[FINAL] OPdelegate.com

ARCHIVED Mission Proposals
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S4 Intent: Governance Accessibility (Intent 4)

Proposed Mission: This mission is for the creation of “OPdelegate.com”; a stand alone analytics website for delegates to understand, manage, and grow their delegation on Optimism.

[Proposal Tier](Collective Trust Tiers): Phoenix

Please verify that you meet the qualifications for your Tier: 2x Member of the Grants Council and receiver of RPGF2 funding.

Baseline grant amount: 85k OP

% of total available Intent budget: 2.833%

Alliance: OPdelegate.com

Alliance Lead: Michael Vander Meiden

Contact info: @Michael

L2 recipient address: 0x6EdA5aCafF7F5964E1EcC3FD61C62570C186cA0C

Please list the members of your Alliance and link to any previous work:

Please explain how this Mission will help accomplish the above Intent:

  • Since the start of Optimism Governance, a consistent issue has been delegate apathy and involvement. Having more active and interested delegates would be a huge benefit to the Optimism Collective as a whole. But we have a problem… delegates have no insight into data on their own delegation. Currently the only information that is readily available to delegates on all major websites is the total amount of OP delegated and the # of delegating addresses. This limits the agency of delegates, especially new and growing ones, and as a result limits participation in governance.
  • OPdelegate.com solves these problems by creating the go-to website for Optimism Delegates. Specifically, it will provide address-specific information for delegates to understand, manage, and grow their delegation on Optimism. Think “zapper.fi for delegates”.
  • Examples of statistics on this website would be:
    • Total delegation over time
    • number of delegating addresses over time
    • “Demographics” of delegating addresses (size, activity, etc.)
  • By having access to the most important information, delegates will have the agency to see how their decisions and activity affect their delegation, leading to the opportunity to make data-driven decisions. The existence of this tool will increase overall delegate involvement in governance and provide a growth for new and growing delegates.
  • While the initial goal of this grant is to build a wallet-specific dashboard for delegates, the ultimate goal is to be a one-stop-shop for all things Optimism delegation. All parts of the website will be open-source, meaning that this code will be available for other projects to integrate and that outside contributors will be welcome to contribute.

What makes your Alliance well-suited to execute this Mission?

  • Michael Vander Meiden
    • Through being one of the most active delegates in Optimism governance, Michael has experienced the key pain points of new and active delegates. Through hosting the community calls, Michael has been at the center of delegate discussion for almost the entire existence of the token house. Along the way, Michael has answered countless questions from and helped guide many new delegates just starting their journey. These experiences have made Michael one of the most knowledgeable within Optimism’s Token House on the delegate journey. All of this experience makes this Alliance strongly positioned to design and build the product that delegates need.
    • As far as ability to execute, Michael draws on his experience as a software engineer and later a product manager at a venture-funded startup (http://www.stockwell.ai/). There he managed a remote team to build multiple applications, most notably a delivery and stocking app that cut driver stocking times by 40%.
    • He is also a solidity engineer that has built many web3 projects and placed in multiple web3 hackathons, most notably Arbitrum’s 2022 hackathon, placing 1st in the DeFi track.
  • Michael Silberling (advisor)
    • Michael Silbering is a data wizard at OP Labs, and his work speaks for itself. To-date he has been instrumental in all of the most important data dashboards on Optimism and Optimism Governance. He will be serving in an advisory role for this project.

Please list a critical milestone. The critical milestone should be a measure of whether you’ve made best efforts to execute what is outlined in this proposal or not. If you fail to achieve your critical milestone, your grant may be clawed back.

  • Launch of Delegate Dashboard Website
  • Inclusion of at least 3 real-time charts to help delegates visualize their delegation data

How should Token House delegates measure progress towards this Mission: These should focus on progress towards completion. Including expected completion dates for each is recommended.

  • Alpha-version published for testing (September 1st)

How should badgeholders measure impact upon completion of this Mission? These should be focused on performance and may be used by badgeholders to assess your Misson’s impact in the next round of RetroPGF.

  • Number of delegates actively using Delegate Dashboard
  • NPS-score of website from delegates

Breakdown of Mission budget request:

All grant funds will go to Michael as a delayed reimbursement for website expenses, for which he will fund out-of-pocket for the development of the website.

While Michael has the experience needed to build the website himself, he will leverage the use of 3rd-party contractors to make sure that the website meets the highest standards of quality and usefulness.

Planned expenses include:

  • Website infrastructure costs
    • Hosting/Compute
    • API fees
    • Domain Registration
  • Full Stack Dev (3rd party contractor)
  • Designer (3rd party contractor)

I confirm that my grant will be subject to clawback for failure to execute on critical milestones: Yes

I confirm that I have read and understand the grant policies: Yes

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

I understand that I will be expected to following the public grant reporting requirements outlined here: Yes

Edit: For clarity, here is a rough mockup of some of the things that might be seen in the interface:

website mock up 2
website mock up 21920×4030 284 KB

3 Likes
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Hi Michael, delegate dashboard sound to me like
https://optimism.karmahq.xyz/ which has the advantage of 1) linking delegate profiles across multiple governance locations and a proactive team @mmurthy helping to customise and quantify karma [governanve impact] scores for the communities they support

Theres also ongoing improvements to the Agora UI which has the critical advantage of being our OP delegation tool

Can you share the key differences, unique benefits and advantages of building another delegate interface.

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Thanks again for the detailed feedback @lee0007.

I just want to clarify that this is NOT a competitor to the Agora UI and is very different from platforms like Karma. All the tools/features mentioned in the proposal are not available in Agora and the goal isn’t to be a competitor to Agora/Karma, but rather an analysis tool for Delegates and Delegators.

The best way to think about what is being built is “Youtube Analytics” + “Zapper.fi” for delegates.

Youtube analytics provides actionable data over time to it’s creators. When a creator posts a video, they can see the direct effects on their watch-time and subscriber base.

For delegates:
Currently, if a delegate gives a call-to-action to their community, they have no way of really tracking if that made an impact on their delegation. Imagine a protocol/project putting out regular requests to their community to “Please delegate to our Op ambassador”. Currently there is no out-of-the-box solution to tracking the effectiveness of this. The only numbers that delegate aggregation platforms give are the absolute # of delegates and # of OP delegated.

Here is an example of youtube analytics which this draws inspiration from:

Screen Shot 2023-06-22 at 2.08.54 PM
Screen Shot 2023-06-22 at 2.08.54 PM1652×674 81.8 KB

Why is this important? By seeing how delegation changes over time based on the actions of the delegate, the delegate will gain agency to do what they discover works to gain delegation. As a whole, optimism delegates will be able to drive more participation (delegation) in governance by given access to these tools.

In addition, delegates will be able to get more detail on their delegator cohort. They will be able to answer questions like "Are my delegators 1 whale and a bunch of airdrop farmers? Or are they a bunch of medium-size active DeFi users? This is a great opportunity to include things like attestations into the breakdown.

For delegators:
Because this information would be public for everybody, delegators could use the same info to get a more detailed breakdown of the the delegation of potential delegates before choosing who to delegate too.

But to be clear, this is not a delegate discovery platform or a governance platform, it’s a research and analytics platform for delegates to use.

3 Likes
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I am an Optimism delegate with sufficient voting power and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

1 Like
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I am an Optimism delegate with sufficient voting power and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

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I am for any endeavour that advances data-driven decision-making. I support your Why and am just keen to better understand the how and what. As a member of a relatively new delegate team, we are probably a target audience segment. If I’m on the wrong tangent here, let me know.

Unfortunately, the YouTube analogy is a bit confusing for me because YT provides analytics for content and advertising within it’s own platform where data access makes it easy to track, quantify, accurately attribute and report a myriad of metrics.

I understand you would need this app to connect with wallets to provide a more granular, user-friendly UI for on-chain data - data akin to say this dune analytics dashboard?

What I’d like to understand is this concept of linking decisions + delegations because if you have a solution that can attribute off-chain w. on-chain data this would revolutionise our ability to quantify impact in real-time.

So a couple of questions because maybe I’m way of track here

  • Which type of decisions and activity would you initially want to capture?
  • Other than on-chain data which off-chain data sources do you plan to draw from to represent decisions
  • How do you connect and attribute on-chain data to off-chain data to determine the correlation between ‘decisions’ and ‘delegation’
  • And if you’re not drawing from off-chain data then to what extent (limitations) can you inform how decisions and activity affect delegation
3 Likes
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I am an Optimism delegate with sufficient voting power and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

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Yes exactly, the idea is that the kinds of data in this dashboard is for those who want to judge the delegate program as a whole. We want to break down this data into wallet-specific actionable insights. It’s important to note that the main contributor of that dashboard, Michael Silberling, is an advisor on this project.

While dune dashboards are great and can be very useful, you are limited to on-chain data and their UI, which limits opportunities for improving and customizing the interface.

This is exactly what we want to do. Here is a very crude example about what one of the charts could look like:

Chart Mockup 1
Chart Mockup 11278×638 157 KB

All try to answer these questions:

  • The main thing to initially capture would be time-series wallet specific data + a breakdown of (on-chain) delegator demographics.
  • Anything with an API could be integrated, however the idea is to get the basic on-chain data available into a useable format for delegates first. Then add optimism-ecosystem events (airdrops) and then we can start adding more specific activities based on requests from delegates. It’s also important to note that this will be open source, and so if someone wants to join the development and add some integration (i.e. youtube) then they would be welcome to do that to earn any share of RPGF
  • Combining on and off chain data is relatively easy if there is an API for the off-chain data and everything is time series. To start, we just want to get the data out there in a useable format… delegates know what actions are happening
  • It’s important to note that we are NOT linking on-chain addresses of delegators to off-chain profiles, nor is it in the plans. As a delegate, you might be able to see that a new viral tweet gets you a few delegators, but you will not be able to see which delegators are also twitter followers.
3 Likes
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I am an Optimism delegate with sufficient voting power , and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

1 Like
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As a delegate who has been hoping for a dashboard like this for a long time, I’m excited to see this mission!

I am an Optimism delegate with sufficient voting power and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

1 Like
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I represent KyberSwap, an Optimism Protocol Delegate for Season 4 with sufficient voting power, and we believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

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Our team is really looking forward to seeing an analytics dashboard like this and believe it will be a huge help for delegates to understand how their activity/decisions impacts delegations. This mission also has the approval of 404 DAO and we are looking forward to it being put up to a vote. 404 DAO is an Optimism delegate with sufficient voting power.

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OPdelegate.com can be a valuable resource by providing delegates with specialized information to understand, manage, and grow their delegations. Delegates can learn to make data-driven decisions using this tool, which can increase their participation in governance. Considering the difficulties delegates face in the decision-making process due to limited access to data, a platform like OPdelegate.com that enables easy access to information is a positive step forward.

2 Likes
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I’ve mentioned in other forum posts, I’m a fan of @Michael’s work in Optimism, but unfortunately I couldn’t get to a yes in this proposal. Having more governance information would be useful but I felt the amount requested was too high for me.

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Should have asked this earlier, @Michael you will make the code base open sourced, right ?

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Yes the code will be 100% open source.

Better yet, once the base work is set anybody will be invited to participate in improving the website to earn a share of any RPGF that it generates.

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At this point you have enough approvals, so really this is symbolic. But I’m leaning toward voting Against on this and here’s why:

I don’t think that delegations are fluid in the way that you describe. As in, I don’t think delegators are really actively managing their delegations in response to things that delegates do. I think at most, the average token holder delegates one time and then leaves it alone.

That being said, it looks like we will have the chance to really see if that’s the case, as you make this data available.

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I agree with you on this @chaselb, however I think that giving this data to the delegates will allow governance as a whole to discover the handful of ways in which people DO manage their delegation.

Also, any efforts to increase the fluidity of delegation (on which there has been a lot of discussion) would greatly benefit from having this kind of infrastructure already in place in order to judge the effects.

Like you say, the vote has passed and I’m excited to prove that this will be a worthwhile project.

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As ITU Blockchain, we are aware that the inactivity of delegates poses a significant problem in terms of governance. The disconnection between management and delegates, as well as the delegates’ independence from their votes, is one of the major issues that hinders the efficiency of the process. Currently, delegates can only access the token amount owned by token holders, which creates a limit on community participation. We believe that the proposed dashboard will overcome these obstacles and support its open-source nature.

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Hi @Michael!

As Season 4 draws to a close this week, we’re so excited to see how you’ve executed on your Mission! Please post an update for the community here outlining the milestones you’ve met this Thursday (9/20) by 19:00 GMT. Please include links to any final work products as we’ll create a final roundup linking to all Mission deliverables.

We also encourage you to sign-up for RetroPGF Round 3. You’ll be able to describe the impact of your Mission when you sign-up: RetroPGF Round 3 Applications Are Open

Thanks again for being part of this experiment and helping us build the Collective :heart:

1 Like