[Ready] [GF: Phase 1 Proposal] Messari

Really happy to see you all here.

Just to get facts right, if I understand this correctly, the deliverables are the following:

And I see four types of roles working on these: research analysts, protocol specialists/engineering, data science, and marketing.

What i’m generally asking here is: is there a way you can connect the 420k OP ask directly to the resources required to generate the intended work product?

And is the idea that in effect what Optimism is ‘buying’ is Messari following through on these deliverables, i.e., that they would not generate them at all otherwise? Or only offer them to paying subscribers? Or would this have all happened regardless?

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Thank you this proposal.

Echoing what jack has mentioned above.

This would be helpful but who is the audience, only 15-20 members are active on this forum and other projects are doing their own analytics. On top of that, foundation is working on preparing the report from their side.

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Hi, I really like Messari’s work. I have some questions.

Could you give more details about the use of the 420k OP. Such as how much is paid to internal resources and the time frame this grant covers.

And another question, will the Optimism reports be available to all the public, will there be information that is only available to Messari subscription?

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Our general cost breakdown is as follows:

  • Quarterly reports x4: $25k/per
  • Governance season recaps x4: $25k/per
  • Initiation of coverage: $30k
  • Ecosystem report: $50k

This brings the total to $280k to cover the various roles involved as outlined above. Add on a 5% premium we use when accepting native tokens to account for added costs to do so and we back into the 420k OP

The idea is Optimism is paying for an investor relations service with these deliverables. We only produce these types of freely available reports with DAOs where we’re able to receive funding since they’re not monetized behind any paywall (like Messari Enterprise which is totally separate; ie. more subjective, thematic research compared to this objective reporting)

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This covers a 12-month period with the cost breakdown noted above.

And all of these reports will live as free resources on our site, distributed through our newsletter, social channels, and third-party distribution partners (Bloomberg, S&P, etc.)

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It’s a hefty amount coming to around $23k per month but Messari provides high-quality service and looking at the internal resources mentioned & channels included (Bloomberg, S&P etc.) it makes sense for the cost.

Looking at the previous work done for Optimism, such as the gov fund by the named gov analysts, I believe that these types of reports will bring much-needed transparency to Optimism.

Messari also provides quarterly reports to Balancer (we are delegates in Balancer), which are always of high quality. I’d expect to see a similar outcome here.

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Given that this is around $360k, can you provide some references that have been happy with a comparable package, as well as the materials produced and price they paid?

If Optimism feels like it needs to bring in outside consultants to create quarterly reports, it seems like it should put out a Request For Proposals. If Optimism governance decided it wanted quarterly reports published and that it was unable to have an internal affiliate create them, then it seems prudent to get multiple offers to shop around.

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Thanks for sharing this proposal. I think that each of the reports you listed would provide useful information for the ecosystem and from what I’ve seen with past work, it seems that Messari puts out high-quality content. My only feedback is it seems the pricing is steep ($357k at the time of my post). Are you open to a reduced amount? I would also imagine that once the initial infra is set up for some of the reports (e.g. pulling in metrics, network stats, etc) that future reports might require less time.

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Hey Messari team, big fans of everything you do! These reports sound useful overall but the prices seems pretty steep. It sounds like you are asking for 420,000 OP for 5 quarters total of reporting, is that accurate? Would it be possible to share what you have charged other projects for similar reports in the past?

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To share pricing we’ve provided other projects, you can see our proposals for Balancer and Venus to fund similar quarterly reporting.

In terms of the governance recaps, the first one we did was OP Season 1 so this is the first time we’re looking to fund it on an ongoing basis. The resources going into it are on par with the quarterly reporting which is why they are priced the same.

Since we posted the proposal the OP price has increased fairly substantially so we’d be okay using a 30-day TWAP which would bring the total to 365,000 $OP.

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@katie @linda @Bobbay_StableLab Thank you so much everyone for the feedback! With the deadline approaching, we’re curious if the revised OP amount (365,000 OP) warrants a move to the next step. If so, can two delegates with >0.5% of votable OP please state their approval?

It looks like the amount requested still needs to be updated.

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I’ve updated the amount in the original post!

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I am an Optimism delegate [Delegate Commitments - #18 by katie] with sufficient voting power and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

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I am one of the Synthetix Ambassadors, and a member of the Defi Shadow Committee.

I am an Optimism delegate [Delegate Commitments - #65 by mastermojo ] with sufficient voting power, and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

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From DefiLlama I’d like to extend a counter-offer: we’ll provide reports on the same topics for half the price, and on top of that we’ll open source all the dashboards and tools that we develop for these reports and maintain them

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now we’re talking. @GFXlabs this follows your lead here, I think – seeming more and more like a vendor proposal and less an ecosystem one

Seems to me that one way or another we probably would need to do some shopping around, and we don’t have a week to sort that out. I think we might want to table discussion of this proposal and maybe even get some sort of single-purpose team together to look through some offers? Could put the creation of this team in this voting round. If people signal interest in this thought, we can draft something more formal.

Messari’s reputation is certainly very strong, but I don’t think this is one we rush into.

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Would you be able to draft a counter-proposal to at least have something to compare to when reviewing this proposal? As it seems that this proposal did make it in this cycle and as such needs to be reviewed.

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We’re excited to see alternate proposals as it showcases other builders looking to solve a pressing DAO need. We’re big fans of Defi Llama over at Messari and have used it to inform much of our research.

However, DL’s experience remains in the raw data ingestion and dashboard building I’m not sure adequate time was spent thinking through the full extent of the resources that go into this type of longer form reporting and building out a platform to ensure it reaches a wide audience. (We left additional thoughts in the comments on the counter-proposal)

Lastly, while it seems the goal was to undercut us on price DL is requesting 300k OP to build the underlying data infra and then 182k OP to write the reports. Our proposal is less than that to do both.

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