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.