other service then $OP prices are good marketing for their brand and they attract more clients. If the host it’s a nonprofit living on donations then this is the same case, OP used as prices will create marketing enough to bring in more donations. I think this will have to be examined on each proposal.

@Michael

How do we prevent the gaming of the system (i.e. hosting a sham competition and pocketing the prizes)?

Clear rules from the beginning
Well-known organizations with hackathon history can have bigger prices but they should apply full transparency
New hosts can have an OP request limit for their first event and earn trust step by step
All hosts would post a thread for accountability like grants approved from season 2

@Michael

What kinds of competitions would you most like to see?

• I would love to see EIP implementations tryouts. Like grab EIP 4844 and see who can implement it better in a given time. This could save some time from real EIP teams and even bring some new ideas to them.
• EVM gas optimization (Gas Golfer) like https://optimizor.club/
• A Zachtronics | TIS-100 made with solidity language
• The IAmTheOptimzer NFT it’s another great example: https://twitter.com/NoahCitron/status/1580359718341484544
• Compilation of challenges to solve: https://www.damnvulnerabledefi.xyz/ or https://ethernaut.openzeppelin.com/

good times are ahead!