To answer your questions:
- Indeed, retroactive funding phase hasn’t been announced. There’s no set date yet announced from the Optimism Foundation as far as I am aware. You can read about it more here.
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If you are requesting support and funding directly form the Optimism Foundation, there’s a specific form to fill in order to get a partner’s grant. This is part of the 5.4% of the OP token supply dedicated to the partner fund. Find the form here
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A proposal submitted on gov.optimism.io is part of the Governance fund, voted and discussed by the community, and eventually voted on by the Token House, or governance participants.
- Cycle 8 has already began and votes are on snapshot. Cycle 9 will be dedicated to grants council and protocol delegation program proposals. January 19th: Season 3 starts with Voting Cycle #10. See more here.
That being said, I do see that you can both try to reach out for a partners fund, as well as ask for a grant from the governance fund cycle #10 incentivizing usage of your RPC endpoints.
I will give you my feedback, and you can feel free to take it or adjust it based on your judgement. A better proposal from Pocket imho would:
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Encourage new builders to deploy to Optimism with its RPC endpoints. The funds would be used for the usage of RPC endpoints for projects that haven’t deployed yet on Optimism.
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Encourage previously deployed projects to continue using your RPC endpoints. Part of of the grant is to subsidize your RPC endpoints (34% for example), while another paid by developers (33%), and the rest 33% you can offer as co-incentives. Letting developers pay for your would validate that you are offering a superior product than the free tiers of other providers.
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Not encourage exchanging the grant received for POKT token. The community isn’t a fan of dumping governance grant for other protocols tokens. I tired understanding why there needs to be a token for validators to run a node but I wasn’t able to. You probably have a very clear answer, so if there’s an absolute need to exchange OP for POKT, I would clarify it clearly in your proposal.