Collective Trust Tiers are the very first step towards establishing a connection between one’s positive impact in the ecosystem and access to different types of work, grants, and roles within the Collective. Over time, Trust Tiers will become more robust as they incorporate Attestations and impact scores derived from one’s activity in the ecosystem.
The first iteration of Collective Trust Tiers was run as an experiment in Season 4. The Trust Tiers have been updated for Season 5, based on delegate feedback. Both Tiers and their criteria are subject to change based on feedback. Over time, we expect Tiers to be based on Collectively agreed upon trust scores, calculated using Attestations.
Initially, Trust Tiers will be used to:
Establish transparent standards for contribution and grant eligibility
Help people understand the types of contributions (and, over time, Attestations) we think are important for establishing the basis of reputation in the Collective
Please note that in Season 5 Trust Tiers will be applicable to both Delegate and Foundation Mission Requests (this includes all grants processed by the Grants Council.)
Ember Tier - Eligible to receive up to 50k OP
Has never done work for or with the Optimism Collective before and has never received retroPGF
Fledgling Tier - Eligible to receive up to 250k OP
Has done work for or with the Optimism Collective at least once before or has received over 10k OP via retroPGF
Eligible to apply for simultaneous growth experiments grants (apply for program continuation before the first grant is fully disbursed)
Eagle Tier - Eligible to receive between 250k OP and 750k OP
Has repeatedly done work for the Optimism Collective or has received over 50k OP via retroPGF
Eligible to apply for simultaneous growth experiments grants (apply for program continuation before the first grant is fully disbursed)
Phoenix Tier - Eligible to receive over 750k OP
Has repeatedly done work for the Optimism Collective, at the Eagle Tier level, or has received over 100k OP via retroPGF
Eligible to apply for simultaneous growth experiments grants (apply for program continuation before the first grant is fully disbursed)
OR
Falls into one of the below categories:
Councils (The Grants Council may not apply to Mission Requests)
Core developers
Foundation grant recipients
Employees or contractors of OP Labs or the Optimism Foundation
Strategic Partners of the Optimism Foundation, as determined internally
Accountability Adjustments
If you or your team have been found to have violated the Grant Policies since the start of the last Season, you must move down by one Tier
If you or your team have had a grant clawed back or have been found to have misused your grant - as defined in the Grant Policies - since the last Season, you must re-set to the Ember Tier
Looks really cool - a great way to continuously reward the teams building on Optimism, especially those with a history of contribution to the ecosystem.
For the difference between Eagle and the Phoenix tier: are the bullets conditional for Phoenix?
As it reads now there doesn’t seem to be much difference between these two tiers (esp. the first lines.) At quick glance, it looks like they both require more than 50k OP funding from the retroPGF rounds.
Phoenix just allows for greater funding.
If Phoenix is conditional - it requires RetroPGF funding greater than 50,000 OP AND falls into one of the outlined categories that may make more sense.
But still a bit confused as many of these proposed categories were ineligible for retroPGF funding.
TLDR: Seems to be an exciting concept, just need more clarity around Phoenix vs. Eagle tiers.
Thanks for flagging, have updated the Phoenix Tier to better clarify the difference between Eagle.
“But still a bit confused as many of these proposed categories were ineligible for retroPGF funding.”
The criteria stipulate that a project may qualify for a tier if they’ve done work for the Optimism Collective before (including via Token House or Partner Fund grant) OR they have received RetroPGF but they do not need to have done both (it’s not an AND statement.)
Now that we’ve gone through one round of Missions using the Collective Trust Tiers, we’d like to request delegate feedback and/or any suggestions for potential improvements to the Tier criteria for Season 5. Please leave below
Our main suggestion would be to ratchet down the amounts accessible for each tier, or alternatively add a fifth tier to make it more granular.
Particularly at the Ember Tier, 100k seems quite high. Not necessarily because of the funding itself, but because 100k is high enough they may be tasked with building/doing something very important or sensitive that would be better handled by a vendor or grantee with a track record.
I would like to see smaller tiers to promote small experimentation.
X 10k 2 approvals (gets next tier when critical milestones are completed)
Y 25k 2 approvals (gets next tier when critical milestones are completed)
Z 50k 3 approvals (gets next tier when critical milestones are completed)
Ember 100K 4 approvals
Fledgling 350K 4 approvals
Eagle > 1M 4 approvals
Phoenix < 1M 4 approvals
The potential problem I see with the Trust Tier system is that it assumes that a team deserves trust based on how much you trust an individual on that team. Right now, the trust tier of a team is the highest trust tier of any individual on that team. But team performance has less to do with the individuals of the team and more to do with the chemistry of the team as a whole. I think we should try to develop a trust tier system that looks at the teams as opposed to just the individuals.
One potential counter argument here, is that individuals with high trust tiers will not put themselves in a disfunctional group, but how will the know unless they have worked together before? Also, why would they worry if there is no penalty to your trust tier for poor performance?
A follow up questions: are there any ways that a trust tier can go down? How will we measure the success/failure of the trust tier system as the work of these missions concludes?
GM! I believe that one of the issues we faced this season was the difficulty in self-categorizing within a Collective Trust Tier. For instance, what would happen if the alliance leader was also the founder of a project that had already built something before? Would they inherit the Tier from the project or start from scratch? Where could one check which tier would be applicable? Additionally, I think the amounts were quite high. I agree with Gonna’s point that there could be smaller Tiers for alliances applying for the first time. Assuming there is no one-year lock, I would divide it as follows:
GM! I agree with @Gonna.eth and @brichis on the value of implementing lower tiers with reduced approval requirements.
There are many activities that can be carried on with less than 15 or 10k and still have great impact. But most importantly, being able to grant small amounts could be an excellent tool to onboard promising teams to the ecosystem. By adding a low tier / fast approval category, the Collective can impact a larger array of builders accelerating grow and future “deal-flow” on higher tiers and more complex projects. Additionally, in agreement to what @GFXlabs outlined, lower tiers could act as a “testing” instance, upon which the Collective tries out new teams and “vendors” before trusting them with very relevant or sensitive work.
I participated on the last season with a mission on intent 4 and found it difficult to reach the 4 approvals despite the amount requested was significantly lower than other proposals. While the process was overall quite smooth, I believe it would have been more efficient if requirements were lowers for lower amounts.
On regards to the point raised by @chaselb, I still have some doubts on what should be the case when a “high-tier” member teams with lower tier folks. My initial intuition is there would be some sort of inheritance, but that could easily lead to perverse “mechanisms”, in which high-trust individuals could get paid for including their names on an alliance only so that the alliance can aim for a higher tier. It’s indeed an interesting debate, I have began to think of it quite recently so I’d be more than happy to learn from whoever has devoted more thinking time and effort to the problem and the possible solutions.
This sounds great as a way to consolidate long-term relationships and ensure alignment!
Something that caught my eye is the section within the Phoenix Tier, which states: “Falls into one of the below categories.”
I understand this is a way to give the Foundation and people related more freedom to move faster. And probably at this stage makes a lot of sense.
On the other hand, coming from Argentina, I know how these can be misused for cronyism in the long term if it becomes the norm. It would be good to have it revised at some point in the future to avoid this.
Blockquote
I would like to see smaller tiers to promote small experimentation.
Updates and Announcements / Grant Updates - Optimism Collective