RE: Price.
I helped price this out and these grants are very risky for two main reasons.
#1 Tight time pressure.
All milestones need to be done by Sept 20th. This means working through the summer where many people in Europe and the US are supposed to be taking vacation, and instead, we need to develop a lot at breakneck speed to get something out in 2.5 months, despite potentially running into a technical blocker!
#2 Volatility of OP & 1 year lockup.
We don’t get this funding cash in hand, we have to really make a 1 year bet on the OP token price, and this is very, VERY risky. I have been in the space long enough to see this go wrong many many times. When put on my OP Steward hat, I believe we can give OP a solid economic footing, and am personally pushing for real token utility. But at the same time, the issuance rate for OP is very high and getting higher and there is no real demand or utility for the OP token. We do this work now and get OP tokens in a year that will be worth ___? This week alone it has fluctuated nearly 30% in price!
Source Coingecko - accessed just before posting
I won’t gain any friends by saying these things in this forum but the reality is, we do not know when the bear market will end, nor do we know when investors will cash out or when the regulators in the US will give clear guidance and we will get the green light to give the OP token utility (that’s pure speculation on my part on why there isn’t utility for the OP token yet).
We have to do this work on the price of OP a year from now. For that to make sense we have to consider OP economics, and the risks involved with finishing this work. When tasked with estimating how much OP we to ask for to do these grants, it would be irresponsible to do it at the current market rate of OP. The goal is supposed to be to make a profit and an impact, not just an impact.
Risk #1
Short timeframe means high risk of running into blockers and not getting the full grant amount.
Risk #2
1 year lock up means high risk of OP token issuance to investors, core team, RetroPGF, grants and other issuance mechanisms while there is no clear demand case outside of pure speculation.
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I hope I don’t get shunned for all this :-/ but I am the one who advised them to set this price, and I want to be transparent about my reasoning.