Delegate Commitments [OLD]

šŸ“Œ Policies and Templates
4

Name : Funnily enough, Iā€™m anon and donā€™t have a specified name. I started a blog called ā€œpolynyaā€ and people started calling me that. So, I go by that pseudonym now.

Address or ENS: polynya.eth

Discord username :

Verification (Tally profile or tweet): Tally | 1GNE04

I have read and understood the Delegate Commitment Process: Yes

I understand that becoming a delegate is a significant commitment: Yes, although I donā€™t know the magnitude required. So, Iā€™m not prepared to make an eternal commitment just yet.

My reasons for wanting to be a delegate: I have been writing about rollups as a side hobby for a couple of years and curious to see what the governance for a major rollup feels like. Wish I could offer you some grand statement, but itā€™s just curiosity at this point.

My view on the Optimistic Vision: Well, itā€™s curiosity and also a novel vision. I despise the entirely plutocratic systems that pervade the crypto space (a large reason why Iā€™m a crypto-skeptic), and any attempt at breaking beyond it is worth contributing to.

My view on the first three articles of the Working Constitution:

  1. This is pretty obvious - you wouldnā€™t have governance if the constitution wasnā€™t a work-in-progress.

  2. Finding a balance will be challenging, I believe more specific goals and targets need to be fleshed out by citizens and holders and embedded into the constitution.

  3. Also a pragmatic way to begin, though Iā€™d like to see Optimism Foundationā€™s influence gradually diminish over time.

My Web3 interests:

Accessibility, identity, privacy, social impact, security

Languages I speak and write: en

My skills and areas of expertise: [optional] Iā€™m skilled at studying, identifying, and investing in cultural and artistic movements.

My favorite Web3 projects: [optional] ENS, Gitcoin, Uniswap

39 Likes
5

Name : pseudotheos

Address or ENS: pseudotheos.eth

Discord username : pseudotheos#0001

Verification (Tally profile or tweet): https://twitter.com/pseudotheos/status/1521910281236094976

I have read and understood the Delegate Commitment Process: Yes

I understand that becoming a delegate is a significant commitment: Yes

My reasons for wanting to be a delegate:

everybody wants a governance token but nobody wants to govern. I want to do what I can to change this.

As a researcher, I believe that rollups are the best way to securely scale blockchains without compromises. Optimism isnā€™t just a classification of rollup, itā€™s a mindset and worldview.

My view on the Optimistic Vision:

Public goods are a necessity and perpetually underfunded. I am a strong believer in the fact that Optimism has the opportunity to change this, and would like to do what I can to make sure the funding goes to where it is needed most.

My view on the first three articles of the Working Constitution:

  1. Fair, I believe experimentation and flexibility is important, especially during the setup phase.
  2. Incredibly interesting idea, very curious to see how it works in practice.
  3. Understandable, especially in this phase. I would like to see it eventually dissolved when/if it is no longer needed.

My Web3 interests:
Economics, Governance, Infrastructure, Privacy, Security

Languages I speak and write:
en

My skills and areas of expertise:
Infrastructure (rollups, data availability, etc), research, communication

My favorite Web3 projects:
Protocol Guild, Gitcoin

25 Likes
7

Name :
David Mihal

Address or ENS:
mihal.eth

Discord username :
David Mihal#3257

Verification (Tally profile or tweet):
My Tally is here:
https://www.tally.xyz/voter/profile/1X6RPY
Iā€™m working with their support on getting my address linked

I have read and understood the Delegate Commitment Process: Yes

I understand that becoming a delegate is a significant commitment: Yes

My reasons for wanting to be a delegate:

For the last few years, Iā€™ve been working with projects across the L2 space to try to push forward Ethereumā€™s L2 vision. I have worked significantly with Fuel Labs, contributed to the native bridges of both Optimism and Arbitrum, and have been working with Lito Coen and the L222 team to bring liquidity mining incentives to Ethereum rollups.

Iā€™m very interested in further contributing to the L2 ecosystem by helping guide Optimismā€™s governance moving forward.

Furthermore, I am a founder of CryptoStats, a public-goods project that will be deploying on Optimism within the coming weeks, and I believe the interests of CryptoStats and Optimism are heavily alligned.

My view on the Optimistic Vision:

I was inspired by last weekā€™s Bankless episode, outlining the Optimism Collective and the path forward for this project. Specifically, I believe project that are mission driven (such as Optimism with their mission to fund public goods) will allow for growth that extends beyond pre-existing use-cases.

My view on the first three articles of the Working Constitution

  1. Strongly agree. Decentralized governance still has a long way to go to becoming mature, and there is a need to be open to changing and experimenting
  2. Agreed, very excited to see this experiment in expanding governance beyond the plutocracy of coin-voting, while still maintining a fungable token
  3. Agreed, the foundation model has worked well for other web3 projects

My Web3 interests:
Choose ā‰¤ five from the following set. List them as comma-separated values as your answer, like: ā€œA, B, Cā€.

  • Developer tools
  • Data and analytics
  • DAOs

Languages I speak and write:
en, es

My skills and areas of expertise:
Solidity, web3 development

My favorite Web3 projects:
Uniswap, The Graph, CryptoStats (ok, a little biased on that one :slight_smile:)

14 Likes
8

Name: Forrest Norwood

Address or ENS: forrestn.eth

Discord username : forrest#6764

Verification (Tally profile or tweet): Tally

I have read and understood the Delegate Commitment Process: Yes

I understand that becoming a delegate is a significant commitment: Yes

My reasons for wanting to be a delegate:
Rubicon chose Optimism as our scaling solution in December of 2020, and later we became one of the first apps to deploy on OP mainnet. It has been a delight watching the community form and the network grow across every metric. As a delegate, I promise to represent fellow Optimism builders, users, and believers in Ethereum. I tell pretty much whoever will listen that rollups are broadband for blockchains and that they will change the world. As a delegate, I can help make this a reality and play a small role in scaling Ethereum to the masses.

My view on the Optimistic Vision:
The most important line in the vision is, ā€œThe Optimism Collective will dispel the myth that public goods cannot be profitable .ā€

Hindsight is 20/20, and for the first time, we can use it to our advantage to allocate capital (and potentially other resources) to public goods! When I first learned about public goods theory in an Economics class, the professor spoke of their unprofitably and underfunded nature as a given. I want the Collective to prove them wrong!

I think RPGF presents a new paradigm for human coordination. Today it directs funding to web3 devs who built useful tools, but tomorrow it can and will do so much more.

My view on the first three articles of the Working Constitution:

  1. The transitory nature is good. In four years we will have a MUCH better idea of what effective governance looks like for crypto networks. I have always encouraged L2s to experiment (previously in development but now in governance) and am happy there is a commitment to it.
  2. This is ambitious but I have nothing but praise. I am genuinely excited for the first Holder vs. Citizen conflict and think the Collective will come out of it stronger.
  3. In my view this early level of control is necessary. I only ask that the Foundation maintain a rigorous internal process for treasury allocation and publish some sort of regular transparency report. I do not think the Foundation should ever be arbitrarily forced to dissolve. It should remain a steward and driving force for ecosystem growth and will naturally be made redundant by other actors.

My Web3 interests:
DeFi, Privacy, Writing, Gaming

Languages I speak and write: en

My skills and areas of expertise:
I know DEX market structure and rollup economics very well
I am also an avid researcher and a good recruiter

My favorite Web3 projects:
Rubicon (i am biased), Flashbots, Etherscan

7 Likes
9

Name : Lefteris Karapetsas

Address or ENS: lefteris.eth

Discord username : lefterisjp | Rotki#7253

Verification (Tally profile or tweet): Tally | Y66G8Y

I have read and understood the Delegate Commitment Process: Yes

I understand that becoming a delegate is a significant commitment: Yes

My reasons for wanting to be a delegate: I have considerable experience on DAO governance, being an active delegate in 2 of the biggest DAOs (gitcoin and ENS) and I want to use that to help the Collective towards its goals of proving that public goods can be be profitable and something more people should work on. Not everyone needs to work on a VC-funded for-profit soul-crashing startup that gives nothing back to the world.

My view on the Optimistic Vision: In short I dig it. The main thing that pushed me to get actively involved in Gitcoin DAO was the goal of funding public goods. Only for my specific case public goods is the much more specific and hard case of opensource software. The idea of finding ways to make opensource software sustainable by providing incentives to those who build them is something that excites me and fills me with purpose.

My view on the first three articles of the Working Constitution: I find them logical. (1) Makes sense. Things will evolve. (2) Intrigued to see how the bicameral governance of checks and balances will end up working out. (3) For the 3rd article and the foundation, I wonder if the DAO gets any say on the operations of the foundation, like who sits in the board etc.?

My Web3 interests: Privacy, Data and analytics, DeFi, Infrastructure, Economics

Languages I speak and write: en, el, pl, de, ja

My skills and areas of expertise: Software development, opensource, software architecture, managements, governance and ehm ā€¦ photography? :smiley:

My favorite Web3 projects: rotki, trueblocks, erigon

12 Likes
10

Name: Matthew Bunday

Address or ENS: zencephalon.eth

Discord username : Zencephalon#0949

Verification (Tally profile or tweet):

I have read and understood the Delegate Commitment Process: Yes

I understand that becoming a delegate is a significant commitment: Yes

My reasons for wanting to be a delegate: I felt very impressed when I saw the governance structure that Optimism intends to setup and the care that went into the initial airdrop claim selection process. As someone involved in social benefit DAOs (FreeRossDAO and UkraineDAO) Iā€™d love to see more public goods and social benefit DAOs flourishing on L2s and Optimism feels aligned. I also work as an engineer at PleasrDAO and would love to see NFT activity moving on L2s in order to spread adoption to larger audiences.

My view on the Optimistic Vision : It feels extremely important to me to continue showing the world that public goods can create profit for all stakeholders. I believe Ethereum has made a great start and would love to see Optimism carry that forward and onboard the next billion users.

My view on the first three articles of the Working Constitution: I appreciate the framing of the constitution as a working document, love the basic two house structure, and agree with anti-plutocrary as a guiding function. Governance minimization also seems wise to me.

My Web3 interests:

DAOs, DeFi, Governance, NFTs, Social impact

Languages I speak and write:

English (en), Mandarin Chinese (zh)

My skills and areas of expertise:

Defi, Solidity, web3 React, DAO governance / diplomacy.

My favorite Web3 projects:

UkraineDAO, FreeRossDAO, PleasrDAO

6 Likes
11

Name : web3magnetic

Address or ENS: web3magnetic.eth

Discord username : web3magnetic#0072

Verification (Tally profile or tweet): Tally Profile

I have read and understood the Delegate Commitment Process: Yes

I understand that becoming a delegate is a significant commitment: Yes, I understand.

My reasons for wanting to be a delegate: I have been involved with defi for a while and feel closely aligned with the Optimistic Vision, and driving impact within the defi/web3 ecosystem leading to the betterment of the space and brining benefits to all its users.
I believe Optimism will become one of the flagship scaling platforms in the web3/defi economy and would love to play a role in ensuring it does so. I have been actively participating in the governance of few projects, and looking forward to contributing much more in the years to come!

My view on the Optimistic Vision: The focus on public goods is a marked difference in the goals of the Optimism Collective vs many other DAOs and communities. Public Goods are often taken for granted, however they could become key infrastructure for the decentralised economy.

My view on the first three articles of the Working Constitution:
RE: 1. working constitution - This approach allows the Collective to be flexible enough in its formation days and a 4 year period is a sound time frame to solidify the core articles of the Collective.
RE: 2. Collective Existence - This seeks to address one of the biggest flaws in existing token based economies i.e the misalignment in expectations and goals.
RE: 3. Optimism Foundation - I welcome the Foundation to steward the Collective in the early days and also as a key participant in the decisions of the Collective.

My Web3 interests: DeFi, Social impact, Economics.

Languages I speak and write: English

My skills and areas of expertise: [optional]
Treasury management, Legal research, community engagement research

My favorite Web3 projects: [optional]
Aave Grants
EVMavericks
Element Fi

6 Likes
12

GM!

Name : Griff Green

Address or ENS: griff.eth

Discord username : griff (:purple_heart:, :purple_heart:)#8888

Verification (Tally profile or tweet): https://twitter.com/thegrifft/status/1522142269259853824

I have read and understood the Delegate Commitment Process:
Yes

I understand that becoming a delegate is a significant commitment:
Yes

My reasons for wanting to be a delegate:

Scaling Ethereum is needed if we are going to bring to life the things I am dedicated to building with Giveth and Commons Stack. I organized a Scaling Now conference and interview series in 2018 and worked with Hermez (Now Polygon Hermez a public goods focused rollup) on and off over the years. I would like to get deeper into the scaling community!

Optimism is very aligned with my values of solving Public Goods funding issues with novel economic driven win-win systems. I would like to help in any way that I can, and given that I am a Delegate for ENS and Gitcoin this seems to be the most obvious way to help. Also, I LOVE experimental governance systems and as a delegate I will get to be on the forefront of how we tune parameters as a community, and I love that stuff!

My view on the Optimistic Vision :

ā€œPositive impact to the collective should be rewarded with profit to the individual.ā€

This is exactly what I spend every waking hour working towards.

ā€œWe imagine a future in which the Collective expands beyond the digital realm and into the physical world.ā€

I work towards this future everyday with Giveth, bridging web3 incentive models to meatspace is the dream and we are doing it! Giveth is going straight into the physical world, but Commons Stack (as well as Gitcoin) is also taking the pragmatic approach and starting with areas that are relevant to our work (Token Engineering) and building solutions for that. I agree with starting with Public Goods in the Optimism and Ethereum space and then venturing out as we grow.

I have never been as aligned with a vision of a crypto project that wasnā€™t one I helped to found.

My view on the first three articles of the Working Constitution:

Love the humble Experimental approach, 4 years is definitely enough time to come to a steady state solution. I like the citizen approach, I couldnā€™t find the on-boarding or off-boarding info for Citizens, but that will be an interesting experiment, that OP has already prototyped in their first Retroactive Public Goods Funding Round.

As far as the Cayman Islands thing, thatā€™s cool. Thats similar to the set up of ENS, but at the same time, Iā€™m a little sad to see it cause I remember when OP launched, it was a B-corp and honestly I was really hoping they found a repeatable way for a B-corp to tokenize with delegated governance! Expectations are the root of all disappointment. I havenā€™t read the charter for the foundation (couldnā€™t find it), but hopefully its board is beholden to the decision of the governance system, otherwise the governance will be a farce, and the board are a shadow third check not stated in the design (just being real here).

Really excited to have methods to tune parameters as a delegate, I hope we have some cool dashboards to play with and take some lessons learned from other projects that do similar like mstable, TEC, 1inch, etc.

My Web3 interests:

DAOs, Economics, Governance, Identity, Social impact

Languages I speak and write:

English and a little Spanish

My skills and areas of expertise:

Iā€™ve been a contributing member of the Ethereum community since 2015 & received a masters degree in Digital Currency in 2016 (first degree of any kind ever given in digital currencies).

As community manager for Slock.it and TheDAO, I helped form the community around TheDAO and led every angle of the crisis response effort following TheDAO Hack.

I co-founded the White Hat Group, which secured the at-risk funds (10% of the total supply of ETH) during TheDAO hack and one year later rescued $210 million dollars worth of crypto assets following the Parity Multisig Hack. I also audited Aragon and MakerDAO systems with the WHG.

In 2016, I co-founded Giveth, a donation platform similar to Gitcoin, we have the best donation platform in the world giveth.io where 100% of the donations go to the project and we have the web3 version of a tax-deduction where our token $GIV is given to the donors, it is a web3 public goods lego that i hope optimism can use for their own public goods funding approach (free tokens on top of your donation, why not?)

I co-founded DAppNode in early 2018 to ensure the p2p world has true hardware decentralization.

I co-founded the Commons Stack in 2019. The Commons Stack is the natural progression of Givethā€™s efforts to build the future of giving from a Token Engineering perspective with a goal of creating Public Good focused economies. Our first Commons, the Token Engineering Commons, launched earlier this year and we did a lot of interesting community parameterization.

I also co-founded a project still in stealth mode called General Magic which is a sort of a Service DAO like Raid Guild but focused on supporting Impact DAOs.

I have contributed to dozens of other projects as well, most notably, iden3, Hermez, and brightID and continue to support all 3 in an advisory capacity. Hermez (now Polygon Hermez) is especially relevant as it is also a public goods focused rollup.

I also lead 2 crypto focused burning man camps, Decentral and Blockhaus :wink: Look me up if you want to burn with THE crypto camp on playa.

My favorite Web3 projects:

Of ones that I didnā€™t mention above (these are 3 that I neither founded, advise, or steward):

  • Grassroots Economics
  • Panvala
  • 1hive

I am very excited to take a deeper dive into Optimism Governance and support this incredible ecosystem!

13 Likes
13

Name: Reverie.

Address or ENS: reveriegov.eth

Discord username: Larrys#0571

Verification (Tally profile or tweet): https://twitter.com/hi_reverie/status/1522323306350891010?s=21&t=HlqSpL6WXPOIPx7fFZu94A.

I have read and understood the Delegate Commitment Process: Yes.

I understand that becoming a delegate is a significant commitment: Yes.

My reasons for wanting to be a delegate: Reverie is a full-time governance activist. Weā€™ve worked with projects like Compound, dYdX, and Uniswap on several high-impact initiatives (e.g., DeFi Education Fund, running an auction process to hire an auditor for Compound, and the dYdX Grants Program. As part of our work, Reverie is an active voter in the governance processes of projects weā€™re involved with. We believe great projects need great governance. Our motivation to be a delegate is simple: we care about governance, are excited about Optimism, and as a result, want to be involved in the governance process!

My view on the Optimistic Vision 11: For better or worse, the easiest way to get great people to do great things in a capitalist system is to pay them. As a general matter, weā€™re very aligned with the idea that (i) money is a thing that can be used to get great people to do great stuff, (ii) the more money (profits) you have, the more great people you can get and the more great stuff you can do, and (iii) public goods can generate a profit, and that profit can be re-invested into more public goods (read: great people). It wonā€™t all be rosy (there are plenty of private, rent-seeking actors masquerading as public goods entities), but with the right people sitting at the ā€œprofit allocation table,ā€ we believe the goal is an achievable one.

My view on the first three articles of the Working Constitution: We think itā€™s fair to say we donā€™t know exactly what Optimism will look like in three to five years. As a result, we donā€™t think it makes sense to have rigid rules around governance ā€” a rigid constitution around a fluid and emergent technology/community would significantly slow the growth of the ecosystem. To that end, we really like the idea of fluid governance.

My Web3 interests: Governance, DeFi, Economics, and DAOs.

Languages I speak and write: Members of our team speak English, Russian, Italian, and French.

My skills and areas of expertise: Our team specializes in governance (weā€™re governance activists after all), investing/capital allocation (prior to this, half of our team worked in investment roles at crypto VC funds), and speaking when weā€™re called on (i.e., doing the work weā€™re supposed to be doing!).

My favorite Web3 projects: afraid of responding to this; the projects we donā€™t name will get mad at us :slight_smile:

7 Likes
14

Name: Blockchain at Berkeley

Address or ENS: CalBlockchain.eth

Twitter: @CalBlockchain (verification will be posted here)

We have read and understood the Delegate Commitment Process: Yes

We understand that becoming a delegate is a significant commitment: Yes

our reasons for wanting to be a delegate: We are active delegates for Uniswap, Compound, AAVE, Tribe, and DYDX - we believe we have the infrastructure and experience to contribute to Optimism governance. We see Optimism governance as a bold step for the L2 space, governance structures, and Ethereum as a whole - we hope to contribute greatly to the conversation.

Our view on the Optimistic Vision: Blockchain at Berkeley, as a non-profit, student organization focused on onboarding individuals into the crypto space through a technical-first value driven approach, supports the Optimistic Vision. We see the failure of our market to reward individuals based on collective impact, which we want to steer the Web3 community away from. Furthermore, we see the need for the Web3 space to scale in terms of values. The crypto space emerged due to philosophical ideals of anonymity and decentralization, and has grown to value composability, forming communities, and defining ownership. We want to see these values strengthened throughout the space, and the Optimistic Vision aligns with this by supporting public good projects that reward impact.

Our view on the first three articles of the Working Constitution:

  1. We are confident in the OP collectiveā€™s ability and determination to define itself. We are committed to pushing the boundaries and being experimental with OP governance for the goal of developing a well informed permanent constitution when the collective is mature. We see the need for a more rigid structure overtime - but hope to contribute greatly to the collectiveā€™s experimental years of self-determination.
  2. We believe OPā€™s bi-cameral system will be the force that ensures positive impact is profitable. Simple fungible token governance can create unhealthy dynamics - decisions made based on token price, consolidation of voting power, buying votes for selfish reasons, etc. Onboarding citizens who care about the success of the protocol - and not attaching a price tag to their vote - will help defend against these trends we have seen play out in other protocols. The dynamic between $OP holders and OP Citizens will create a system of checks and balances that we believe will be equilibrium of digital governance.
  3. We view progressive decentralization as a necessity in our space - and we are grateful the Optimism Foundation will oversee stewardship of the Collective in its youth. We trust as the Collective matures and decentralizes its voting power, control over Optimism will be handed over. We hope to help aid in maturing governance.

Our skills and areas of expertise: Smart contract development, full-stack development, DeFi, teaching and creating educational content, external/community generating!

Our Web3 interests: DAOs, DeFi, Infrastructure, Social impact

Our favorite Web3 projects: Gnosis Safe, Tribe DAO, Compound

Languages we speak and/or write: English, Mandarin, Turkish, Telugu, Punjabi, Hindi, French, Spanish, Farsi, Armenian, Odia, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese, Gujarati, German

If you have any questions before delegating to us - feel free to contact our organization on twitter @CalBlockchain or me personally @DevenMat

7 Likes
15

Iā€™m also happy to answer any questions anyone from the community may have.

9 Likes
16

Name: Blockchain@Hopkins

Address or ENS: blockchainathopkins.eth

Discord username: vibing#7820

Verification (Tally profile or tweet): Twitter Verification
I have read and understood the Delegate Commitment Process: I understand

I understand that becoming a delegate is a significant commitment: I understand

My reasons for wanting to be a delegate:

gm! Weā€™re Blockchain@Hopkins (@blockchain_jhu on Twitter), the student blockchain club at Johns Hopkins University for all of our schools (undergraduate, graduate, business, even medical!). Weā€™re currently a group of over 100 members, with a core unit focused exclusively on contributing to protocols in the form of governance, development, and white-hat.

As a student-run club, we take decentralized governance very seriously and think of ways to be a crypto-native as possible. Via our governance team, weā€™re piloting an internal governance token, built on Polygon, which is an attempt to provide our club members and university students globally with a chance to learn, and contribute to our own club and manage our treasury and consequently fund public goods that contribute to the club such as educational courses, events, hackathons, outside development, white-hat, etc. By actively contributing to the club mission, members earn the erc-20 governance token, which gives club members voting authority on the treasury allocation and more. One of our main focus areas (both in research teams and in practice via our development team) has been projects such as Gitcoin. We are excited to further this interest by contributing to the OP Ecosystem both from a policy perspective and a technical one.

Our (planned) Optimism governance committee is composed of 2 Cryptography PhD Students (focused on rollup technologies), The 3 other students major in Computer Science, Economics, Sociology and International Relations. The governance committee works very closely with the research team to analyze emerging trends in DAOs and tokenomics. We are also advised by Prof. Matthew Green, Ph.D. (part of the founding team of Zcash) and Prof. Jim Liew (Prof of Finance and Cryptocurrencies)

It is imperative that in order for the Collective to be equitable and democratic, it needs to be inhabited by people from a diverse background that possess general proficiency about the strengths and limitations of web3 technologies and have the passion and drive to actually participate in the governance process. We believe that ā€“ for reasons we already elucidated ā€“ our student body is fit to advance the Collective to that direction.

My view on the [Optimistic Vision]

First and foremost, we love OPā€™s idea of retroactive incentives. While retroactive incentives with clear and definite deployment are rare in a worldly context, in the context of the information age, we agree that retroactive incentives can be implemented fairly, using blockchain and other web3 technologies.

We also believe that the Collective is well-equipped to accomplish this task of deploying capital for public goods, in an ideal democracy. Thatā€™s why a lot of us got into blockchains ā€“ To participate in a more perfect meritocracy with impact aligned profit.

My view on the first three articles of the Working Constitution:

We are encouraged by the nature of the Constitution being elastic. As we were piloting our token, one of the most important things we had to do is iteratively work on not only the guiding principles but also the tokenomics and implementation of agreed-upon proposals. As OPā€™s collectively growing, we think itā€™s important to be flexible.

The bicameral structure of OPā€™s governance is one of the most interesting experiments in the blockchain governance space to date. Assuming that there is a proper accountability practice in place, adding an additional ā€˜houseā€™ that isnā€™t bound by the market condition of the governance token is surely going to align with the longer term goal of the Collective. We are excited and optimistic (heh) to see it come to fruition.

We love that the eventual goal for the foundation is to be decentralized. We believe that while it might be easier to strategically start with a more centralized model (as we initially started), we are true believers that at scale, decentralization is fundamental.

My Web3 interests: DeFi, Developer Tools, Security, DAOs, Infrastructure

Languages Our clubā€™s governance committee has members who speak English, Spanish, Greek, Hindi, Mandarin.

Please choose from the [ISO 639-1 1] list

My skills and areas of expertise: [optional]

Smart contract development in Solidity and Rust, Full-stack development across TS, JS, Go, Python, C, and C++, modern cryptography (consensus algorithms, verification systems and rollups), DAO Governance.

My favorite Web3 projects: Syndicate Protocol, Synapse Protocol, Gitcoin

8 Likes
17

Name: Matthew Bunday

Address or ENS: zencephalon.eth

Discord username : Zencephalon#0949

Verification (Tally profile or tweet): https://twitter.com/zencephalon/status/1521983754809528329

I have read and understood the Delegate Commitment Process: Yes

I understand that becoming a delegate is a significant commitment: Yes

My reasons for wanting to be a delegate: I felt very impressed when I saw the governance structure that Optimism intends to setup and the care that went into the initial airdrop claim selection process. As someone involved in social benefit DAOs (FreeRossDAO and UkraineDAO) Iā€™d love to see more public goods and social benefit DAOs flourishing on L2s and Optimism feels aligned. I also work as an engineer at PleasrDAO and would love to see NFT activity moving on L2s in order to spread adoption to larger audiences.

My view on the Optimistic Vision: It feels extremely important to me to continue showing the world that public goods can create profit for all stakeholders. I believe Ethereum has made a great start and would love to see Optimism carry that forward and onboard the next billion users.

My view on the first three articles of the Working Constitution: I appreciate the framing of the constitution as a working document, love the basic two house structure, and agree with anti-plutocrary as a guiding function. Governance minimization also seems wise to me.

My Web3 interests:

DAOs, DeFi, Governance, NFTs, Social impact

Languages I speak and write:

English (en), Mandarin Chinese (zh)

My skills and areas of expertise:

Defi, Solidity, web3 React, DAO governance / diplomacy.

My favorite Web3 projects:

UkraineDAO, FreeRossDAO, PleasrDAO

3 Likes
18

Name: Katie

Address or ENS: 0x75536CF4f01c2bFa528F5c74DdC1232Db3aF3Ee5

Discord username: katiegarcia#4914

Verification (Tally profile): Tally Profile

I have read and understood the Delegate Commitment Process: Yes

I understand that becoming a delegate is a significant commitment: Yes

My reasons for wanting to be a delegate: As a long time member of MakerDAO and former employee of the Maker Foundation, I have extensive interest and experience in governance. I thoroughly enjoy participating in governance and learning new ways in which it can be improved. I feel very aligned with the Optimistic Vision and I believe I would be a valuable asset to the Optimism Collective.

My view on the Optimistic Vision 2: I love the analogy of building a town that focuses on community and public goods. I believe that the Web 3 community is at an inflection point, and itā€™s critical to build communities that bring positivity (and optimism!) into the space.

My view on the first three articles of the Working Constitution:

  1. Iteration is crucial to governance. Without consistent experimentation and learning, itā€™s impossible to improve and move forward, which is essential to the success of any community.
  2. I find the model of the Token House and Citizens House super fascinating. This is not a governance model I have seen play out and I would love to participate.
  3. As the Operations Manager at the Maker Foundation from 2018 until dissolution, I am very familiar with the purpose of a Foundation and its role of bootstrapping governance. I understand the Foundation plays a critical role in enabling a community to fully decentralize, and I would be happy to provide any insight or knowledge where needed.

My Web3 interests:

DAOs, DeFi, Events, Governance, Identity, Music, Privacy, Security, Social impact, Wallets, Writing

Languages I speak and write: English

My skills and areas of expertise: Operations and governance are my main areas of expertise. I also like to bring positive vibes :smiley:

My favorite Web3 projects: MakerDAO (kinda bias lol), Tokemak (super rad UI and overall community), Element (love their governance model)

12 Likes
19

Name: :fire:_ā€‹:fire: & The Wildfire Infrastructure Pod

Address or ENS: fire-infra.pod.xyz

Discord username: sergioarizav.eth :black_flag:#3536, profishional#7147, ceresbzns#4276, dexa_#3743, blockchainJames#1665

Verification (Tally profile or tweet): https://twitter.com/wildfire_dao (twitter going live mid May with the Wildfire governance forum posts)

I have read and understood the Delegate Commitment Process: Yes

I understand that becoming a delegate is a significant commitment: Yes

My reasons for wanting to be a delegate:

Wildfire is a new initiative spun out of :fire:_ā€‹:fire: (Fire Eyes DAO) which aims to provide highly aligned, informed, and engaged governance for communities and systems across the Ethereum space.

We believe that Optimism represents an important public good within the Ethereum ecosystem and as such, must be governed in a careful and considered manner. Wildfire and :fire:_ā€‹:fire: have made thoughtful and effective contributions to many governance systems including ENS and Gitcoin. We are excited to bring this context and experience to OP governance.

My view on the Optimistic Vision:

Wholeheartedly agree. The OP vision is the vision of Ethereum; fostering a layer two ecosystem which is value-aligned with Ethereum and the ethos of public goods is of utmost importance. Wildfire believes that Optimism is the L2 which has both the technical and directional capacity to provide the much needed scalability to the Web3 community.

My view on the first three articles of the Working Constitution:

1. "This is a ā€œWorkingā€ Constitution"

Wildfire believes that taking the first step of governance by establishing a working constitution is not just prudent, but necessary. Good governance requires flexibility and forethought, especially when it comes to a nascent space such as ours.

A commitment to experimentation also means a commitment to improvement, and we at Wildfire agree wholeheartedly with this approach.

Finally, the four-year limit on the working constitution also demonstrates a thoughtful beginning for the Collective, by enabling a regular review of decision-making power and how it flows in the Optimism Collective. Wildfire fully concurs.

2. "OP Citizens and OP Holders will equally coexist within the Collective."

If Optimism Collective wants to accomplish the task of retroactively funding public goods and driving sustainable growth in the decentralized ecosystem, it is critical that its government does not become a tokenized plutocracy.

We strongly support the fact that Optimism has proposed a governance model that aims for equality and for putting checks and balances in place for the different bodies involved in decision making. :fire:_ā€‹:fire: and Wildfire are excited to play a roll in both sides of the Optimism Collective.

3. "The Optimism Foundation will be a steward of the Optimism Collective and its early governance model."

At Wildfire, we are confident that the Optimism Foundation will protect the interests of the ecosystem when it has to be involved in decision making.

My Web3 interests:

Economics, Governance, Infrastructure, Privacy, Security

Languages I speak and write:

English, Spanish, Persian (Farsi)

My skills and areas of expertise:

Economics, governance, technical development, product development

My favorite Web3 projects:

ENS, Gitcoin, Optimism

6 Likes
20

Name: Jen Senhaji

Address or ENS: jensenhaji.ens

Discord username: Jenn#6356

Verification (Tally profile or tweet) Tally | 47VDZY

I have read and understood the Delegate Commitment Process: Yes

I understand that becoming a delegate is a significant commitment: Yes

My reasons for wanting to be a delegate:

I want to see ā€œweb3ā€™ā€™ continue to be something really transformative and not just fade into legacy traps because of greed and centralization easy mode. I really appreciate how Optimism is using technology for positive social impact, putting purpose and not just profit front and center and fostering public goods development for the long term benefit of everyone. This is refreshing and equally reassuring at this point in the crypto adoption cycle.

Iā€™ve contributed to MakerDAOā€™s mission since 2018, being part of the Foundation team and now (after being part of the Foundations dissolution) a contributor to the DAO on the Maker Growth Core Unit. I believe itā€™s incredibly important that everyone has the optionality into DeFi. Affordable and secure transactions are key to bring decentralized services to people everywhere.This is why I want to participate in Optimism.

My view on the Optimistic Vision 9:

Building public goods funding and creation into the mechanism design of Optimism and by default Ethereum, gives us the best chance to create a system that inherently gives back to its users in a net positive way. Intentionality creates positive momentum and incentives help keep that momentum. Iā€™m all for reshaping behavior in this area!

My view on the first three articles of the Working Constitution:

  1. This is an honest and realistic design approach. New models need time to be tested and emerge from theory to practice. Itā€™s not easy stuff.
  2. Having two key focus areas to orient action and decision making seems like a logical way to avoid distractions and minimize inefficiencies.
  3. Like anything in its infancy, having guidance from a Foundation and dedicated ā€œcaretakersā€ is crucial to create the right frameworks for the Collective to operate in and eventually become self-sustaining (ā€œfly from theā€™'nestā€)

My Web3 interests:

DAOs, DeFi, Identity, Infrastructure, Social Impact, NFTs, Privacy

Languages I speak and write: English

My skills and areas of expertise: Business Development, Decentralized Governance, Strategy

My favorite Web3 projects: Maker (current contributor :), Maple Finance, Async Art

7 Likes
21

Name : The Blockchain Guy (Michael)

Address or ENS: theblockchainguyYT.eth

Discord username : vandermeiden#0645

Verification (Tally profile or tweet): Tally | Michael Vander Meiden šŸ”“āœØ

I have read and understood the Delegate Commitment Process: Yes

I understand that becoming a delegate is a significant commitment: Yes

My reasons for wanting to be a delegate:
I believe in the Optimistic Vision; that the new governance by The Optimism Collective in combination with RPGF has the potential to grow beyond the digital realm and solve some of humanities biggest problems.

That said, I donā€™t think it is guaranteed. This is an experimental form of governance which needs strong execution in order for the vision to be realized. I would like to aid in the realization of this vision, and I believe that my broad background (Product Management, Machine Learning, Economics/Game Theory, Communication & Finance) makes me well-suited to the task of guiding the Optimism Collective while communicating to my delegators at each step.

My view on the Optimistic Vision :
The Optimistic Vision is important because itā€™s a guide to introduce positive externalities into the incentive systems of a community. ā€œImpact = Profitā€. By retroactively rewarding those who create public goods, we make the ā€œgoodā€ decision the rational one. This is an amazing concept, and The Optimism Collective combined with RPGF is the best chance humanity has had so far to make it work. Letā€™s summon that phoenix. :triumph: :heart_on_fire:

My view on the first three articles of the Working Constitution:
1: This is such a novel coordination experiment, that I donā€™t think there is any other way than to have a ā€œworkingā€ constitution. Iā€™m looking forward to the experimentation of The Optimism Collective.
2: I also believe that both are necessary, but I think there are other ways to describe this than just ā€œshort term incentives vs long term visionā€. The Token House is the home of economic incentives and The Citizenā€™s House is the home of community incentives (positive externalities).
3: I accept the necessity of this article, and I am confident in the current members of the Optimism Foundation based on their record.

My Web3 interests:

Economics, Infrastructure, DeFi, Social Impact, Wallets

Languages I speak and write: en, es

My skills and areas of expertise: Software Engineering, Machine Learning/Robotics, Economics, Finance, Product, Education

My favorite Web3 projects: Optimism, Gnosis Safe, POAP

3 Likes
22

Name: Srikar

Address or ENS: srikarv.eth

Discord username : n/a

Verification (Tally profile or tweet): Tally ID | 42NPPY - https://twitter.com/SrikarVaradaraj

I have read and understood the Delegate Commitment Process: Yes

I understand that becoming a delegate is a significant commitment: Yes

My reasons for wanting to be a delegate:

I have been closely following the research around optimistic and zk-rollups since 2017, and met several initial core contributors of Optimism as it was starting out. The application ecosystem on Ethereum was raw and practically unusable then, but weā€™ve seen the beginnings of broad societal reach now.

It is evident that scaling Ethereum with a community-aligned effort is critical today. Optimism is widely accepted as the most EVM equivalent optimistic rollup and any decisions made (eg. retroactive distributions, grants, protocol changes, decentralization of sequencer) need careful consideration from delegates who care deeply about their short and long term tradeoffs.

I co-founded Spectral, which creates a score for users based on historical user activity (specifically with lending and trading protocols currently). Our goal is to encourage users to care about their actions on-chain and be good actors, while allowing protocols to be more capital efficient and user-sensitive. Iā€™ve also helped build, incubate and made critical protocol decisions with several projects in the space that include: a widely used AMM, a decentralized basis trading protocol and a payments management tool for projects. Not too long ago, I was working towards a PhD in computer science focused on applications of zk-proofs before deciding to build in web3 full-time.

In order to onboard every person on Earth eventually, we will need scaling solutions to be governed thoughtfully with a long term future in mind. I believe active governance over Optimism will lead to a community that fosters values which promote public goods with strong incentive alignment for contributors. I want to be part of this active governance and deliver value to the Optimism and Ethereum ecosystems simultaneously.

My view on the Optimistic Vision 3:

Growing up seeing Wikipedia ask for donations every few months in order to keep operating was jarring given the impact Wikipedia has had on the world. On the other hand, weā€™ve seen time and time again, with platforms like facebook, that the mandate of generating profit for shareholders skews incentives in a way where users and platform contributors are no longer the main beneficiaries. In the long run, the societal impact of primarily profit-seeking platforms has been largely negative.

In the face of all this, Ethereum has been an incredible demonstration of the premise that Impact = Profit. While it was not clear initially that ETH would accrue value, by attracting millions of developers and users who built open-sourced applications and tools considered public goods, the holders of ETH greatly benefited from a community formed around shared beliefs.

The Optimism ecosystem is in a particularly challenging position, where given the EVM-equivalence, most public goods built for/on Ethereum can benefit Optimism and vice-versa. As a scaling solution to Ethereum, it is important to balance value accrual towards OP and ETH so that the ecosystems are symbiotic in the long run.

ā€œThe Optimism Collective will dispel the myth that public goods cannot be profitableā€. This is a statement I am fundamentally aligned with. Optimism has the opportunity to carefully craft incentive structures around distributing OP and rewarding public goods given a large percentage of these incentives across User Airdrops, RetroPGF and Ecosystem Fund have not been distributed yet.

My view on the first three articles of the [Working Constitution]:

  • Working constitution:
    • A commitment to experimentation - Creativity and experimentation seem to have stalled a bit in the space, especially in regard to economic incentives for contributors. The deluge of liquidity mining incentives and retroactive airdrops have led to very predictable project trajectories that often donā€™t accomplish the goals of the project. I would like to see experiments and improvements on Quadratic voting, soulbound NFTs and using cryptographic tools to enhance private voting. I would also want to see more tools being built around self-sovereign identity as public goods, leveraging a lot of the recent work from the zero-knowledge community.
  • OP Citizens and OP Holders will equally coexist within the Collective:
    • Will have to see how things play out. Every project has large idealistic goals and dreams but often times economic incentives overrule everything else. Both houses need to be designed with this in mind, to allow for sustainable growth.
  • The Optimism Foundation will be a steward of the Optimism Collective and its early governance model:
    • A normal starting point. With progressive decentralization of all aspects of the Optimism ecosystem, it remains to be seen how Foundations can remain at once hands-off (in allowing creativity and freedom while not picking ā€œwinnersā€) and nurturing (in providing specific support) to contributors.

My Web3 interests:

Identity, Privacy, Economics, Social Impact, Accessibility

**Languages I speak and write: en

My skills and areas of expertise:

Skills: Identifying societal/technological trends and building projects with collaborators.

Expertise: Doing research in math/computer science. Thinking through economic incentives and ideating on web3 project initiatives.

My favorite Web3 projects: iden3 + tools (circom), Gnosis Safe, zkEVM (from the EF+contributors @ Scroll)

3 Likes
23

Name: Srikar

Address or ENS: srikarv.eth

Discord username : n/a

Verification (Tally profile or tweet): Tally ID | 42NPPY - https://twitter.com/SrikarVaradaraj

I have read and understood the Delegate Commitment Process: Yes

I understand that becoming a delegate is a significant commitment: Yes

My reasons for wanting to be a delegate:

I have been closely following the research around optimistic and zk-rollups since 2017, and met several of the initial core contributors as Optimism was starting out. The application ecosystem on Ethereum was raw and practically unusable then, but weā€™ve seen the beginnings of broad societal reach now.

It is evident that scaling Ethereum with a community-aligned effort is critical today. Optimism is widely accepted as the most EVM equivalent optimistic rollup and any decisions made (eg. retroactive distributions, grants, protocol changes, decentralization of sequencer) need careful consideration from delegates who care deeply about their short and long term tradeoffs.

I co-founded Spectral, which creates a score for users based on historical user activity, encouraging users to care about their actions on-chain and be good actors, while helping make protocols capital efficient and user-sensitive. Iā€™ve also helped build, incubate and made critical protocol decisions with several projects in the space that include: a widely used AMM, a decentralized basis trading protocol and a payments management tool for projects. Not too long ago, I was working towards a PhD in computer science focused on applications of zk-proofs before deciding to build in web3 full-time.

In order to onboard every person on Earth eventually, we will need scaling solutions to be governed thoughtfully with a long term future in mind. I believe active governance over Optimism will lead to a community that fosters values which promote public goods with strong incentive alignment for contributors. I want to be part of this active governance and help deliver value to the Optimism and Ethereum ecosystems simultaneously.

My view on the [Optimistic Vision 3]:

Growing up seeing Wikipedia ask for donations every few months in order to keep operating was jarring given the impact Wikipedia has had on the world. On the other hand, weā€™ve seen that time and time again with platforms like facebook, the mandate of generating profit for shareholders skews incentives in a way where users and platform contributors are no longer the main beneficiaries. In the long run, the societal impact of primarily profit-seeking platforms has been largely negative.

In the face of all this, Ethereum has been an incredible demonstration of the premise that Impact = Profit . While it was not clear initially that ETH would accrue value, by attracting millions of developers and users who built open-sourced applications and tools considered public goods, the holders of ETH greatly benefited from a community formed around shared beliefs.

The Optimism ecosystem is in a particularly challenging position, where given the EVM-equivalence, most public goods built for/on Ethereum can benefit Optimism and vice-versa. As a scaling solution to Ethereum, it is important to balance value accrual towards OP and ETH so that the ecosystems are symbiotic in the long run.

ā€œThe Optimism Collective will dispel the myth that public goods cannot be profitableā€. This is a statement I am fundamentally aligned with. Optimism has the opportunity to carefully craft incentive structures around distributing OP and rewarding public goods given a large percentage of these incentives across User Airdrops, RetroPGF and Ecosystem Fund have not been distributed yet.

My view on the first three articles of the [Working Constitution]:

  • This is a ā€œWorkingā€ Constitution :
    • A commitment to experimentation - Creativity and experimentation seem to have stalled a bit in the space, especially in regard to economic incentives for contributors. The deluge of liquidity mining incentives and retroactive airdrops have led to very predictable project trajectories that often donā€™t accomplish the goals of the project. I would like to see experiments and improvements on Quadratic voting, soulbound NFTs and using cryptographic tools to enhance private voting. I would also want to see more tools being built around self-sovereign identity as public goods, leveraging a lot of the recent work from the zero-knowledge community.
  • OP Citizens and OP Holders will equally coexist within the Collective:
    • Will have to see how things play out. Every project has large idealistic goals and dreams but often times economic incentives overrule everything else. Both houses need to be designed with this in mind, to allow for sustainable growth.
  • The Optimism Foundation will be a steward of the Optimism Collective and its early governance model:
    • A normal starting point. With progressive decentralization of all aspects of the Optimism ecosystem, it remains to be seen how Foundations can remain at once hands-off (in allowing creativity and freedom while not picking ā€œwinnersā€) and nurturing (in providing specific support) to contributors.

My Web3 interests:

Identity, Privacy, Economics, Social Impact, Accessibility

Languages I speak and write: en

My skills and areas of expertise:

Skills: Identifying societal/technological trends and building projects with collaborators.

Expertise: Doing research in math/computer science. Thinking through economic incentives and ideating on web3 products.

My favorite Web3 projects: iden3 + tools (circom), Gnosis Safe, zkEVM (from the EF+contributors at Scroll)

4 Likes
25

Name : MinimalGravitas

Address or ENS: MinimalGravitas.ETH

Discord username : MinimalGravitas :black_flag:#7064

Verification (Tally profile or tweet): Tally ID: 1E0EZ1

I have read and understood the Delegate Commitment Process: Read and understood

I understand that becoming a delegate is a significant commitment: Read and understood

My reasons for wanting to be a delegate: While Iā€™ve been playing with Ethereum since 2016 it was only in 2019-20 that I really started to ā€˜getā€™ the potential of it as a coordination tool. Then in quick succession (not sure which was first) I read a Bankless article on Moloch (and then the Slate Star Codex article that it references) and the book Ministry for The Future, in which one of the key components in saving the biosphere from global warming is a complete overhaul of the financial world through a crypto currency called Carbon Coin. Great book, go read it.

From that point on this idea that Ethereum was just an interesting tech project to learn about or a valuable investment seemed almost quaint. Iā€™ve been enthralled by projects like Gitcoin, Klima, and now Optimism. The concept of Ethereumā€™s Phoenix, using the incentive structures of retroactive public goods funding to encourage behaviours with positive externalities seems completely revolutionary, it might well be what we need to overcome the Great Filter of climate change that we are barreling towards, and even if itā€™s not then it will almost certainly be the Schelling point around which the people who do develop even better mechanisms converge. I want to be as involved as I can.

My view on the Optimistic Vision : We have seen in the legacy world that relying on charity and altruism is not sufficient to tackle the biggest problems we face as a species. By flipping the incentives to reward actions that contribute to public goods the Optimistic Vision changes the game from one where freeloading and exploiting the commons benefits the individual more than the shared community cost effects them, to a system where finding the ways to produce the most positive effect with your capital will end up being the most financially rewarding choice.

Starting with public goods in Optimism and the broader Ethereum ecosystem is like ensuring your own oxygen mask and your familyā€™s are fitted first when an aircraft cabin loses pressure. In the long run though, my optimistic view is that we get to the cabin and take over from the unconscious pilot in time to avoid crashing to a fiery doom.

My view on the first three articles of the Working Constitution: Articles 1 and 3 seem almost obvious at this stage of the collective. The first for exactly the reasons described in the constitution document itself and the third as a necessity for any governance organization in itā€™s infancy. It is entirely understandable that the roles taken on by the Foundation are not feasible to be managed by the Token and Citizen houses initially. It seems unlikely that the undefined ā€˜Take other actions that are conducive to its stewardship roleā€™ will be exploited to, for example, buy Ben Jones a yachtā€¦!

Article 2 is or course the most exciting part of the Optimism Collectiveā€™s Working Constitution. I am extremely interested to see how the creation of Citizens will take place and how Sybil resistance will be maintained, however the idea of having part of the governance control based on permanent members with long term incentives, rather than having all the power effectively purchasable through token trading is very appealing. I think that it is becoming increasingly well recognized that airdropped token governance is inadequate on itā€™s own. It is good to reward active participants in a project, but when many (most) airdrops get sold and governance power is then available to whoever can pay for it it is inevitable that we will recreate the plutocracy of the legacy world. By balancing this with OP citizens, issued with a single soulbound voting token the possibility for long term decision making seems much improved.

My Web3 interests:
Choose ā‰¤ five from the following set. List them as comma-separated values as your answer, like: ā€œA, B, Cā€.
DAOs, Economics, Environment, Governance, Social impact

Languages I speak and write:
Please choose from the ISO 639-1 list
en

My skills and areas of expertise: [optional] My main educational background is in physics and astrophysics, with a side of environmental decision making. While the specifics of planetary atmospheres and deceleration of spacecraft isnā€™t directly useful to crypto governance, the general skills of objective analysis and investigating problems that are beyond the current frontier of human knowledge seems to have a lot of crossover with what weā€™re building and discovering in this new field of coordination structures.
As a secondary interest I have worked on projects trying to understand and improve community resistance to manipulation in Web 2, assisting investigative journalists analysing Russian influence campaigns, constructing the ā€˜Web of Liesā€™ map of Cambridge Analyticaā€™s spin-offs, funders, clients etc and building the Trollfare wiki of research on disinformation. If you check my Twitter you will see almost nothing crypto related ā€“ for that my social media of choice is Reddit, usually trying to answer questions and correct misunderstandings in r/ethereum and learning from the wise minds in r/ethfinance.

My favorite Web3 projects: [optional]
List ā‰¤ 3 projects
Curve (for the 90ā€™s style UI), Sign In With Ethereum (canā€™t wait for it to be the norm online), and GreenPill (what do you mean a podcast and a Telegram group isnā€™t Web 3ā€¦).

5 Likes