Cycle 19: Final Grants Roundup

🏛 Token House Governance Grants
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All mission requests from Cycle 19 have been fully reviewed. The overwhelming interest in contributing to the Optimism ecosystem has been truly remarkable, with a total of 314 applications received for 28 mission requests.

The reviewers evaluated each mission application, paying particular attention to the scope of the mission requests. Using the adapted rubric for each intent and subcommittee, assessments were made to ensure thoroughness and fairness. Looking ahead, we encourage authors to suggest additions to the standard rubric to further streamline the evaluation process. Your valuable feedback on rubrics for the upcoming round can be shared here.

This cycle showcased the unwavering dedication of every member of the grants council, as evidenced by the record number of applications reviewed. Each Growth reviewer assessed an average of 100 applications, while each builder reviewer did an average of 150 submissions. Despite the increased workload and having one less reviewer from the original design (I had to take Grant Council Lead), the commitment of the builder’s subcommittee was impeccable, and the growth subcommittee provided vital support in evaluating hybrid mission requests (Locked and liquid OP within the same application).

Special acknowledgment is due to the Charmverse team for their instrumental role in providing the necessary tools to facilitate the review process. Leveraging the rubric, workflow, and form tools for the first time, we achieved an impressive success rate of 97.2% out of 314 applications without errors and solved any issues on a 12-hour gap. Seamless communication between reviewers and applicants further enhanced the efficiency of the process, paving the way for the upcoming milestone hub implementation.

Looking forward to the second round, applications are now open. The council is committed to refining the rubrics, narrowing the scope of some of the mission requests, and fostering increased participation from builders within the Optimism ecosystem.

IMPORTANT:

  • Mission requests that open again will consider non-granted finalists from round 1 as finalists of round 2 with the same score unless they include feedback on their application and comments. This applies to builders and growth applications too. You can check if you are part of that list here.
  • The Grants Council decided to close ZK Toolkit for ZK Application Developers mission request contrary to what we said on the preliminary announcement.
  • The grant council decided to keep Deliver a Best-in-Class Perp Dex Mission Request open contrary to what we said on the preliminary announcement.

Here is the list of the 40 elected grantees from the 106 finalists of Cycle 19:

INTENT 1 Developer advisory board comments here.

INTENT 2

INTENT 3

INTENT 2
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Hi everyone, and congratulations to the selected grantees for this cycle.

Our team is confused and surprised at the results published for Intent 2: Making Impact Evaluation Accessible given that only two teams were listed as finalists in the preliminary results 9 days ago (one of them being ours “Optimisms Impact Tree”) and the final results list a new team as Grantee that was not a finalist.

We understand that the publishing of the preliminary results is done so that projects can prepare to reapply if they were not selected or were among a large pool of finalists, or to start outlining next steps for the upcoming workload. Hence why the confusion stems from the information shared in the preliminary results, and the fact that the mission was to be executed by two teams only which led us to believe that the only two teams listed were the two selected grantees. Additionally, the Mission Request was listed as Closed, meaning no additional finalists existed and that this mission wouldn’t take any new submissions.

Any insights to why a third finalist was added in the last 2 hours and that can help resolve the confusion derived from the shared information would be very useful. Unfortunately, based on the preliminary results our team had started preparations for this project.

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From what I understand, of the 3 “finalists”, only 2 were chosen to execute the mission.

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Originally, and for the last 9 days, the post only listed two finalists. A third finalist was just added 2-3 hours ago today, after this Grants Roundup came out.

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Yes, and it seems that the change was 4 years ago

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However, in the Charmverse it has passed all instances.

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This was a data entry error. The Wakeuplabs was always a finalist inside Charmverse. When we published the rubrics and scores with the cutoff for every mission request they contacted me on the Grants channel and highlighted the issue.

I’m working with Charmverse to amend this situation and publish directly from their databases to avoid future issues.

I hope you all understand we managed 256 applications on prelim, 106 on final and we had 1 data entry error. :pray:

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Builders added 3 applications:

Synthetix IPFS Node
RADAR Launch Future Pools
Lumio - AltVM on Superchain

The cutoff was 80 and all of them were scored above.

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Thanks for the response Gonna!

It’s good to know how this came to be, I believe what you’ve described to work directly with Charmverse to solve for this kind of situations will be very beneficial for future Seasons and will also hopefully lead to a reduction in workload for Grants Council.

As you’re working to streamline processes for the visualization and discoverability of results, it could also be good to explore with the Charmverse team to have a landing page/dashboard (pre-set) that serves as the source of truth. I know we’ve talked about this on Discord, where you mentioned that these WIP spreadsheets should be used as sources of truth, but it’s really valuable to have them just be one that is easy to look up online and can’t be modified.

Putting it out there as I’ve noticed several other Grantees struggling to keep up with the different communications channels where updates are posted, and which then also can lead to Grants Council members having to tackle questions through multiple channels.

Appreciate all of the work and effort that I know is put in by the members of the Grants Council to process this big workload.

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Hello folks! Thank you for all the hard work going through the grant applications. We’re really excited to get started on our grant, “DelegateKit”.

I wanted to quickly ask, will there be some form of official notification about the grant? If there a format for starting the grant? IE: do we need to notify the committee when we think we will start? Just curious about what the next steps are.

Thank you!
Dennison

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Congratulations to all the grantees! And thank you to all the reviewers for their meticulous evaluations.

Looking forward to an increased participation from builders in the second round.

Stay Optimistic! :red_circle: :sparkles:

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We are waiting for the developer advisory board to confirm intent 1 applications. After that, we will send the list with the contact info you provided in your application to the foundation.

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Thank you! Is there an expectation to start the grant in the meantime? We were under the assumption that once a final approval happens, or we get some documents, we get to pick the time we start the grant? Is there a time constraint on when the grant is finished, or when the grant is started?

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Hey, it’s our first time as a grantee! I’m the Blockful PMM, and we’re ready to scale ENS to Optimism. I wanted to know what the next steps are to receive the grants and complete (prove) the milestones. Thank you.

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The foundation will contact you on the “Contact Info” provided in your application.

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Ok! Thank you, Gonna!

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On behalf of the Walnut team, we would like to thank everyone involved for putting their trust in the Lightweight Open Source Explorer for the Superchain project.

We are looking forward to hearing about the next steps from the Foundation.

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Sounds good! Is there any particular timeline around this for when we should expect to be contacted? (Just a bit nervous if we missed a communication)

Thanks!

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Hi @dennison ! You should have been contacted on 04/12 – can you confirm with me that you were?