As I expressed during the Governance Call following the release of the Course Correction proposal, I believe that having total gas fees generated as the core criteria by which OP is (pro-rata) delegated to protocols on Optimism, would result in the under representation of many projects and flawed results.
Looking at this dashboard: Optimism - Popular Apps and Project Usage Trends 🧮 🔴✨, you can see that Synthetix is low on the list despite having one of the most active communities on Optimism and being deeply integrated with the rollup. Aside from under representation of some protocols, another thing that stands out to me is that both Uniswap and Galxe would end up with a large amount of delegated OP from this program, despite having hardly any activity and interest in Optimism governance.
Uniswap has displayed little interest in Optimism even though they were awarded a large OP allocation from the Phase 0 Governance Fund. More than 6months have passed and there still hasn’t been an attempt to make use of the OP incentives Uniswap was given (1 Million $OP). I could go even further by outlining that no one from Uniswap Labs or the Grants Program submitted a proposal for the use of OP from that allocation until there was public pressure on Twitter for them to do so. They seemed quite disinterested in Optimism governance back then, and based on the lack of a plan for the OP they hold, it seems they still lack interest. Therefore I believe delegating a large portion of OP to Uniswap Protocol, based on a single metric of gas fees generated last season, would be a pretty big waste.
Galxe is a project which has lead to a great amount of growth and usage on Optimism, but does not have significant resources and infrastructure deployed to Optimism like many DeFi protocols do. So despite successfully onboarding many users to Optimism through the Quests campaign, it would be unjust for Galxe to have a major portion of OP delegated to them, from this program, without sharing the same exposure that other protocols have to Optimism.
In general I think that the Protocol Delegation Program would end in suboptimal and flawed results under the current criteria. Gas fees generated, on its own, don’t properly represent the depth of alignment that protocols have with Optimism and would certainly need to be used in combination with other metrics for it to be effective in achieving the goals of this program.
I think if used in combination, the following metrics would lead to fairer results:
- Total Value Locked in the protocol
- Is the project Optimism native (deployed on OP and ETH mainnet only)?
- Does the Protocol conduct its Governance on Optimism?
- Gas Fees Generated by the protocol
I think the above criteria could be weighted and combined to produce much better results for Optimism Governance and fulfill the purpose of the Protocol Delegation Program.
Eager to hear feedback from the OP foundation and other delegates on the above idea!