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.