[DRAFT] [GF: Phase 1 Proposal] Atila

ARCHIVED & OLD Missions Governance Fund: Phase 1
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Project Name: Atila and Arthouse (github)

Author Name: Tomiwa

Number of OP tokens requested: 100,000

L2 Recipient Address: 0x27F7e8d7C63C414Eae2BB07E1a9B9057a1D382cf

Relevant Usage Metrics: (TVL, transactions, volume, unique addresses, etc.)

6,300 monthly active users. Proof below:

1029Ă—608 43.8 KB

Optimism alignment (up to 200 word explanation):

Atila makes it easy to start scholarships and grants using cryptocurrencies. Atila currently does not support Optimism scholarships and grants. By distributing scholarships and grants on Optimism we can onboard more students unto the Optimism ecosystem.

This proposal is especially important because there are no projects on Optimism specifically trying to onboard students unto the crypto ecosystem.

We believe that students are the ideal target market for cryptocurrencies because:

  • Lower switching costs to onboard finances to crypto:

    • The don’t have strong ties to the existing financial system

  • More receptive to new technologies

  • More connected and active social networks means things spread faster

Arthouse makes it easy to create, buy and sell NFTs. Arthouse will specifically focus on students. Arthouse currently doesn’t support Optimism and there is a lack of NFT applications on Optimism. Having a great NFT application is important for growing the NFT ecosystem because we believe that NFTs are going to be the best consumer application for onboarding millions of people unto crypto.

Proposal for token distribution (under 1000 words):
How will the OP tokens be distributed?

30% development work: adding support for Optimism chain to Atila

30% sales and marketing: give workshops to students and student developers about topics they will find interesting. Tell other crypto companies that they should start crypto scholarships. Mention that Optimism is one of the sponsors.

40% grants and scholarships: give Optimism scholarships to students that are doing cool things. Give grants and bounty prizes for the best NFTs made on Optimism.

Scholarship ideas include:

  • $500 scholarship to any arts student that makes a cool NFT

  • $1,000 scholarship to any computer science student that makes a web3 project on Optimism

  • $2,000 scholarship to any environmental student that does a project that supports clean energy

NFT Bounties:

  • $500 scholarship to any arts student that makes a cool solarpunk themed NFT

  • $1,000 scholarship to any science student that tokenizes their research thesis as an NFT

How will this distribution incentivize usage and liquidity on Optimism?
Why will the incentivized users and liquidity remain after incentives dry up?

By giving students scholarships in Optimism, they will be incentivized to learn what they can do with this new currency. Similar to how getting currency in a foreign country incentivizes you to learn where you can spend your foreign currency.

The main purpose of this proposal is to create a case study and set a precedent for how crypto scholarships and grants might work. We will use the success, metrics and user stories from the first round of grants and scholarships to encourage others to run their own scholarships and grants programs.

Currently, there isn’t much to actually do on Optimism. As we said earlier, NFTs will be the first consumer application for crypto because it finally allows people to trade digital goods. Trading and collecting is an activity that has existed since the beginning of humanity and creates organic demand for activity on Optimism.

Over what period of time will the tokens be distributed?

6 months

Has your project previously received an OP token grant? If yes, what’s the status of these tokens?

No

How much will your project match in co-incentives?

n/a

1 Like
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Love to see fresh ideas, so I’m glad to see this proposal! It’s hard for me to see OP governance approving it without a lot more detail around how the scholarship application and selection process would work in the context of this initiative. I see your site allows users to create their own scholarships and invite others to contribute to the review process (is the review on-chain? I didn’t see any contracts related to that in your github repo). It’s not clear how the review process would work in the context of disbursing OP tokens through this initiative. Would OP governance be asked to trust the team’s best judgment, or perhaps the team could request that OP identify subject area experts to lead the review?

An aside: as a scientist, I find the idea of rewarding a scholarship for tokenizing a thesis a little bizarre. The thesis is usually the final stage of study, meaning a “scholarship” may no longer be necessary and rendering this as more of a “prize”. A more impact-oriented strategy in my view would be to have applicants tokenize a research proposal to be eligible for potential funding after a round of on-chain peer review. That would be pretty exciting.

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Real world applications are intriguing, so this is worth a look. Scholarships via blockchain could open a long-tail and connect people with similar objectives or interests.

This does need some clarifications:

-The workshop template that you linked to was boilerplate. Can you give some examples of workshops that the tokens would be used to support? If these will be used for workshops that generally students “find interesting” the subject matter should, at minimum, be related to Optimism’s vision or capabilities.

-Similar comment for the grants for people “doing cool things”. What is a cool thing and how does the token allocation support Optimism?

-Similar comment for “the best NFTs” made on optimism

In general, I suggest you 1) define more clearly the criteria that will be used to judge the various outcomes that you will be incentivizing and 2) explain how those activities support the Optimism vision or goals of Phase 1 allocations to incentivize usage and liquidity.

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First, thank you so much for taking the time to reply @allthecolors . This is the type of feedback I wanted to get when I wrote this proposal. It’s amazing to have people taking the time to give detailed feedback on our project.

Is the review on-chain?

No. The review is off-chain. Our thesis is that we only want to use the blockchain for things that can only be done best with a blockchain. Right now, the best use case for blockchain is payments handling the transfer of scholarship funds. Traditional off-chain systems are still better for handling the review process.

While we could do something like snapshot voting but that adds a lot of friction for reviewers and may not be worth the additional complexity. It’s all about tradeoffs.

However, we also believe in the concept of progressive decentralization so as we find better product-market-fit and blockchain technologies advance, we plan on moving more activites on-chain.

It’s not clear how the review process would work in the context of disbursing OP tokens through this initiative. Would OP governance be asked to trust the team’s best judgment, or perhaps the team could request that OP identify subject area experts to lead the review?

Yes, that’s exactly the plan! Subject are experts would be asked to lead the review based on the nature of the scholarship. For example, if we did a scholarship for “best Art NFT deployed on Optimism” OP could pick NFT experts in the art space to lead the review process.

An aside: as a scientist, I find the idea of rewarding a scholarship for tokenizing a thesis a little bizarre.

You are correct. That was my mistake as I’m still getting familiar with the different terminologies. The interesting part is there is a way to do both! Tokeinize the research proposal. Then after the proposal has advanced from a research proposal to a thesis, you could tokenize the thesis as a Harberger NFT (NFT that gives the creator royalties in perpetuities) or fund the thesis using Retroactive Public Goods Funding (funding for work that has already been done).

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Can you give some examples of workshops that the tokens would be used to support?

Here is a specific proposal for what an Optimism Workshop would look like. Here are some concrete examples from that proposal:

Workshop Topics:

Bounty Prizes:

  • Highest score on the workshop quiz gets $25 sent to their Optimism wallet
  • Most creative social media post about the workshop (make sure to tag Optimism) gets $50
  • First person to create, buy, and sell an NFT on Quixoitc Testnet gets $50 in OP

Similar comment for the grants for people “doing cool things”. What is a cool thing

“Cool thing” will be decided by the community but some examples.

  • The most interesting tokenomics proposal for how OP can give value back to it’s shareholder.
  • A creative game that uses ERC721 NFTs on Optimism
  • An interesting nuclear energy or longevity research paper

how does the token allocation support Optimism?

The thesis is simple: We want to bootstrap demand and liquidity. We give people that are doing cool things, money in the Optimism economy and then give them things they can spend the money on in Optimism.

We could just as well airdrop money to random people. But given that this money is being given to people who have done impressive things, my thesis is that token allocation done this way attracts a different holder demographic with values that align more with Optimism and it might incentivize people to stick around longer.

This also bootstraps demand because the existence of an OP scholarship means that people are essentially competing to get rewarded in OP. This psychologically increases the value of OP in the minds of everyone who is trying to receive this reward. “If I’m applying for a scholarship or grant in OP, then surely it must be worth something”.

I need to flesh out this idea more, but intuitively, the broad idea feels directionally correct.

6

This is indeed a nice idea of combining blockchain and knowledge.

Few things on the proposal.
30% is for development.
40% is to share knowledge about crypto in general. These are not directly aligned to phase 1 funding goal.

Not exactly sure if this qualify for RPGF as rules and guideline around that is not clear yet, but would recommend to submit this there.

7

40% is to share knowledge about crypto in general. These are not directly aligned to phase 1 funding goal.

First, let’s quickly review Phase 1 funding goals:

The proposal must include a plan for how the tokens will incentivize growth on Optimism.

I think teaching people about crypto in general first, and then teaching them about Optimism will incentivize growth on Optimism. Here’s why

If we want to grow Optimism, we need to onboard beginners.

If we want to onboard beginners, we have to first teach them about crypto, then teach them about crypto on Optimism.

For example, when we say we plan on teaching crypto in general, we don’t plan on just having a workshop “what is crypto” or “what is an NFT” since that brings little value to Optimism. The plan would be “what is crypto?” THEN explain “here’s how to get your first OP token from a faucet” and send it" or “What is an NFT” then teach people how to make an NFT on OP and buy and sell it on an Optimism NFT marketplace.

Why do we need to onboard beginners?

Optimism has 2 levers of growth:

  1. Onboarding crypto-natives on other platforms.
  2. Onboarding crypto-beginners who have little to no experience with crypto

At Atila we believe that also focusing on crypto beginners (group 2) is very important for growing Optimism:

  1. Group 2 is way larger than group 1: 16% of Americans already own crypto (group 1). 72% of Americans use social media (proxy for group 2)

  2. Group 2 has lower acquisition costs. Both in terms of time and money. People who are already on a different crypto platform already have financial and ideological ties to their current chain. Getting them to switch will require more effort. The value proposition has to be higher to get people to swtich from a different blockchain. However, if someone little to no pre-existing crypto or blockchain uses, the value proposition simply has to be greater than zero.

The RPGF idea is a good one as well. @OPUser thanks for sharing. Any links to where I can learn more about that?

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[removed]*

*I accidentally made a duplicate of my previous comment.

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Hey @tomiwa1a , I am not saying your proposal is wrong. I am suggesting where its more suited.

I think knowledge is more suitable for Public good, you can support your proposal there with past engagement that your project has done. Rules are guidelines are yet not clear here from the OP foundation so this is just my opinion.
check these two links :- 1, 2

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This is super helpful! I’ll look into those links. Thanks @OPUser!

1 Like