Cycle 14 - Grants Preliminary Roundup

[GrantsOps]

The Cycle 14 Preliminary Review has been completed. Cycle 14 had sustained momentum from the uptick in proposals we saw in Cycle 13. The community submitted 97 proposals, bringing the total number of proposals this Season to 203 (compared to 151 in Season 3).

We continue to see novel use cases, confirming that innovation is strong in the Optimism ecosystem. The Grants Council recently proposed to repurpose unused OP from other Season 4 intents to enable more Experiments and Builders grants this Season. Delegates can vote on Agora.

Before jumping into the Final Review List, it is worth noting the commitment of the reviewers. The past two Cycles have seen a considerable uptick in proposals and the Council’s Reviewers have handled the review load as a team, provided meaningful feedback to proposers, and shown considerable support for one another. This is the kind of coordination that proves the power of Web3.

Final Review List

The Grants Council congratulates the 35 proposers that will be considered for Final Review.

Here is the list of proposals for Final Review organized by Sub-Committee:

Builders

• Culture Blocks

• DappyKit

• DeCommas

• EUROe

• GasHawk

• Grindery Delight

• growthepie

• Hamster

• Launchcaster

• Liquid Resilience

• Locksmith

• NFTScan

• Onboard

• OnlyDust

• SafeSwap

• Solid Grinder

• Solidity Survivor

• Upnode

Experiments

• Clearpool

• Clique

• Hypeshot

• Idle

• Invest in Music

• Let’s Get Hai

• Liquity

• Mutual

• Octav

• OmniX

• Opti Social

• Optimism OAT

• Qubit Wallet

• The Optimistic Series

• TProtocol

• Velodrome

• Wombat Exchange

Cycle 14 Preliminary Roundup

Of the 97 proposals received for Cycle 14:

• 51 were for Experiments Grants, and
• 46 were for for Builders Grants

Of the initial proposals:

• 33 proposals passed Intake Filter for Experiments (~65% pass rate);
• 37 proposals passed Intake Filter for Builders (~80% pass rate)

Cycle 14 saw a modest increase in Experiments proposals and a notable decrease in Builders relative to Cycle 13. This is not surprising, as the first Cycle of this Season had a backlog of proposers who wished to submit a proposal between Season 3 and Season 4. Nonetheless, the number of Builders proposals this Cycle was 86% of the total for the entirety of Season 3. The sustained elevation in proposals suggests a high level of demand for Optimism grants.

Intake Filter passage rate for both Sub-Committees declined this Cycle. The total passage rate was 72% (vs 76% in Cycle 13). There were a number of projects that made proposals that violated core rules (eg no sale rule) or did not fill out key parts of the proposal form. All projects will be given a chance to make a proposal in Cycle 15.

The Preliminary Review also saw a decline in pass rate: 50% of projects that passed Intake made it to the Final Review compared to 60% in the previous Cycle. This is due in part to adjustments to the Rubric intended to reduce excess points for discrete factors that are not necessarily indicative of a project’s ability to further the core missions of the Sub-Committees (e.g. Optimism deployment to date). Notably, no proposer has yet to have a score reduction for proposer conduct categories.

The Grants Council will publish rubrics for the Preliminary Review in the coming weeks so that projects that would like to consider ways to improve their proposals may do so for Cycle 15.

Requests for Grants (RFGs)

The Grants Council is actively publishing RFGs on CharmVerse. So far this Cycle, the Council has published three new RFGs, focused on:

• UI for Smart Contracts
• Smart Contract Auditing Services
• AI-driven Smart Contract Auditing Assistance

RFG 1 remains open for submission and several more RFGs will be published in the near term.

The Council looks forward to conducting the Final Review over the next two weeks.