Gonna.eth (Dhannte) - Delegate Communication Thread

These were my initial guidelines for the last 5 cycles:

Yes:

  • Protocol usage incentives
  • Grants and 3rd party developer incentives
  • Retroactive allocations for early adopters

No:

  • Bridging incentives
  • Paying for full project development.

Since then I come to realize most so-called ā€œincentivesā€ are mostly liquidity programs and financial tools for OP$ farming and it feels like no real value is added.

This is what changed for Cycle 6:

Yes

  • Incentivize Optimism usage
  • Live on optimism (for funding go to the Optimism partnership program)
  • Tooling and non-financial ideas have my attention
  • Open source (unless DeFi committee C approval)
  • DeFi project approved by committee C

No

  • Closed source projects (Unless DeFi committee C approval)
  • Paying for full project development
  • Ghost teams/projects with nothing deployed
6 Likes

As we move forward to the last committee voting cycle I felt it is a good time to give some feedback about this experience. I enjoyed both being a committee member and being a proposer at the same time as it gave me a full picture of how this worked and where improvements might go.

Time wasted
It blows my mind to see so many talented people gathered for such a good cause to be pulled into meaningless and repeating conversations. If you take only (Regular badge on Optimism Collective) you have the 18 most active readers. There you can find Karl, Kelvin, Katie, Polynya, and more. If you add up some of the strong delegates who give feedback and show up to the community call you have Lefteris or Linda Xie. You can quickly understand this is not people with free time. And yet here they are trying to push this forward.

I yearn for a 20 min talk with any of them to learn all the things they have and I struggle seeing how do they have to repeat themselves over and over until they leave the conversations.

Lack of Optimism Foundation Involvement
This is crystal clear, if the foundation is going to hold the last word, then we need someone from inside representing the foundation and at least saying something like ā€œthis is being analyzed by the foundation you will have an answer in 24hsā€ We cannot have 48hs of unstoppable harassment over a committee member without any word from the foundation. Iā€™m not asking for fast answers I know they have a lot on their plate, but at least an acknowledgment to avoid confrontation. And if for that they need more people Iā€™m all in to vote for an $OP fund.
By the way, I love the work the foundation is doing so far, this is just improvements on the amazing job they are doing already.

About my vote on cycle 8
I abstained from EthernautDAO proposal as I am the proposer and I wanted the rest of the community to decide, Iā€™m sorry if those who delegated to me felt misrepresented we passed with 96%.

For all other proposals, I followed the respective elected Committee recommendation. When the committee recommended DYOR like Velo and Messari I did.

I voted Yes for Massari as I believe they come with a different proposal. I would love to have more clarity about the grant but at least the idea is new and I want to know the metrics that come from it.

I voted no for Velo I donā€™t think the second proposal repeating the first one makes much sense. (This applies to Gov and Partners fund). At the same time, the amount asked should be half of the first one and not more. This is a DeFi protocol, not a public good and they are profit-oriented, the project itself must consider a market acquisition of OP tokens if they need more to be sustainable and integrate this own demand in its own profit formula. Otherwise, they are just leveraging their own project with $OP. If other DeFi projects want to use Velo as their main liquidity stream and they need $OP for the bribes etc then those projects should be asking for the tokens and not Velo.

6 Likes

The badge holder vote was a tough one. I wanted to pick 10 candidates but I had to pick 11. I based my vote on this, they donā€™t need to be in all of them but at least 2:

I voted for:
katie, linda, lefterisjp, OPUser, mastermojo, jrocki.eth, polynya, DeFi_LATAM_Joxes, MinimalGravitas, millie, krzkaczor and jackanorak

I voted yes for the Grants Council proposal. The feedback is here:
Feedback 1, Feedback 2, Feedback 3
As a final thought, we donā€™t have the perfect system to move governance forward but at least Optimism itā€™s trying to get better every season. Iteration, reflection, and tryouts are the best tools we have and Iā€™ll keep supporting these radical governance changes with an optimistic mindset.

I voted yes for the Protocol delegation program. These protocols are the core contributors to the Optimism ecosystem and without them we have nothing. It is obtuse to think they shouldnā€™t have a voice in their own space, native or not, we are all here to promote Optimism use. I hope to see more of these delegation programs to smaller projects too in the future.

4 Likes

Special Voting Cycle #9b: Protocol Delegation Elections picks:

ENS, is a no-brainer I want them to be integrated with optimism as soon as possible, their ethos itā€™s truly aligned with Optimism, and if we could edit, renew, pick new ens, and everything you do on mainnet here I wonā€™t have any more uses for L1 :sweat_smile:

Atlantis world, Iā€™ve been meeting the team, learning about their process and what they want to deliver, how small the team is and yet they ship and ship and ship always thinking of the greater benefit of the ecosystem. Iā€™m surprised by how welcoming they are when you ask questions and you want to learn more about them.

Bethoven and Kwenta are in the top 20 of optimism usage and they should have a say in this governance: Optimism Project Usage - Custom Period

Code4arena Itā€™s good to see an audit project getting involved in governance. They have an innovative product and most of their projects are in optimism. I think it is also time to give security researchers representation in this governance and they were the only ones applying.

Agora, they have been selected to deploy a new user interphase for Optimism governance, so most of the token house decisions will go directly into their product and this is the reason I believe they need to have a voice in this process.

3 Likes

Special Voting Cycle #9b: Grants Council Elections - Growth Experiments

This vote was hard, all candidates are good and committed to the Optimism Collective. It almost feels like we waste resources when we vote people out of a council determined to work for the collective benefit.

@Joxes : Easy pick, they are a community not just one person and as they say, ā€œif you want to go fast go alone, but if you want to go far, stay togetherā€ Defi_latam itā€™s one of the most active communities on the forum and their work as Defi Committee and NFT committee helped us a lot on last cycles.

@Matt: I know mat long before this governance experiment. He helped EthernautDAO in many ways and never asked for anything in return. His public goods mindset itā€™s deep inside him long before there was any sort of personal benefit and he has been following one of the most complex DeFi protocols in the space since I know him. A great contribution to the Growth Council.

@Michael: A no-brainer, he has hosted most of the community calls, has a great experience and itā€™s innovative when it comes to communication, even made a youtube vid about himself for the reviewerā€™s nomination and maybe, pioneering on how we should present ourselves in the future.

@katie: Sheā€™s been here before anyone, the first community call host, has deep experience in governance long before Op collective, outstanding feedback giver. She has a positive work frame and every project she intervenes ends up being better. Iā€™m very happy to root for her.

4 Likes

Special Voting Cycle #9b: Grants Council Elections - Builders

Same as Growth Council, I feel we should keep all 5 candidates, make a redistribution for compensation and work together as a team. Itā€™s not easy to find people willing to commit their time to the collective and all candidates here have worked a lot:

@OPUser, look at that summary with 8 days of reading time on the forum: Profile - OPUser - Optimism Collective. I have to say that summary is impressive and it shows a commitment way beyond any other candidate on this council. Positive feedback giver, I got contradicted by him many times and he has never been disrespectful. Worked with him on the DeFi Committee, well organized and willing to help anyone. I hope he can make it!

@jackanorak, another impressive summary, Profile - jackanorak - Optimism Collective. Heā€™s been always in the front when it comes to ideas, the first to call for a rethinking of OP grants given we were giving too many tokens. The first one is to start a deep analysis of how distributions are going since they started. He is deeply involved with an Optimism native protocol from the beginning and the debates between him and OpUser are the most educational content you can find on this forum.

Dhannte, this is the first time I vote for myself. Iā€™ve been against this until someone made me realize all the delegation I have comes from people who trust me and that will vote for me if they had to do it themselves.

3 Likes

respect the sentiment but I strongly disagree with this (oh sorry didnā€™t realize I was in your thread! thought it was general grants council thread)

2 Likes

All good, do you strongly disagree with everything said? Curious to understand what you mean and learn from it.

2 Likes

I donā€™t think opuser is well suited for this role, as evidenced by his rfp post, and I would rather not expand the council merely to accommodate him if it turns out he doesnā€™t have the votes

2 Likes

I would like to publish some of my rationales, experiences, and feedback on the process we lived through these 2 months on Season 3 as a Grants Council reviewer.

First of all, a big shout out to @danelund.eth for coming up with this process for the builderā€™s council in just 5 days. Even if it had many iterations and changes while we used it, the result itā€™s extremely fair, and not so many people hit the nail so well on their first try with such short notice.

A few notes for those that donā€™t know how this worked:

  • Intake filter: we check the proposal is complete and that they comply with the rules. (Feedback if not)
  • Preliminary review: 2 of the reviewers score the proposal with the rubric. (Feedback after scoring)
  • Final review: The 3rd reviewer scores the proposal and prelim reviewers rescore if anything on the proposal is changed.

The final score is the average of the 3 final scores.

The Rubric:
This is the core of the review. We made many changes, aiming for the final score to represent the values we were looking for. You can see changes from Cycle 10 and Cycle 11 like:
ā€œDeveloper reachā€ evolves to ā€œDev Precenseā€ and ā€œDev Qualityā€ was better represented by ā€œDev Drawā€ (how many new devs they will bring in).

We also realized Milestones were the core of this proposal given the 1-year lock. We didnā€™t want to send governance tokens to a scam or badly aligned project and we wanted to keep developer attraction and composability as the main focus. The good thing about the 1-year lock is that it let us know 100% where the project is at when the fund is being unlocked.

You can check both rubrics here: Season 3 rubrics - Google Sheets

My utopic rubric is a hybrid voted, by the community and council members representing what the token house wants to achieve with grants. If we could bring in everyoneā€™s opinions on what should the score represent, itā€™ll give far more legitimacy to the projects on the final rank list.

Karl said that RPGF was born from watching too many good but economically unsustainable ideas, becoming a bad one when a revenue model was implemented on top of them. I believe our future rubric should reflect these are the projects the council is looking for, and make everyone know they can make something impactful and live from Optimism grants avoiding a bad monetary policy on their product.

CSR is worth exploring too, thread here:

On the builderā€™s team, I have to thank @jackanorak and @kaereste for being so open about their rationale. I became fond of this group since it has a perfect balance of financial, technical, analytics, community, growth, and education we all understand what we are reading, and all 3 make a good equilibrium when averaging rubric scores. Communication has been very fluid thanks to Dane and we looked out for each other every step of the way to deliver milestones on time no matter what. No newborns (2), or ETH Denver, or a bank run will make this group stop delivering. :red_circle:

A final note for future reviewers. Even if itā€™s stated this takes 2hs a day, you have to be exceedingly good at this, if not itā€™ll take about 3/4 hs or you wonā€™t be doing your job correctly. If you think scoring and selecting projects is the main objective, you are getting it wrong (this is my point of view and nothing here is ā€œofficialā€ read the rules and objectives). The main target is for you to contact proposers, look out for good feedback to make their proposals more Optimism aligned, come up with possible solutions if you see them struggling, stay connected, and always understand there are humans with dreams and aspirations behind these proposals. I try to reach almost every proposer and never got a disrespectful answer in 2 months, everyone was always proactive, and always there to answer. Even after closing cycle 10 most of the non-elected projects were open for feedback and looking at how to be better. The good vibes around the whole process make me want to stay and keep building here, thank you!

5 Likes

Voted FOR Protocol Delegation Program Renewal

While the first results of this experiment look terrible, it is the only way to get feedback on a process and reiterate it to improve it. The job done by Lavande here demonstrates we are on the path to involve the protocols that keep Optimism alive in the governance process.

Voted FOR Intent #1: Progress Towards Technical Decentralization

The intent is very clear and I believe 1M is good depending on the mission objectives and the decentralization scope they have.

Voted For Intent #2: Innovate on Novel Application

I was part of the S3 Grants Council, and while it was A LOT of work for reviewers, I believe this is taken out from delegates in general that have full-time jobs and can get involved in protocol proposals which are the core of the Optimism ecosystem. It made the process for grantees more clear, made everything work on time and as expected, and the filter (that will get better) was relatively good. This needs to have at least one more season to see its full potential.

Voted For Intent #3 is: Spread Awareness of the Optimistic Vision

I participated in the brainstorming call about this intent and people need to understand they can create applications without revenue systems to promote better uses and experiences. We need to put the word out!

Voted For Intent #4: Governance Accessibility

I voted for and I would like to see more engagement from Optimism Foundation if any mission comes forward for this intent. Not only granting resources but giving them public visibility and endorsement. Projects like Karma or Boardroom are working on this previous to Agora and I havenā€™t seen any sort of endorsement from Op Foundation.

2 Likes

Intent #1

  • Superchain Governance Deepdive: FOR. I prefer research to be included on RPGF where results are already measurable, but given the amount requested and the importance Iā€™ll break my rule on this one.

  • Fully Decentralized and Independent Oracle and Data Infrastructure. FOR Iā€™ve been following this project for the past 6 months. I believe itā€™s a novel idea that will fully decentralize oracles if it gets traction enough. Iā€™m bullish on DataLP, the option to stake your OP to provide an extra layer of security on top of your Oracle and expose yourself to proper slashing by oracle consensus makes this project highly composable with Optimism.

  • TechNERD Program. FOR @vonnie610 has been looking to train devs forever and if you donā€™t believe me go check EthernautDAO forum where she opened a mentorship in the past. This is a direct way to grow developed in the optimism ecosystem and aligns with my vision of how it should be done.

  • Extend the L1Block contract to store historical blockhash data: FOR I like how much someone can learn just by reading the comments on this proposal. Even optimistic team members showed interest. The amount is good and I expect their own code and not just an OZ module.

  • Future-proofing UI/UX of OP nodes: FOR Iā€™m getting my dappnode just because of this proposal. Dappnode has been making it easy to have a node and promoting decentralization and self-custody forever and we should back them up every time they take a step in this direction.

  • Spearbit + Immunefi Bug Bounty Program for Large Protocols on Optimism: FOR I believe 99% will approve this proposal if Velodrome wasnā€™t mentioned with fewer comments. My approach here is very pragmatic. If they find a bug on Velodrome, many projects will be saved from losing liquidity. If no bug is found, they jump to the next big project with those funds. $OP is between those saved projects if a bug is found, and many projects will rely on this liquidity to be safe, from missions to grants and RPGF. ā€œWhy not do the same to AAVE, Uniswap or Synthetix, or Curveā€ Well they are here since DeFi started, they outlived a bull run and the fall of a bull run, if a bug is on any of those projects itā€™ll be drained by now. I saw Synthetix being predated when Luna collapsed, the collective needs Velodrome to be bulletproof.

6 Likes

Intent #3

5 Likes

Thank you for sharing the proposed changes for Cycle 6. Itā€™s important to continuously reassess and refine our guidelines to ensure that our incentives align with our goals and provide real value. Here is my valuable answer with comments on the proposed changes

Itā€™s great to see that you have recognized the need for incentivizing Optimism usage. This shows a focus on promoting the adoption of Optimism and its associated benefits.

In my opinion, the ecosystem is currently experiencing problems with respect to this
Because despite an active community, activity has dropped off significantly with many airdrop hunters simply leaving

The goal of the ecosystem really should be to attract users who will be participants in the ecosystem to the end and this will not depend simply on airdrop

1 Like

Hey @Gonna.eth, thank you for sharing your thoughts on each proposal.

Regarding Proposal 3H: Develop the most relevant and aligned audiovisual content for the Optimism Collective, I want to clarify that our mission goes beyond marketing. We are dedicated to creating high-quality, well-researched, and easily explained videos. This requires a significant time investment from our Alliance, as we aim to provide valuable and accessible resources for everyone. The proposal aligns perfectly with the goals of Season 4, as it focuses on the production of educational content that will benefit the entire Optimism community.
Please let me know if you have any specific questions or concerns, Iā€™ll be happy to answer them!

I know you are not just marketing @dmars300 . I nominated Cryptoversidad for RPGF2 and I still believe this is a good candidate for RPGF3.

But I have to be consistent with how I vote on proposals to give everyone fair treatment. Iā€™m not sure about how many people will watch it and will be helped by this so I believe KPIs to verify impact once itā€™s done are needed. Iā€™ll be happy to give my support as a citizen like I did in the past.

1 Like

Hey @Gonna.eth We genuinely appreciate your consistent approach in voting on proposals to ensure fairness for everyone. Moreover, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that you had nominated us for RPGF, It means a lot to us that you believe in our work, and we sincerely thank you for your support. Weā€™ll continue to add value to the Collective in the best way we can.
We appreciate your engagement and contributions to the Optimism community.

1 Like

Intent 4

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I nominated @alexpoon_hk to be an Optimism Citizen.

Can this person help advance the process and structure of RetroPGF as a funding mechanism?

his optimistic views and actions in the past 4 months have been unmeasurable. He has great expertise in funding, social communication, team and business building, and probably some hidden knowledge I have not seen yet. He showed great alignment when the Grants Council started to use Charmverse as the primary point of work and decided to go for RetroPGF instead of charging the grants for the service. This sort of action not only shows he wants optimism to thrive but also a great commitment towards impact=profit vision.

What I truly like about this nomination is that Alex is way outside the optimism eco chamber I have and it will probably expand the Citizen reach to a new level in the near future. Alex enabled the collective to have one of the smoothest grant processes so far.

4 Likes

@Gonna.eth maybe it is irrelevant to the topic but how can i initiate an event for the optimism promotion in my country?

1 Like