GFX Labs - Delegate Communication Thread

This thread is intended to provide a record of GFX Labs’ voting and communication around the reasoning of each vote. Subsequent voting communications will be added to this thread over time.

3 Polls Ending June 26

Proposal A
Summary: This is a batch vote for 24 grants, ranging from Chainlink to Synthetix to Gelato. It includes 23 different protocols, and a full list with requested amounts of OP and individual spending plans can be found here. This vote is to approve or deny all 24 grant requests together.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. Batched approvals of grants are poor governance, as they remove oversight, overload voters, and generally bundle together spending in a way such that many stakeholders get a turn at funding. Optimism is in early days and requires developing a strong ecosystem for users, but we feel strongly that unrelated spending proposals should not be bundled together like this again in the future.

Proposal B
Summary: This proposal would distribute a 1,000,000 OP grant to Uniswap. 200,000 OP of which would be earmarked for grants from Uniswap to builders on Optimism. The remaining 800,000 would be earmarked for liquidity mining on Uniswap Optimism.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. While the pools to be incentivized have not yet been specified, Uniswap is core infrastructure and it is difficult to imagine a successful Optimism without a robust adoption of Uniswap, which also has a proven network effect that makes users and liquidity sticky after incentives eventually end.

Proposal C
Summary: This proposal would distribute a 300,000 OP grant to 0x. The entirety would be earmarked for the 0x grants program, with an intent for at least 50% to be directed to NFT/gaming projects on Optimism.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. Like Uniswap, 0x is known as an important piece of on-chain infrastructure. It also has a grants program with an established history and ability to channel funding. The focus on non-financial uses of Optimism hold the potential to create more diverse use cases for Optimism, and 0x’s recent shift into NFT infrastructure strongly suggest they have the expertise to distribute grants in that industry effectively.

NB: GFX is having difficulty voting on Snapshot, which does not currently support multisig voting on Optimism. We use best practices for handling assets internally – including voting power that has been delegated – and utilize a multisig on our delegate address. We are attempting to find a workaround, but ultimately, Snapshot needs to support voting from multisig addresses.

9 Likes

I was looking for place to share thoughts on votes and in general related to proposals. I like this approach, will create one for me too.

4 Likes

17 Polls Ending July 6, 2022

Proposal A: Optimistic Railway
Summary: This proposal would distribute 400,000 OP to Optimistic Railway. Optimistic Railway is an early stage development and self describes its project as: “We are building the 4 dimensional railway of the metaverse - the infrastructure to connect social dapps and enable massive on chain gaming.”

90% of the tokens would go to “core team & operations” with the remaining 10% being distributed to users.

Recommendation: Vote No. This project does not appear to have a web site, few concrete deliverables are offered, and it’s unclear to what extent the 90% is going to individual compensation vs operating expense. This project appears to be in seed or pre-seed stage, and (at writing) a grant of nearly a quarter million dollars requires some demonstration of work already underway, product-market fit, or allocation of equity to Optimism Foundation. We encourage the applicants to reapply once there is more of their product to showcase.

Proposal B: dForce
Summary: This proposal would distribute 300,000 OP to dForce, a lending platform that issues the overcollateralized stablecoin USX. 50% of the allocation would be earmarked for liquidity incentivization on Optimism, 30% for grants to developers working on or around dForce protocols, and 20% for marketing events related to Optimism and dForce.

Recommendation: Vote No. The 30% for developers does not appear to be restricted to Optimism, and could be used to fund dForce on other chains while still adhering to the proposal application. It’s also unclear how 20% for marketing Optimism would be done, and this looks like it would simply be used to advertise the liquidity incentives. Given that no new building appears to be proposed, the funds will not be restricted to use on Optimism-related purposes, and incentives are largely just Optimism subsidizing a private business over its competitors rather than increasing overall Optimism ecosystem growth.

Proposal C: GYSR
Summary: This proposal would distribute 400,000 OP to GYSR, a platform focused on helping protocols distribute incentives for users that perform on-chain activities. 35% of the allocation would be general subsidization of its users’ incentives pools on Optimism, 35% used to incentivize existing users to migrate to Optimism, 25% to support development of Optimism-specific GYSR technology, “5% as incentives for projects to use Optimism over other networks as part of their deployment.”

Recommendation: Vote Yes. This grant’s focus is not merely offering an Optimism-provided subsidy to the applicant’s business because it includes allocations to both further develop on Optimism and to migrate existing user base to Optimism. Both of these are reasonable efforts to support with grants targeting ecosystem development.

Proposal D: Mean Finance
Summary: This proposal would distribute 300,000 OP to Mean Finance. Mean Finance is a decentralized, dollar-cost-averaging protocol deployed to both Polygon and Optimism. 45% would be used for user subsidies on Optimism, 30% for grants and bounties to expand use cases of the Mean protocol, 20% for community and growth initiatives, and 5% as a retroactive reward for early adopters.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. This protocol adds quality-of-life services to users on Optimism. While we would prefer to see the funding explicitly used only for Optimism and a TVL that’s at least several million dollars in value, the novel and practical use case of the Mean protocol on Optimism overcomes our objections.

Proposal E: Raptor
Summary: This proposal would distribute 800,000 OP to Raptor. The OP would be sold to finance 10 ETH2 validator nodes. Raptor offers to use 50% of the rewards from those nodes to buy back and verifiably burn OP.

Recommendation: Vote No. This is a large amount of OP that would need to be sold entirely to finance the 10 nodes, and the current APR suggests a very long time to see a return on this investment. Long time horizons on a handshake deal are not a recipe for success. It does not directly grow the Optimism ecosystem.

Proposal F: Balancer & BeethovenX
Summary: This proposal would distribute 500,000 OP to BeethovenX, which is being advised by Balancer. “OP will likely be used to bribe in veBAL gauges for pools on Optimism, primarily boosted pools.”

Recommendation: Vote Yes. This proposal does not commit to a particular use of the OP, and the only use mentioned is basically liquidity incentivization. That being said, boosted pools would also spread liquidity to other protocols on Optimism. In this case, it’s not an ideal proposal, but the second-order effects should ensure contribution to the overall ecosystem on Optimism.

Proposal G: Summa
Summary: This proposal would distribute 2,000,000 OP to Tracey & Associates Accounting to bootstrap bringing some bookkeeping, payroll, and other professional services online in order to use Optimism as rails.

Recommendation: Vote No. This project is ill-defined, still a concept, and has an enormous request. We recommend the applicants focus on some specific deliverables, establish their project, and then seek smaller amounts of funding in future rounds.

Proposal H: WardenSwap
Summary: This proposal would distribute 300,000 OP to WardenSwap, a DEX aggregator. Tokens would then be earmarked as 25% for grants/hackathons, 20% as subsidy to users, 10% for referral links, 35% to marketing, 10% to WardenSwap to pay for its own maintenance.

Recommendation: Vote No. Referral links and influencers (both covered in this request) are not high-value ways to spend OP, and WardenSwap should not be asking for Optimism to pay for maintenance on an existing protocol. WardenSwap is also notably not co-incentivizing. There are simply better ways to distribute OP to grow the Optimism ecosystem

Proposal I: Pickle Finance
Summary: This proposal would distribute 200,000 OP to Pickle Finance. The applicant estimates 1000 OP would be distributed per day to users as incentives alongside their own native token.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. Pickle was the first yield aggregator on Optimism, and so has contributed to the growth of the ecosystem. Whether future impact will be meaningful is somewhat open to question, but recognition that Pickle provided a new use or functionality on Optimism justifies the grant.

Proposal J: Ooki Protocol
Summary: This proposal would distribute 700,000 OP to Ooki Protocol, a margin trading platform. The tokens would be distributed as liquidity incentives to bootstrap the initial seed liquidity needed for traders to operate on the platform.

Recommendation: Vote No. This is a very large grant request, and the applicants have not made a compelling case that the liquidity seeded would remain after the end of incentivization. It’s also not clear that the applicant DAO itself has much skin in the game, which for a request of this size seems important.

Proposal K: Infinity Wallet
Summary: This proposal would distribute 500,000 OP to Infinity Wallet, a cross-chain browserless wallet. 15% would be distributed for marketing (airdrops and completing activities), 45% for developers to deploy to Optimism and work with Infinity Wallet, 40% to waive the applicant’s usual fee to integrate dapps.

Recommendation: Vote No. The stated use of the grant is focused solely upon developing Infinity Wallet’s business and does not provide or promise new functionality or growth to the overall Optimism ecosystem.

Proposal L: Beefy
Summary: This proposal would distribute 650,000 OP to Beefy, a multi-chain yield optimizer. 90% would be to provide incentives to users, with 10% earmarked for “strategic partnerships.”

Recommendation: Vote No. Beefy is not yet deployed to Optimism, and the request is large. Additionally, nearly all of the grant would be used to subsidize users for Beefy, and it is unclear how this would add any value or use to the Optimism ecosystem once those incentives dried up.

Proposal M: 0xHabitat
Summary: This proposal would distribute 400,000 OP to 0xHabitat. 45% would be streamed to the 0xHabitat treasury, 45% for developer grants focused on 0xHabitat, and 10% for marketing.

Recommendation: Vote No. 0xHabitat is not yet deployed to Optimism, and the request largely leaves the grant’s use up to 0xHabitat DAO. Because of this, it is unclear whether or how these funds would contribute to the overall Optimism ecosystem.

Proposal N: Thales
Summary: This proposal would distribute 2,000,000 OP to Thales. The allocation would incentivize Thales users and ETH/THALES liquidity.

Recommendation: Vote No. Thales just received 900,000 OP in the previous governance cycle. Another large distribution is unnecessary and would crowd out other projects that can contribute to the ecosystem.

Proposal O: Paraswap
Summary: This proposal would distribute 450,000 OP to Paraswap. 50% would be allocated to dapps integrating Paraswap on Optimism, 35% to Paraswap-owned liquidity, 15% to DexLib integrations.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. The majority of the funding is going towards development and integration rather than simple liquidity incentivization. Increased composability, integration, and development is exactly what these grants are for.

Proposal P: Rotki
Summary: This proposal would distribute 190,770 OP to Rotki. The grant would fund development of open-source software by Rotki. Note that this is one of the only two grants to be accompanied by an actual budget breakdown.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. Rotki provides useful services in tracking and accounting, and is open source. It provides utility to a wide variety of users, is planning to use the grant to exclusively fund development of further functionality and utility. It also has the distinction of providing one of the only two budgets with much detail amongst all the grants, and should be rewarded for that. The size of the grant is also small relative to many very large requests.

Proposal Q: Candide Wallet
Summary: This proposal would distribute 190,000 OP to Candide, which is developing a cross-rollup noncustodial wallet. Candide has not yet launched, and code is open source. A detailed breakdown of the budget the grant request is based on is available at the proposal link.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. The request is modest relative to many grant requests, and the budget includes actual estimates to support the number of OP requested. Additionally, the funding is for development of new utility, and not merely for incentivizing users of a protocol at Optimism’s expense.

NB: GFX is having difficulty voting on Snapshot, which does not currently support multisig voting on Optimism. We use best practices for handling assets internally – including voting power that has been delegated – and utilize a multisig on our delegate address. We are attempting to find a workaround, but ultimately, Snapshot needs to support voting from multisig addresses.

4 Likes

loved this, can i also for some extra information or you are planning to use this page only to broadcast your view on voting.

This is a great place to ask or discuss anything. DMs are also open to anyone who wants them, and we can be found on Discord under Getty or PaperImperium.

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Amazing work guys. I’ll take a note on your feedback regarding “funding explicitly used only for Optimism”, which is a completely valid concern and we will do our best not to use Optimisms’ funds to add value to other networks.
We would also love to have at least several million dollars in value locked haha, but, to be fair, we are pretty new and will work on new products to enable new behaviors in Optimisms’ users.
Thank you for taking the time to read our proposal!

1 Like

9 Polls Ending July 20

Proposal A: Superfluid
Summary: This proposal would disburse 150,000 OP to Superfluid, which provides tools to stream payments such as salaries. The funds would be used to incentivize some movement to Optimism as well as some grant funding around Superfluid on Optimism.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. The request is modest and Superfluid provides utility through a service. Given the size and nature of the request, this is easy to approve.

Proposal B: Kromatika
Summary: This proposal would disburse 300,000 OP to Kromatika, a DEX that provides the capability to place automated limit orders. The majority funds would be used for marketing, with a breakdown of categories provided in the proposal, with around 20% for user incentives, and 10% for an airdrop to past users.

Recommendation: Vote No. While it’s nice to see a DEX with more than vanilla utility, the heavy use of OP on influencers seems difficult to justify. It’s acceptable (and intended in many ways) for OP to be sold by grant recipients, but influencers’ impact is ephemeral and not a good use of Optimism funds.

Proposal C: Hundred Finance
Summary: This proposal would disburse 300,000 OP to Hundred Finance. The OP would be released over multiple tranches, each connected to a milestone of TVL.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. Given the modest size of the request, and the schedule linked to milestones, this seems reasonable. It would be best if Hundred Finance offered some novel utility that is lacking or scarce in the Optimism ecosystem, but bringing a Compound fork to Optimism is acceptable given the relatively small funding request.

Proposal D: Biconomy
Summary: This proposal would disburse 750,000 OP to Biconomy. 250,000 OP would be earmarked for liquidity mining, while 500,000 OP would be earmarked for migrating existing usage to Optimism.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. The request is fairly large, but a modest liquidity incentives program coupled with migration of existing usage seems accretive to the Optimism ecosystem.

Proposal E: Dope Wars
Summary: This proposal would disburse 1,000,000 OP to Dope Wars, a play-to-own metaverse project that is a Loot fork. 45% of the tokens would be sent to the Dope Wars treasury, with the remaining OP earmarked for various types of user incentives.

Recommendation: Vote No. It is inappropriate to request funds for general purposes. These grants are to increase utility and depth of the Optimism ecosystem, not to seed a treasury. We recommend the applicant reapply for a smaller amount, and without the treasury component.

Proposal F: Infinity Wallet
Summary: This proposal would disburse 500,000 OP to Infinity Wallet. Note that this proposal is substantively the same as one that just failed a vote in the previous cycle.

Recommendation: Vote No. This is basically the same proposal that failed last cycle. We don’t wish to encourage repeatedly pushing the same proposal each cycle until it passes. Until a cooldown period is required formally, we will simply vote against any proposal that was already defeated in the preceding cycle.

Proposal G: DexGuru
Summary: This proposal would disburse 300,000 OP to DexGuru, a data platform. 100% of the request is earmarked for grants around DexGuru’s ecosystem.

Recommendation: Vote No. There is not an obvious alignment between the suggested use of this grant and the Optimism ecosystem.

Proposal H: Overnight.fi
Summary: This proposal would disburse 250,000 OP to Overnight.fi. OP tokens would be used to incentivize LP pairs on Velodrome.

Recommendation: Vote No. This would not provide any unique utility to Optimism, and benefits accrue primarily to Overnight and Velodrom users. The applicant should consider a strategy to incentivize users to migrate to Optimism, or provide a novel service for the Optimism ecosystem.

Proposal I: Saddle Finance
Summary: This proposal would disburse 500,000 OP to Saddle Finance. Tokens are earmarked as liquidity incentives for various stablecoin and ETH pools.

Recommendation: Vote No. This grant would not fund any unique utility for users of Optimism, nor is it directed at migrating new users to Optimism.

NB: GFX continues to have difficulty voting on Snapshot. Finding an alternative platform for Optimism governance seems urgent.

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Thanks for your voting feedback on my proposal, Summa. It was succinct & clear.
It has been noted, and taken on board.

Kind regards,
Axel

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Good job ,thanks!!!

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Good, it’s clear! !!

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Hi @raho. You deleted your comment, but it’s a great question so we wanted to respond. You wrote:

"Hello, quick question for you all…

What is the point of being a delegate if you are not actually going to vote on any proposals? According to this delegate profile, you have voted for a total of 1/39 proposals so far, even while recommending several proposals as ‘Vote Yes.’"

Unfortunately, Snapshot did not support voting by Gnosis safes that originated on Ethereum. This was not known until after delegation took place, and extensive communication with Snapshot has still not yielded a resolution. Optimism governance has been informed for all voting cycles that several major delegates have been unable to vote due to the incompatibility with Snapshot. Note that it is not unusual for professional governance organizations to utilize Gnosis safes to safeguard delegated voting power.

However, a recent test through Boardroom.io’s user interface allowed GFX to vote on a proposal, which is the 1/39 you saw! We are hopeful this will allow voting going forward. Consider the lack of voting by GFX and other Gnosis safe delegates as evidence of centralization risk by relying upon a single voting interface.

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Thank you very much for clarifying this for the community! This makes more sense now, as I was looking through delegate voting history and was surprised to see some of the larger delegates inactive. After posting, I read your note at the bottom of a post stating it was a snapshot issue, which is why I deleted my question… Happy to hear the issue is recognized and there is a potential fix!

1 Like

9 Polls Ending August 3, 2022

Proposal A: Rocket Pool
Summary: This proposal would disburse 600,000 OP to Rocket Pool. 70% would be utilized for liquidity mining of rETH/wETH on Balancer/BeethovenX, and 30% would be utilized for liquidity mining of rETH/wETH on Velodrome.

Recommendation: Vote Abstain. While we are sensitive to the perception that Lido needs competition in the Ethereum staking market, it’s not clear that provisioning Rocket Pool with what amounts to a direct subsidy for their staked derivative would result in any meaningful market share. We also don’t feel Optimism should be in the business of choosing winners or losers, and would prefer to see some direct benefit to Optimism (however difficult to measure).

Proposal B: Boardroom
Summary: This proposal would disburse 100,000 OP to Boardroom. 80% would be utilized to reward OP holders that delegate or re-delegate for the first time through Boardroom, and 20% would be earmarked to subsidize staff that aggregate Optimism data onto Boardroom.

Recommandation: Vote Yes. GFX Labs provided the delegate “approval” to move this to a vote. Aside from the general quality-of-life improvements that Boardroom’s platform provides, utilizing their interface finally allowed the GFX Gnosis safe wallet to vote. This is after weeks of attempting to get Snapshot to fix the problem, and demonstrates that front-end competition is of clear benefit to the Optimism governance ecosystem.

Proposal C: dHedge
Summary: This proposal would disburse 500,000 OP over 6 months to dHedge. This would generally be directed towards staking.

Recommendation: Vote Abstain. This was not a proposal that we initially were excited about. Generally, directing OP to staking emissions for a protocol’s token is a nonstarter unless coupled with a clear justification. That being said, dHedge appears to provide a novel service to the Optimism economy, and we would like to support it. Unfortunately, subsidizing the liquidity of their DHT token doesn’t provide clear benefit to OP holders or Optimism generally. We strongly encourage the applicants to resubmit with a revised plan that more clearly provides benefit to OP holders, directly encourages migration to Optimism from other chains, provides a public good, or directly supports this new service. dHedge is in the business of provisioning a service otherwise unavailable on Optimism, but it’s just not clear how this grant is necessary for them to perform that service.

Proposal D: xToken Terminal and Gamma Strategies
Summary: This proposal would disburse 900,000 OP to xToken Terminal, Gamma Strategies, and Uniswap V3 Staker. Each platform would receive ⅓ of the allocation to provide liquidity incentives over 24 weeks to the wETH-OP 3 bps pool.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. More market making on the OP token is beneficial for the health of the Optimism ecosystem.

Proposal E: Byte Mason Product Suite
Summary: This proposal would disburse 490,000 to Byte Mason’s platforms. 95% would be earmarked for users, with 5% for OP educators.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. It’s not a small request, but it’s important to support protocols that utilize OP as collateral.

Proposal F: GARD
Summary: This proposal would distribute 1,000,000 OP to GARD Protocol. 10-20% would be earmarked for development and auditing expenses, 80-90% would be earmarked for buying back LP tokens.

Recommendation: Vote No. The request is quite large, and the use of the OP tokens doesn’t appear to provide any novel utility, services, or public good to the Optimism ecosystem. While a native decentralized stablecoin is nice, GARD’s existing deployment is not even on an EVM chain, so there’s not even an existing code base to rely upon any “lindy” for. Additionally, the intended use of the tokens doesn’t appear to provide much benefit to OP the token or Optimism the ecosystem. We recommend the applicants revisit this with a much smaller proposal and one that clearly benefits Optimism.

Proposal G: Beefy Finance
Summary: This proposal would distribute 650,000 OP to Beefy Finance. This is a revised version of an earlier proposal which failed. 35% would be used to incentivize BIFI-OP liquidity, 50% to incentivize farms of various Optimism protocols, and 15% for strategist developer/team incentives.

Recommendation: Vote No. As with our previous opposition, it’s unclear how this directly benefits Optimism as an ecosystem, while the subsidies clearly benefit Beefy. We appreciate the changes that were made (going to a BIFI-OP vs BIFI-ETH pool), but there should be some novel service or utility for the Optimism ecosystem, or else some sort of public good should be funded. Simple subsidies of yield farms are not enough.

Proposal H: BarnBridge
Summary: This proposal would disburse 600,000 OP to BarnBridge. These would be used for a variety of user incentives and to bribe BOND holders to migrate to Optimism.

Recommendation: Vote No. This simply seems like direct subsidization of BarnBridge’s business. That can be acceptable, but there needs to be a clear (and hopefully measurable) benefit to Optimism’s economy, governance, or user experience.

Proposal I: Qi DAO
Summary: This proposal would disburse 750,000 OP to Qi DAO. 20% would be reserved for bounties for building on Qi DAO on Optimism, 20% would be for borrowing incentives, and 60% to subsidize MAI liquidity on Optimism.

Recommendation: Vote No. As with other proposals, this looks like a direct subsidy to Qi DAO without a clear benefit to OP holders or the Optimism ecosystem. Optimism governance cannot be in a position to choose winners and losers in the Optimism economy, so applicants must bring some novel service that is not presently available on Optimism, have clear methods of attracting new users to Optimism (and track that metric), or have provided some form of public good where private compensation simply is difficult to extract.

Note To All Applicants & OP Holders:

Making proposals can be a time-intensive activity, and often frustrating if feedback is not made available prior to the submission deadline. We are sensitive to that, and have an open-door policy for those soliciting feedback. We cannot speak for other delegates, and you may get conflicting input from different delegates, but GFX prides itself on being accessible and transparent with communities where it holds delegations. Our inbox here on the forum is always open (or you can find PaperImperium on the Optimism Discord) if you wish to discuss anything related to Optimism governance.

1 Like

5 Polls Closing September 7

Tooling & Infrastructure Committee [Group A]
Summary: This proposal would establish an official committee of delegates to provide recommendations to OP voters and other delegates with regard to future grants/proposals related to tooling or infrastructure. The proposed committee members are: Kris Kaczor (L2BEAT), Joxes (DeFi LATAM), Lefteris Karapetsas, Lito Coen (Hop Protocol), Scott (Gitcoin).

Recommendation: Vote Yes. The proposed members are well known in this area, and many have a history of being active in crypto. We have full faith that this group will provide quality insights.

Disclosure: GFX Labs is a delegate at Hop Protocol, which several of the members are associated with in various roles.

DeFi Committee [Group A]
Summary: This proposal would establish an official committee of delegates to provide recommendations to OP voters and other delegates with regard to future grants/proposals related to decentralized finance. The proposed committee members are: Katie Garcia (UDHC), GFX Labs, Flipside Crypto, StableNode, Linda Xie (Scalar Capital).

Recommendation: Vote Yes. GFX Labs is one of the proposed members. We fully support this proposal, or would not have participated in bringing it forward.

DeFi Committee [Group B]
Summary: This proposal would establish an official committee of delegates to provide recommendations to OP voters and other delegates with regard to future grants/proposals related to decentralized finance. The proposed committee members are: Doug, Jack Anorak (Velodrome; Information Token), Solarcurve (Balancer), MasterMojo (Synthetix), Matt (Synthetix).

Recommendation: Abstain. GFX Labs is promoting a competing committee and will abstain from voting on alternative DeFi Committee proposals.

DeFi Committee [Group C]
Summary: This proposal would establish an official committee of delegates to provide recommendations to OP voters and other delegates with regard to future grants/proposals related to decentralized finance. The proposed committee members are: OPUser, Jokes (DeFi LATAM), MinimalGravitas, Dhannte (EthernautDAO), ScaleWeb3.

Recommendation: Abstain. GFX Labs is promoting a competing committee and will abstain from voting on alternative DeFi Committee proposals.

NFT & Gaming Committee [Group A]
Summary: This proposal would establish an official committee of delegates to provide recommendations to OP voters and other delegates with regard to future grants/proposals related to NFTs or gaming. The proposed committee members are: Jrocki (Web3 Experience Podcast), Butterbum, FractalVisions, Michael (The Blockchain Guy YouTube channel), OPUser.

Recommendation: Vote Abstain. Only FractalVisions (an NFT artist collective) has obvious expertise in this area based on the descriptions provided of committee members. We would prefer more information on why these members are able to provide other delegates with insight on NFT or gaming proposals. That said, no obvious red flags have presented themselves.

Note To All Applicants & OP Holders:

Making proposals can be a time-intensive activity, and often frustrating if feedback is not made available prior to the submission deadline. We are sensitive to that, and have an open-door policy for those soliciting feedback. We cannot speak for other delegates, and you may get conflicting input from different delegates, but GFX prides itself on being accessible and transparent with communities where it holds delegations. Our inbox here on the forum is always open (or you can find PaperImperium on the Optimism Discord) if you wish to discuss anything related to Optimism governance.

3 Likes

Kromatika
Summary: This proposal would disburse 300,000 OP to Kromatika. Kromatika is a swap aggregator that also has premium features (limit orders) that can be accessed by paying KROM tokens.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. The limit order feature (even if it is a paid, premium feature) is a utility that is novel to Optimism DEX trading. The distribution of the OP going to the KROM/OP liquidity pools does not provide clear value to the Optimism ecosystem. In balance, however, this proposal was a modest request and provides a novel service that is not widely available on Optimism.

This proposal was also well formatted and detailed. Optimism needs more well thought

Revert Finance
Summary: This proposal would disburse 240,000 OP to Revert Labs. Revert Finance provides various analytics tools for users of Uniswap V3 and V2. All OP would be used to reward Uniswap V3 users that utilize Revert Finance.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. The request size seems reasonable and Revert offers a clear service. The enhanced analytics toolkit adds to DEX usefulness on Optimism. Both Revert itself and its directed incentives should increase liquidity on Uniswap, and Revert Labs will exclude team wallets from profiting from the program.

Tarot - confirmed
Summary: This proposal would disburse 600,000 OP to Tarot. 540,000 OP would be earmarked for bribes to encourage TAROT liquidity on various protocols that allow bribery. 60,000 OP would be paired with TAROT to provide liquidity, and would revert to the core team at the end of 12 months.

Recommendation: Vote No. Providing liquidity to a protocol’s token and direct grants of OP to protocol teams are not within the scope of Optimism grants.

dHedge DAO
Summary: This proposal would disburse 350,000 OP to dHedge DAO, a decentralized asset management platform. 70% would be earmarked for poll incentives, with 30% earmarked for liquidity incentives on DHT-OP.

Recommendation: Vote No. We generally disapprove of requests that seek to incentivize the liquidity of the applicant’s governance token, which in this case is nearly one third of the request. That being said, the remainder of the request is modest in size (~240,000 OP over 6 months) and would be an appropriate request on its own, since dHedge appears to offer services not present or not widely available yet on Optimism.

Otterspace
Summary: This proposal would disburse 100,000 OP to Otterspace, which is a service to provide DAOs with non-transferrable NFTs to serve various purposes around permissioning and removing financialization from governance. 70% would be earmarked for user incentivization (estimated around $3 per user) and 30% earmarked for incentivizing partner adoption. The estimated program would run for 9-12 months.

Recommendation: Vote No. Typically, such long-term programs would be better broken into shorter pieces that could then be renewed. The request is small, however, and the service seems novel. This kind of experimentation and development is to be encouraged. That being said, the Tooling Committee’s in-depth review recommended a No vote, and we will defer to their expertise in this area.

Across Protocol
Summary: This proposal would disburse 750,000 OP to Risk Labs. 75% would be earmarked to subsidize bridging fees to Optimism on Across Protocol, with 25% earmarked for relayers on Optimism.

Recommendation: Vote No. This is in line with a similar grant to Hop Protocol. More bridging to Optimism, and with subsidized cost to move onto Optimism, is strictly better than fewer options. That being said, this is a large grant, and we would be more comfortable with payment being broken into multiple pieces, with a reporting requirement prior to receiving each tranche. This is a general view on large grants, and is not meant to single out Risk Labs/Across. With a smaller grant or an oversight/reporting component, we would be supportive of this proposal when resubmitted.

Disclosure: GFX Labs also serves as a delegate at Hop Protocol.

OptiChads
Summary: This proposal would disburse 50,000 to the OptiChads NFT project. All funds would be used for fitness-related quests run through a partner, Web3 Quest.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. The request size is small and attempts to bring a different demographic of user to Optimism that isn’t focused on DeFi. NFTs and art are typically not our area of expertise and would abstain, but the small size coupled with support by other delegates with more knowledge in the area moves us to vote yes.

Socket
Summary: This proposal would disburse 1,000,000 OP to Socket, a multichain bridge and DEX aggregator. 60% are earmarked to provide 90% cost refunds to users that bring assets to Optimism. 40% are earmarked for integration incentives and grants. The expected distribution is over 6 to 8 months.

Recommendation: Vote No. The proposal conceptually is appealing. Given the size of the grant, however, we would be more comfortable with the grant being broken into multiple payments rather than a lump sum, with reporting required prior to receipt of each subsequent fund disbursement. This is our view on any large grant, and is not meant to single out Socket in particular. With a smaller grant or an oversight/reporting component, we would be supportive of this proposal when resubmitted. This view is further reinforced by the Tooling Committee’s recommendation to vote against.

Interest Protocol: Development/Deployment to Optimism
Summary: This proposal would disburse 31,764 OP to Interest Protocol. 100% would be earmarked for cost sharing deployment, testing, and development costs of deploying an instance to Optimism. Interest Protocol notably allows governance tokens to retain voting rights when used as collateral.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. GFX Labs authored this proposal.

Disclosure: GFX Labs developed Interest Protocol and deployed it on Ethereum.

Bankless Academy
Summary: This proposal would disburse 33,000 OP to Bankless Academy, which provides free-to-use educational materials… These would be used to reward contributors.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. The request is small, and the potential impact could be quite high. We agree with the recommendation of the Tooling Committee that this is an appropriate request in size for a program that has high potential reach.

NB: GFX Labs had technical difficulty voting on several of these, and can present on-chain transactions if required.

5 Likes

14 Polls Closing October 20, 2022

Yearn
Summary: This proposal would disburse 1,000,000 OP to Yearn. The tokens would be earmarked to incentivize yVault users to migrate to Optimism, and distributed over 40 weeks.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. In line with our committee’s recommendation, we support subsidizing Yearn’s program to migrate users to Optimism. Yearn boasts an impressive TVL, which has proven to be stickier than many in DeFi. It will already support strategies for five different assets on Optimism immediately. We believe Yearn will be a valuable way to bring new market participants to Optimism that are otherwise still on mainnet.

Li.Fi.
Summary: This proposal would disburse 200,000 OP to Li.Fi, which provides infrastructure for developers to add cross-chain capabilities to their dApps.

Recommendation: Vote Abstain. GFX Labs is a major delegate on Hop Protocol, which represents a conflict of interest.

Safe
Summary: This proposal would disburse 500,000 OP to Safe, which develops increasingly granular controls and access for multi-sig contracts. 15% would go to users, 20% to SafeDAO as a retroactive reward, 20% to fund R&D, and the balance to various partnership programs.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. SafeDAO has been spun out by Gnosis, and Safe is a reputable product with an important role in the ecosystem. The grant request is large, and were this anything but an established product with a clear priority of developing a suite of solutions further, we would be unlikely to recommend an affirmative vote. In particular, a 20% retroactive reward to SafeDAO stretches what we would prefer to see, but are unwilling to let perfect be the enemy of good at the end of the day, and so recommend a vote in favor.

Karma (Discourse Plug In)
Summary: This proposal would disburse 15,000 OP to Karma to create a custom discourse forum plug-in that would display a custom badge for larger delegates and two forms for delegates to fill out that would be linked to their profile prominently.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. We agree with excerpts from the Tooling Committee recommendation that this a low-impact, low-cost request. The badge should probably not even be included as a deliverable, since it can be readily done by any administrator. The utility is in a user-friendly format to view recent votes with a link to stated reasoning. This is, however, likely to be of use only to regular forum users and limited in reach. The total request is small, and so we support it.

Karma (Delegate Dashboard)
Summary: This proposal would disburse 10,000 OP to Karma to create and maintain a dashboard to track Optimism delegate activity and metrics.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. Both delegates and their delegators have a high need for up-to-date, reliable information. Echoing the positive recommendation of the Tooling Committee, the ask is small and possible utility high.

Rainbow Wallet
Summary: This proposal would disburse 420,069 OP to Rainbow Wallet, a mobile wallet that integrates Ethereum, Polygon, and Optimism tokens, NFTs, and other functionalities. The entirety of that amount is earmarked to incentivize users to make swaps on or bridge to Optimism from within Rainbow Wallet.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. The Tooling Committee recommendation makes a compelling case that the applicant can be expected to provide substantial value to Optimism with its existing user base, planned functionality improvements such as integrated bridging, and being a mobile wallet that already prominently features Optimism.

Otterspace

Summary: This proposal would disburse 50,000 OP to Otterspace, which aims to provide easy infrastructure for DAOs that wish to utilize non-transferable NFTs.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. Following guidance from a previous draft of this proposal last cycle, the amount requested was reduced by half. The Tooling Committee recommends a positive vote for this proposal on the basis of reasonable ask and the possibility of this experimental utility being useful. We agree.

Dope Wars
Summary: This proposal would disburse 300,000 OP to Dope Wars, a play-to-own metaverse gaming platform that also utilizes NFTs.

Recommendation: Vote No. We agree with the assessment made by the NFT & Gaming Committee to recommend against voting for this proposal. The major guidance – which applies broadly to many grants in all areas – is that an iterative approach to funding with more payments at various milestones is better than an up front funding for new projects and initiatives.

Alchemix
Summary: This proposal would disburse 500,000 OP to Alchemix. These funds would be earmarked for 50% vault incentives and 50% Velodrome LP bribes over 1 year.

Recommendation: Vote No. Consistent with previous recommendations from GFX and DeFi Committee A, we do not generally support long-dated plans, as the market price of OP is volatile, making it difficult to forecast whether spending is actually in line with what is proposed and approved. Alchemix appears to have already incorporated this feedback into their forum proposal, and we look forward to seeing them resubmit in the next cycle.

Tarot
Summary: This proposal would disburse 540,000 OP to Tarot. This amount would be distributed over 24 weeks amongst a variety of incentives for liquidity provision for OP, ETH, and USDC pairs.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. Following our own committee recommendation, Tarot made substantial changes in line with guidance DeFi Committee A provided in the previous voting cycle. With these changes made, the size and scope of the proposal seems in-line with previous grants.

Sushi
Summary: This proposal would disburse 504,000 OP to Sushi. This would be used to incentivize OP-ETH, ETH-USDC, and ETH-USDT pools over 180 days.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. Following our own committee recommendation, Sushi also incorporated previous feedback from DeFi Committee A to reduce the time and scope of the proposal. With these changes made, the size and scope of the proposal seems in-line with previous grants.

Overnight.fi
Summary: This proposal would disburse 400,000 OP to Overnight.fi. 50% is earmarked for liquidity mining, 25% for “ETS” development, and 25% for “insurance” development.

Recommendation: Vote No. Following the recommendation of DeFi Committee C, a request of this size should come from a finished product, and not for funding development.

Overtime Markets
Summary: This proposal would disburse 300,000 OP to Overtime Markets, a sports betting AMM DEX. 70% is earmarked for general fee rebates, and 30% for targeted incentives for new integrations.

Recommendation: Vote No. Following the recommendation of DeFi Committee C, we agree that the structure of distribution needs closer attention to avoid capture by a few large users. Overtime is also affiliated with the Thales team, which already received 900,000 OP earlier this year. That does not disqualify this request, but does factor against it while there are other requests awaiting grants.

Abracadabra Money
Summary: This proposal would disburse 800,000 OP to Abracadabra. 100% would be earmarked for a liquidity mining program over 1 year. 20% are also stated they will be delegated to Abracadabra.

Recommendation: Vote No. As stated in the grant template guidelines, OP is expected not to be self delegated. We also do not generally support long-term plans, given the volatile price of OP. This is also a very large grant request given Abracadabra is not yet fully deployed to Optimism. Our views are consistent with the negative recommendation and guidance given by the DeFi Committee C.

NB: GFX Labs is experiencing technical difficulty voting. A recent update at either Snapshot or Boardroom appears to have disabled our technical workaround. Given the extended difficulties multiple large delegates have had with Snapshot voting on Optimism, alternatives should be considered.

1 Like

RE: Dope Wars
Ours is an iterative approach to funding as recommended by the committee, but 2 out of 5 of the committee members changed their mind after the week of feedback.
Also, we were responsible for some of the first NFTs on OP, so calling us a new project displays a lack of research. Recommend revisiting.

1 Like

18 Polls Closing November 9, 2022

Velodrome Finance
Summary: This proposal would disburse 4,000,000 OP to Velodrome. 37.5% would be earmarked as veVELO locking incentives, 37.5% for bribe matching, 25% for direct bribing of 8 pairs Velodrome considers strategically important for Optimism. All would be used over 6-8 months. OP would be delivered in two tranches.

Recommendation: Vote No. Velodrome has positioned itself as a large ecosystem actor on Optimism. That being said, Velodrome has already received a large grant from Optimism. The ask is also very large – eight times that of Curve’s current or Sushi’s approved request. Therefore we are not supportive of this proposal based on valuation and cost.

Mochi
Summary: This proposal would disburse 100,000 OP to Mochi, a staked-coordination protocol for DAO contributors. The OP would be earmarked to match a variety of Mochi token incentives for players and users.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. Following guidance from the Tooling Committee, we agree the request is reasonable in size, for a finished product, and includes measurable KPIs.

Ambire Wallet
Summary: This proposal would disburse 425,000 OP to Ambire Wallet, a smart contract wallet. 88% would be earmarked to incentivize users in various ways, and 12% for developers utilizing Ambire.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. While we are typically skeptical about funding for wallets, Ambire offers two novelties that potentially improve quality of life for users on Optimism: gas payment in stables, and onboarding with email. The request is a bit larger than we would prefer, but without opposition from the Tooling Committee on this topic, we do not see a compelling reason to oppose this request.

Agora
Summary: This proposal would disburse 50,000 OP to Agora, which aims to build a suite of delegation/voter capabilities such as partial delegation and time-bounded delegation.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. The request is small, and the metrics to track effectiveness and use are relatively straightforward. While the product is not yet finished, if it has even a 50% chance of delivering upon the stated capabilities, then this grant is worth making.

DeFi Llama
Summary: This proposal would disburse 300,000 OP to DeFi Llama as retroactive compensation for Llama Analytics and LlamaPay support of Optimism since July 2021 and April 2022, respectively.

Recommendation: Vote No. A recent presentation by the Optimism Foundation on the efficacy of grants made from the governance fund has suggested that retroactive awards brought little to no discernable return on investment. It is wonderful that Llama has provided useful products, but given the ultimately limited resources of the governance fund, we prefer to reserve OP to incentivize future or ongoing action.

Messari
Summary: This proposal would disburse 365,000 OP to Messari for provision of quarterly reports and various other reporting initiatives

Recommendation: Vote No. It’s not clear that Optimism needs some of the services offered in this bundle. In the event that Optimism governance does feel it needs these services, there should be a general Request For Proposals (RFP) so that competing offerings can be evaluated. DeFi Llama, for instance, has already offered to provide the same services plus additional dashboards for half of the original 420,000 OP request. That the original request appears to have been a meme number and has been reduced to 365,000 already suggests that competitive bids would result in the best deal for Optimism.

Tally Ho
Summary: This proposal would disburse 400,000 OP to Tally Ho, a wallet provider. The funds would be evenly divided between bridge incentives, intra-wallet swapping, integrations incentives, and growth/marketing.

Recommendation: Vote No. It’s not clear that Tally Ho provides anything not already available to Optimism users or its ecosystem. Governance funding should be used to grow or otherwise improve the Optimism ecosystem, rather than subsidize competing wallets. We encourage Tally Ho to revise this proposal to highlight what makes it different from existing wallets and/or how it would utilize funds in a way that is not already being done by other wallets.

EthernautDAO
Summary: This proposal would disburse 120,000 OP to EthernautDAO, which seeks to provide resources to Web2 developers entering the Web3 space. The funds would be used to incentivize mentors.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. Clearer milestones and deliverables would be helpful, but the request is low, and this is a public good that does not charge users to learn through the program. This is consistent with the recommendation made by the Tooling Committee.

Socket
Summary: This proposal would disburse 500,000 OP to Socket, a cross-chain bridge and DEX aggregator/asset transfer protocol.

Recommendation: Vote Abstain. GFX Labs is a major delegate on Hop Protocol, which is a potential competitor and conflict of interest in evaluating this grant request.

Overnight
Summary: This proposal would disburse 400,000 OP to Overnight.fi. Funds would be earmarked for liquidity mining and ETS incentives on Velodrome

Recommendation: Vote Abstain. GFX Labs developed and is involved with Interest Protocol. Interest Protocol’s USDi is a competing yield-bearing stablecoin, and presents a conflict of interest in evaluating this grant request.

PoolTogether
Summary: This proposal would disburse 550,000 OP to PoolTogether. 70% would be for depositors, 20% for those building new UIs, and 10% for integrations partners.

Recommendation: Vote No. PoolTogether already received a 450,000 OP grant from the Optimism Foundation. While the subsidy appears to be successful, projects should not expect continued and/or expanded subsidies. This stance disagrees with the recommendation made by DeFi Committee C.

Curve
Summary: This proposal would disburse 504,828 OP to Curve. The entirety would be directed as incentives to veCRV voters over 12 weeks.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. We agree with the recommendation of DeFi Committee C. Curve as a protocol has a history of execution and utility. This amount is also comparable to that approved for Sushiswap in the previous voting cycle.

InsureDAO
Summary: This proposal would disburse 100,000 OP to InsureDAO, a decentralized insurance protocol. 65% would be used to subsidize underwriters, 20% would provide partial subsidies on user premiums, 10% for integration partner support, and 5% directed at the INSURE-WETH Velodrome pool.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. The request is modest, with measurable underwriting and policy sale metrics for KPIs. We agree with the recommendation of DeFi Committee C to support this grant request, which is clear and reasonable in scope.

Angle
Summary: This proposal would disburse 250,000 OP to Angle Protocol, which would distribute the entirety as liquidity incentives over 6 months for three pools – directly for a Uniswap pool and indirectly through bribing on Velodrome for two other pools.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. Consistent with DeFi Committee C’s recommendation, we support this grant. It is reasonable in size and scope, and Angle provides the only decentralized Euro-denominated stablecoin on Optimism, which adds a utility to the overall ecosystem.

Homora
Summary: This proposal would disburse 684,000 OP to Alpha Venture DAO, the developer of Homora. 56% would be earmarked for liquidity incentives, and 44% for builder grants. Homora is a leveraged yield farming protocol.

Recommendation: Vote No. We’re not enthusiastic about the relatively large request to subsidize a leverage yield farming protocol, and find ourselves disagreeing with DeFi Committee C’s recommendation. We would prefer to see stronger co-incentives and a more clear use case that this is not simply a subsidy to users who are already yield farming (and likely getting subsidies through that activity already). If the organic yields and likely subsidies on the underlying protocols are not enough to attract users, then a temporary subsidy for another layer in the stack does not logically suggest that it will attract users to Optimism.

Symphony Finance
Summary: This proposal would disburse 250,000 OP to Symphony Finance, which aggregates DEXs + aggregators while assets being traded earn yield on other protocols in the meantime. 35% would be for retroactive airdropping to limit order users, 20% for gas refunds, 15% for marketing and content grants, 30% for development/maintenance. The intended timeline for use is 3-6 months.

Recommendation: Vote No. We recommend revising this proposal to reduce the ask by 35% to remove the retroactive airdrop. In a recent presentation by Optimism Foundation staff on the efficacy of previous grants, retroactive benefits were highlighted as the lowest return on investment. There should also be clarification on whether the 30% for development would be able to avoid violating the no sale rule. See our general position as laid out by the committee in the Arrakis recommendation on this issue.

Arrakis Finance
Summary: This proposal would disburse 500,000 OP to Arrakis Finance. 100% will be earmarked for liquidity incentivization, over 3-6 months, for assets that do not currently have Uni V3 pools. This is envisioned to be primarily protocol-owned liquidity at first, and Arrakis will require their partners to stake or delegate 50% of OP delivered.

Recommendation: Vote No. The ask is fairly high for a protocol that’s not demonstrated product-market fit outside of use in Maker, which is not yet present on Optimism. This proposal also violates the no sale rule for OP. GFX does not agree with this rule, but agrees with the overall committee that we should be consistent in its application.

Alchemix
Summary: This proposal would disburse 250,000 OP to Alchemix. 50% would be earmarked to subsidize alUSD and alETH users, 50% earmarked for bribes on Velodrome. Both portions would be used over 6 months.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. Alchemix incorporated changes requested by the committee in the previous cycle, which mainly consisted of a more limited timeline and request.

NB: GFX Labs is again experiencing technical difficulty voting. A recent update at either Snapshot or Boardroom appears to have disabled our technical workaround. Given the extended difficulties multiple large delegates have had with Snapshot voting on Optimism for months on end, alternatives should be considered. @ben-chain et al, please let us know what we can do to speed a transition to an alternative service or assist in building a voting portal.

2 Likes

That the original request appears to have been a meme number

While I get how you came to this conclusion (especially in this industry) we broke down the exact costs that we’ve standardized across our offering to get to $280k with a 5% premium we charge when accepting tokens getting us to $294k. Convert that to OP at the time of posting ($0.70 on Oct 21) and it comes out to… 420k OP

We revised it as the OP price began climbing rapidly not because it was an arbitrary price we chose for lolz but to reflect the real cost of these services

2 Likes

Thank you for the additional color. It’s helpful.

1 Like