[DRAFT] [GF: Phase 1 Proposal] DefiLlama Reports

đź“ś Grant Proposals Governance Fund: Phase 1
1

Project name: DefiLlama

Author name and contact info 0xngmi

I understand that I will be required to provide additional KYC information to the Optimism Foundation to receive this grant: Yes

L2 recipient address: 0x08a3c2A819E3de7ACa384c798269B3Ce1CD0e437

Which Voting Cycle are you applying for?: Cycle 9

Grant category: Tooling

Is this proposal applicable to a specific committee? Yes, tooling

Project links:

Please link to any previous projects the team has meaningfully contributed to: DefiLlama, LlamaPay

Relevant usage metrics Not applicable

Competitors, peers, or similar projects: Messari

Is/will this project be open sourced? Yes, completely

Optimism native?: No

Date of deployment/expected deployment on Optimism: No applicable

Ecosystem Value Proposition:
We’ll deliver multiple reports on Optimism:

  • Quarterly report on state of the network, metrics and progress in the last quarter, to be delivered at the end of each quarter
  • Governance reports, published at the end of each season, with data based analysis on governance for the next 6 seasons.
  • Ecosystem report at the end of Q1 2023 with data-based analysis of optimism ecosystem

These reports will be made available on our website, defillama.com, under a new reports section, and distributed across all channels we have available.

We are aware our distribution channels may be lacking compared to our competitors, but we aim to make up for it by open sourcing everything related to our reports, including all the code that we use to generate the data, as well as maintaining any dashboards we develop for it.

We believe this is quite important since it will allow everyone to cross-check our numbers (heavily improving transparency) while also making it possible for other people to generate new reports like the ones we’ve made. We are aware that by doing so we’ll rug our own moat (after all, why keep paying us to make reports when you can just generate them), and we are completely fine with that. What’s more, it would be best if our service would generate long-lasting tools for optimism that anyone can use instead of generating any kind of dependency upon us.

We are also aware that defillama isn’t known for our reports, so over the next week I’m going to be working on a sample report on optimism, completely free of charge, to prove our commitment and provide a sample of our work.

Has your project previously applied for an OP grant? There’s another grant, unrelated to this one, currently in process to get voted on.

Number of OP tokens requested: 182,500 OP

Did the project apply for or receive OP tokens through the Foundation Partner Fund?: No

Proposal for token distribution:
Tokens will be spent covering the costs associated with the reports

8 Likes
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We’re excited to see alternate proposals for DAO focused investor relations and reporting as it ultimately leads to more value creation at a better price for the DAO. That said, we feel this counter proposal is hastily put together without a deep understanding or experience in this type of work. There are several questions left unanswered and clarifications we’d like to make as it pertains to our proposal:

  • Who will be writing these reports? Has DL produced long-form reports geared towards financial reporting or governance-specific analyses? Having spent the last year doing this for over 30 top protocols we can confidently say that this is no small task that any outsourced contributor can take on but requires sector-specific analysts whose full-time job is creating these reports. For example, we have dedicated:
    • Governance analysts working on Messari Governor and having done several analysis for Optimism (ex 1, 2)
    • Protocol Services analysts that solely work on DAO quarterly reporting
    • Data scientists building out underlying subgraphs
  • What does the distribution look like? It would be helpful to see how much less DL’s distribution is to gauge the value. While Messari has one of the largest crypto-native audiences we’ve also gone through the incredibly extensive diligence processes from Bloomberg, S&P, Refinitiv to ensure that we’re not only informing the crypto ecosystem but the broader corporate and financial world as we aim to grow crypto well beyond the small portion of global economic activity it is today. These firms are starting to expend more time and resources getting smart on the space and increasingly participating on-chain in protocols they have institutional grade research on.

We are aware our distribution channels may be lacking compared to our competitors, but we aim to make up for it by open sourcing everything related to our reports, including all the code that we use to generate the data, as well as maintaining any dashboards we develop for it.

  • All Messari data will be open sourced (Optimism Subgraphs and Dashboards) as well so this doesn’t seem to make up for the lack of distribution.

We are aware that by doing so we’ll rug our own moat (after all, why keep paying us to make reports when you can just generate them)

  • The value in the reports is not just the surfacing of the data but the contextualization which can not be easily replicated. In the same way companies report their financial statements but there’s still a huge industry for equity research to turn that raw data into valuable insights for stakeholders to consume.
3 Likes
3

Defillama has proven to be a vital part of the DeFi landscape. Constantly working on improving tooling, and data access. Also the team is always expanding their products showing they are here to stay.
Defillama puts every protocol in the same level, giving users the opportunity to sort through fuzz and marketing and look directly into the metrics that matter. I can’t think of “Doing my own research” without them.

That said, before reading the proposal I was concerned of what could DefiLlama offer for the grant, but the reports sound like an excellent idea. I haven’t seen them yet but I know the information there will be trustworthy, verified, relevant, and accurate.

Also DefiLlama information gets picked up by the biggest news outlets, making these reports a perfect opportunity to showcase the amazing metrics Optimism is obtaining.

1 Like