GFX Labs - Delegate Communication Thread

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.

4 Likes

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

3 Polls Ending December 21, 2022

Protocol Delegation Program
Summary: This proposal would allocate 5,000,000 OP held by the Governance Fund to be delegated to 23 protocols. Of those, 8 would be selected by self-nomination and then a vote, and 15 would be selected by the largest drivers of gas usage. Modifiers would be applied to those protocols that are native to Optimism or which already participate in governance. Some conditions and exclusions apply, which can be found on the original proposal.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. No funds transfer, only voting weight. This also provides a voice in governance for stakeholders other than token holders. Presumably protocols operating on Optimism will have some level of vested interest in Optimism succeeding. This experiment is worth trying, though we would request that evaluations of both voter participation and voter behavior be made available at the close of each season.

Grants Council
Summary: This proposal would create a Grants Council, comprised of 9 individuals. The lead for this council would be appointed by Optimism Foundation, and the other 8 elected by Token House. The Grants Council would have full control over the governance fund grant process, removing all other delegates from voting on governance fund grants.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. This was a difficult decision to make. On the one hand, Optimism’s grants process to date has been just short of an abject failure, subject to self-dealing, corruption, inefficiency, low-integrity voting infrastructure, and constantly shifting rules for applicants. The current process is ill-defined, procedurally unstable, and those tasked with overseeing it woefully undercompensated, leading to a lack of time, expertise, and attention to detail. Paid committees with no formal power beyond a recommendation began to address this, but it’s unclear at this point whether that would have been a long term solution.

On the other, this council represents the latest in a trend of walking back decentralization within Optimism governance. It’s possible that those who sit on this council are exposed to increased legal liability, and certainly reputational risk. It’s also unclear if this council will be run behind closed doors, and how they are to be overseen by Token House. It looks like fertile ground for corruption, backroom dealings, and centralized control by a few over millions of dollars’ worth of funding.

When weighed against each other, however, it seems clear that when faced with a problem that exists and a problem that might exist in the future, then it is better to address the problem that is right in front of us. Right now, that problem is the wastefulness and inefficiency of the current grants process. The proposal for a council does not strike us as adhering to best practices – grants have been given out for hundreds of years, but little effort has been made to do anything beyond reinventing the wheel within Optimism’s governance – but it seems difficult for it to result in worse outcomes than the recent past. With that in mind, we begrudgingly vote yes to this proposal.

Badgeholder Nomination Voting
Summary: Delegates are asked to vote for nominees they support to hold a retroPGF2 badge. For a full list of nominees, please refer to the Snapshot vote.

Recommendation: Vote Katie Garcie, Linda Xie, Bobbay (Stablenode), Fig (Flipside Crypto), Juanbug (Penn Blockchain), Jack Anorak, Millie (Synthetix), Mastermojo (Synthetix), Minimal Gravitas, Lefteris. All of these delegates have been exemplars of involvement and taking the Optimism delegate role seriously. We often have differing views from some of them, but they would all represent Token House well for the retroactive public goods funding committee.

NB: GFX Labs is again experiencing technical difficulty voting through Snapshot. Tagging @lavande for visibility in the event our vote would decide an outcome. Thank you in advance.

1 Like

3 Polls Ending January 18, 2023

Protocol Delegation Elections
Summary: This poll asks which protocols should be granted a delegation of OP by the OP Foundation for ~6 months.

2Pi Network
Atlantis World
ParaSwap
Revert
QiDao Protocol
KyberSwap
Thales
BeethovenX & Balancer
Connext
Polynomial Protocol
Kwenta
Lyra
ENS
dHEDGE
Code4rena
Agora
Premia
LI .FI

NB: Voters may select up to 8 choices.

Recommendation: Vote ENS, Code4rena. Both of these protocols can governance view topics through an infrastructure lens, which is often overshadowed by DeFi or NFT or even gaming priorities. Of the remaining options, there are many quality choices, but we don’t feel we have enough experience with their governance/ownership to know how engaged, informed, and valuable each would be to Optimism’s Token House.

Grants Council Elections - Growth Experiments
Summary: This poll asks which entities/individuals should be granted a seat on the Growth Experiments Subcommittee of the Grants Council.

GFX Labs
Bobbay (Stablenode)
Joxes (DeFi LATAM)
Matt (Synthetix Ambassadors)
HC_NATO
Michael Vander Meiden
MoneyManDoug/Sugma.eth
Fig (Flipside Crypto)
Solarcurve
Katie Garcia

NB: Voters may select up to 5 choices.

Recommendation: Vote GFX Labs, Bobbay (Stablenode), Fig (Flipside Crypto), Katie Garcia, Matt (Synthetix Ambassadors). These individuals and organizations have all demonstrated deep commitment to improving the Optimism ecosystem. All have served on previous versions of committees, provided actionable feedback to the OP team, and have articulated clear visions for where each sees Optimism and Token House going.

Grants Council Elections - Builders
Summary: This poll asks which entities/individuals should be granted a seat on the Builders Subcommittee of the Grants Council.

Dhannte
Juanbug (Penn Blockchain)
Jack Anorak
Krzysztof Urbański (L2BEAT)
OPUser

NB: Voters may select up to 3 choices.

Recommendation: Vote Krzystof Urbanski (L2BEAT), Jack Anorak, and Juanbug (Penn Blockchain). All three have demonstrated a deep commitment to improving the Optimism ecosystem, as well as technical understanding of how it operates.

CC: @lavande. We’re about to give it the good old college try to vote through Snapshot, but here is our official position.

2 Likes

2 Polls Ending April 6, 2023

Upgrade Proposal: Bedrock
Summary: This proposal seeks authorization to implement the Bedrock upgrade to the Optimism protocol. For a complete overview, please see the proposal post on the forum. More in-depth details, including audits, can be found here.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. This proposal is long awaited, and brings significant upgrades to Optimism, which should lower the barrier for more protocols to deploy to Optimism.

Delegate Suspension: Fractal Visions
Summary: This proposal seeks to suspend delegate Fractal Visions from Optimism’s official forum and Discord for a period of 3 months for the infraction of intentional doxxing.

Recommendation: Vote Abstain. The Delegate Code of Conduct is explicit that intentional doxxing, as appears to have occurred here, is classified as a “severe” offense. The OP team states they have been provided with 6 files that verify doxxing occurred in a public setting, and Fractal Visions has not denied that they doxxed, except to the extent they only collected already public information, including a photo.

Without evidence to evaluate (given the nature of the accusation), it is impossible to verify whether and to what extent the doxxed handle was already associated with a specific person, including the supposed photo. While it seems very probable that there was harassment of the reporter by the accused, which carries a similar penalty as intentional doxxing, that is not the grounds on which this vote is being argued. In absence of any evidence beyond the word of an unknown reporter and the forum replies of the accused, we do not feel it is appropriate to vote for or against suspension.

1 Like

5 Polls Closing May 10, 2023

Protocol Delegation Renewal
Summary: This poll seeks to renew the OP Foundation program of delegating voting power to the most gas-intensive protocols on Optimism.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. While most protocols appear to have made little use of their delegated OP, several have in fact engaged with Optimism governance more. The nature of DAOs, as GFX is acutely aware, often requires some ramp-up time for contributors to become organized enough to contribute. The majority of the protocols delegated to are to varying degrees decentralized, so it may be that we see increased engagement from delegated protocols in the coming Season. Finally, the cost of failure in this program is simply that OP is not used to vote, and the alternative to this program is Foundation OP sitting idle and not voting. The costs, therefore, are minimal, and there’s little reason not to continue this experiment.

Intent #1 Budget Proposal
Summary: This poll seeks to affirm governance support for Intent 1: Progress Towards Technical Decentralization and a 1,000,000 OP budget for grants related to it.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. This is intended to fund technical contributions to making Optimism more diversified with regard to clients, bridges, provers, and other technical aspects. GFX strongly supports including governance in this Intent, and hopes to see grant requests related to advancing decentralization technically at the governance level as well as other technical attributes.

Intent #2 Council Budget Proposal
Summary: This proposal seeks to renew the Grants Council. It largely expands on the previous Season’s budget and scope, with some additional operational costs that are required for ongoing work.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. The Grants Council in Season 3 was a demonstrative improvement over previous seasons of grants work at Optimism. Reviewers generally had to provide constructive feedback to improve weak proposals, and applicants were generally given advice on how to improve their proposals if they did not meet requirements. This created a more positive environment and lowered the chances of fraud, waste, and abuse that were issues in some of the earlier grants evaluations prior to the council.

NB: GFX Labs was on the Grants Council in Season 3 and anticipates running for a seat on the Grants Council in Season 4.

Intent #3 Budget Proposal
Summary: This poll seeks to affirm governance support for Intent 3: Spread Awareness of the Optimistic Vision and a 1,000,000 OP budget for grants related to it.

Recommendation: Vote Abstain. Generally, we are not in favor of virtue signaling, raising awareness without follow-on action, or other “feel-good” social goals that fall outside the core purpose of a DAO – creating an scaling a Layer 2, in the case of Optimism. We also disagree that builders and users will choose Optimism over competitors due to being aware of the Optimistic Vision. Layer 2s are open frontier, and attract users based on utility and builders based on a combination of utility and monetary incentives. That being said, our skepticism is not strong enough to oppose something that is likely to be popular with voters and is limited in size. For reference, the Optimistic Vision can be found here.

Intent #4 Budget Proposal
Summary: This poll seeks to affirm governance support for Intent 4: Governance Accessibility and a 3,000,000 OP budget for grants related to it.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. While the budget is larger than perhaps necessary, this Intent is focused on lowering governance friction in order to make it more understandable, scalable, and accessible by everyday OP holders. Most governances become opaque and bureaucratic over time, with rigid processes that are inaccessible to the casual tokenholder. An illustrative example is how complex the process to propose at MakerDAO is, which we tweeted about with a primer for those interested. As Optimism governance becomes more complex and continues to evolve, it’s of paramount importance that small and casual tokenholders are not forced onto the sidelines by high-friction knowledge and procedural requirements. Optimism is blessed with thousands of voting/delegating tokenholders today, which is in stark contrast to most other protocols. Maintaining this level of participation, transparency, and diversity of stakeholders is absolutely critical. We look forward to seeing initiatives proposed under Intent 4.

4 Polls Ending May 28, 2023

Inflation Adjustment Proposal
Summary: This proposal seeks to alter the annual inflation of OP token supply from 2% to 0%.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. As the proposal author points out, circulating supply is expected to rise dramatically for the next few years. Unlocking minted supply will dwarf inflation, and there is no clear justification to maintain the 2% inflation target.

Treasury Appropriation (Year 2 Budget Approval)
Summary: This proposal seeks to distribute a budget to the Optimism Foundation of 1 OP for the upcoming fiscal year.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. The requested budget is only 1 OP because the Foundation has failed to utilize the overwhelming majority (~94%) of its initial budget. While we would prefer to see the Foundation successfully utilizing its original budget, given that is not the case, a token budget of only 1 OP is appropriate.

Council Reviewer Elections: Builders
Summary: This poll asks OP holders and delegates to choose up to three candidates for the Builders Subcommittee on the Grants Council. Choices are:

Jack Anorak
Gonna.eth
Oxytocin
Krzysztof Urbanski

Recommendation: Vote Jack Anorak, Gonna.eth, and Krzystof Urbanski. These three delegates served on the Builders Subcommittee the previous season and did a good job. While we suspect Oxytocin would do a fine job based on their past involvement in Optimism governance, we don’t feel the Grants Council should lose momentum.

Council Reviewer Elections: Growth
Summary: This poll asks OP holders and delegates to choose up to five candidates for the Growth Subcommittee on the Grants Council. Choices are:

GFX Labs
Sugma.eth
StableLab
Matt L
Michael Vander Meidan
Katie Garcia
DAOstewards

Recommendation: Vote GFX Labs, Sugma.eth, Matt L, Katie Garcie, Michael Vander Meidan. These five delegates (including ourselves) served on the Growth Subcommittee the previous season. While we suspect StableLab and DAOstewards would do a fine job based on their past involvement in Optimism governance, we don’t feel the Grants Council should lose momentum.

1 Like

3 Polls Closing July 13, 2023

Intent #1 (1m OP)
Summary: Voters are asked which of the following projects should receive a portion of a 1,000,000 OP budget to support Intent #1 (Progress Towards Technical Decentralization).

Eligible requests are:

1A Superchain Governance Deep Dive (20,000 OP)
1B Fully Decentralized & Independent Oracle Infrastructures (150,000 OP)
1C TechNerd Program (21,000 OP)
1D Extend L1 Block Contract To Store Historical Blockhas Data (10,000 OP)
1E Futureproofing UI/UX of OP Nodes (50,000 OP)
1F Spearbit/Immunefit Bug Bounty Program (100,000 OP)

NB: This vote utilizes approval voting. Approval of 51% must be achieved and then funding will be done in order of most votes should there be more approved than budgeted.

Recommendation: Vote 1A, 1C, 1E, 1F.

1A: Tally is a well-known governance infrastructure provider, and while we typically do not support “research” initiatives, the request is relatively low and with a vendor with a proven track record. Presumably the output of this research will result in a technical application that will follow on with its own grant request at a later date, which mitigates the danger that research is conducted but only collects dust on the shelf after the fact.

1C: This is a small training program for developers, run by OP Labs. It includes funding for some of the equipment costs to run a node. Excess funds will be returned. This is reasonable, but it’s not entirely clear why this isn’t being funded directly by Labs.

1E: Dappnode makes a strong case for funding improvements for OP nodes in pursuit of making it easier to host them and in anticipation of modular or specialized nodes.

1F: This provides matching funds (in the form of OP) for approved protocols’ bug bounty programs hosted on Immunefi. Our main concern is that at the beginning, only Velodrome is covered, and would especially like to see these matching funds available to most protocols on Optimism - especially smaller ones where funding is tighter. That said, perfect should not be the enemy of good, and Velodrome is probably systemically important to Optimism, so including them is not a blocker.

Intent #3 (1m OP)
Summary: Voters are asked which of the following projects should receive a portion of a 1,000,000 OP budget to support Intent #3 (Spreading Awareness of the Optimistic Vision)

Eligible requests are:

3A: Fueling RetroPGF Growth through Education, Collaboration, and Active Marketing - 130k OP
3B: Velodrome: Spread Awareness Through Direct Outreach and Onboarding - 100k OP
3C: BanklessDAO’s Global Campaign to spread the Optimistic vision - 70,395 OP
3D: Create and Maintain the ‘Optimism Vision Reservoir’ - 4k OP
3E: Optimistic Womxn Shinning in Blockchain - 15,761 OP
3F: Let’s take the Optimistic Vision to LATAM with Espacio Cripto - 45,600 OP
3G: Spread Optimistic values across Latam with Solow - 15,720 OP
3H: Develop the most relevant and aligned audiovisual content for the Optimism Collective - 55k OP
3I: ‘Thank Optimism - powered by ThriveCoin’ - 150k OP
3J: Web3xplorer - A curated web platform to discover useful web3 apps, resources and tools - 18k OP
Proposal 3K: Rumbo Optimista - Hacia Ethereum Mexico The Event || Optimistic Road in the way to Ethereum México The Event - 5,800 OP

NB: This vote utilizes approval voting. Approval of 51% must be achieved and then funding will be done in order of most votes should there be more approved than budgeted.

Recommendation: Vote 3D, 3G, 3I

3D: This small request is to begin creating an archive of Optimistic resources in a single place, rather than scattered around. Given the small size and the clear need for this, the request should be approved.

3G: Similar to 3F, but with less narrow geographic targeting, slightly different content plan, and a smaller budget. We don’t see the need to fund two different cohorts of Spanish-language content, and this proposal was the most competitive in request while offering a clear amount of content being promised.

3I: This proposal is to use the Thrive platform to incentivize and host creation of content about past grants and retro PGF funding. The ask is a bit high, and so this falls into the “high risk, high reward” bucket of consideration. The Alliance members assembled are top notch, however, so if the milestones are not met we are confident it will be because the concept doesn’t work, and not because of execution risk. As such, we will only support renewing or extending this mission grant in the future if the initial milestones are met.

Intent #4 (3m OP)
Summary: Voters are asked which of the following projects should receive a portion of a 3,000,000 OP budget to support Intent #4 (Governance Accessibility)

Eligible requests are:

Proposal 4A: Multi-lingual Lesson on Optimism Governance, by Bankless Academy - 34k OP
Proposal 4B: The RetroPGF Podcast - 8k OP
Proposal 4C: Delegate Corner Podcast - 10k OP
Proposal 4D: REGEN Score - Attestations for the Citizen’s House - 95k OP
Proposal 4E: Improving Governance Accessibility through Praise and Contribution Based Attestations - 112k OP
Proposal 4F: Pairwise: Tinder UX For Web3 Community Signaling - 95k OP
Proposal 4G: Economic Co-design of Gas Fees for the OP Stack - 125k OP
Proposal 4H: DAOStar: Governance standards for the Optimism ecosystem - 67,500 OP
Proposal 4I: Velodrome: Fostering Inclusive Governance through Leading Optimism Builders and Long-term Users - 1M OP
Proposal 4J: Enable aOP as A Votable Token in Optimism’s Governance - 0 OP
Proposal 4K: OP Governance Analytics Dashboard - 24,500 OP
Proposal 4L: OPdelegate.com - 85k OP
Proposal 4M: NumbaNERD Program - 75k OP
Proposal 4N: Facilitate and empower community members to actively engage in governance through an educational course - 30k OP

NB: This vote utilizes approval voting. Approval of 51% must be achieved and then funding will be done in order of most votes should there be more approved than budgeted.

Recommendation: Vote 4B, 4K, 4M

4B: The request is small, the deliverables of 1 podcast per week is clear. The applicant already hosts community calls and the retroactive PGF program could use more publicity, especially at this price.

4K: This is a relatively small request, and would provide a source of governance analytics and delegate metrics other than Dune and the basic metrics available on the vote.optimism.io front end.

4M: This request comes from OP Labs contributors to establish a bounty board for governance metrics. The initial allocation is small and the overhead low.

1 Poll Closing August 17, 2023

Intent 2 Budget Proposal 2
Summary: This proposal seeks to repurpose unspent OP for Intents 1, 3, and 4. The OP would be added to funding authorized for the Grants Council under Intent 2.

Recomendation: Vote Abstain. Because GFX holds a seat on the Grants Council, we have abstained from this vote due to the conflict of interest.

7 Polls Closing October 25, 2023

Anticapture Commission
Summary: This proposal would establish an Anticapture Commission, charged with alerting Citizen’s House when imbalances of power between various stakeholders arises (e.g. different OP chains, delegates, tokenholders, individuals, or governance bodies).

Recommendation: Vote No. The Anticapture Commission proposal does not include a well-defined scope, or any guidance (or supplementary document promising guidance) as to what constitutes concerns… over significant imbalances of power. The danger with this type of commission is one of two outcomes: 1) The commission does very little of value, but takes up time and resources, 2) The commission is overzealous in an attempt to justify its own existence.

All of this assumes that it is even desirable for specific stakeholders’ or classes of stakeholders’ interests to be deprioritized. Traditionally, tokenholders’ interests are supposed to be paramount within a DAO. Optimism expands on this with its bicameral structure, but it’s not been discussed whether any other organ of governance – including Citizens’ House – is appropriately considered a stakeholder in its own right, or a servant of collective tokenholder interests.

We would contend that – absent any approved resolution to the contrary – all of governance, from Grants Council to Token House to Citizens’ House to any prospective Anticapture Commission, serve at the behest of, and for the benefit of, tokenholders. To the extent that imbalances of power are not desired, it is between tokenholders themselves.

GFX Labs does not at this time support an Anticapture Commission as outlined in this proposal, on grounds that the scope is not defined and we may conceptually disagree with the purpose of the commission as written.

Code of Conduct Violation: Carlos Mengar
Summary: This proposal seeks to suspend delegate Carlos Mengar from Optimism’s official forum and Discord for a period of 3 months for the infraction of intentional doxxing.

Recommendation: Vote Abstain. Consistent with our previous votes, we abstain in the absence of reviewable evidence. Due to the nature of the accusation (doxxing), we have very little public evidence to review.

Code of Conduct Council: Budget
Summary: This proposal creates a 18,000 OP budget to fund a 5-member (plus lead) council to process Code of Conduct violations. This process is currently performed by the Foundation. Included in this proposal is power for the council to perform enforcement actions optimistically; 12% of token voting power can object to force a Token House vote to stay any enforcement action.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. There have now been two Code of Conduct violation votes before Token House. On both, GFX Labs chose to abstain because details needed to make an informed decision could not be made public. Establishing a body whose responsibility it is to evaluate allegations and censure offenders removes wider governance from weighing in on alleged violations without proper review process that is fair to both parties.

Security Council: Vote #1
Summary: This proposal would authorize the creation of a Security Council. The council would control a multisig which itself would join the Optimism Foundation on a 2/2 multisig that controls protocol upgrades for all Superchain participants. The stated intention is for the Foundation to eventually be removed and the Security Council itself have these powers.

NB: 76% approval is required for this proposal to pass.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. GFX Labs firmly believes that protocol upgrades and other governance powers need to ultimately be vested in the OP token, rather than multisigs. We recognize, however, that this represents an interactive improvement, and are willing to support for the time being.

Grants Council Operating Budget
Summary: This proposal provides a 440,000 OP operating budget for the Grants Council (if approved) for Season 5.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. This funds a renewal and expansion of the Grants Council, which has seen increasing interest and workload each season. GFX Labs has announced that it is seeking re-election to its seat on the council.

Developer Advisory Board Budget
Summary: This proposal provides a 70,000 OP budget for a Developer Advisory Board. This is a body with advisory powers only, and is intended to make recommendations to the Grants Council and governance on technical aspects of grant requests.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. This is a small expense, and worth a trial period.

Ratify Developer Advisory Board Members
Summary: This proposal ratifies this slate of initial Developer Advisory Board members.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. We’re not familiar with all of these members, but those we are familiar with have technical backgrounds and/or are strongly aligned with important stakeholders.

3 Likes

7 Polls Closing November 15, 2023

Code of Conduct Council: Member Nominations
Summary: This poll asks OP holders who should be elected to the newly approved Code of Conduct Council.

Juankbell
Teresacd
Oxytocin
Axel_T
Gene
Juanbug_PGov
Bubli.eth
Ayohtunde

NB: Voters may select up to 8 options for 5 seats.

Recommendations: Vote Juanbug_PGov, Oxytocin, Axel_T, Bubli.eth. Other candidates may also be high quality, but these four stood out to us. Juanbug is a well-known governance contributor across many large protocols, and they typically do good work and exercise good judgment. Oxytocin, likewise, has been a longtime participant at Optimism, and is also vocal and visible at other DAOs. Axel appears to be an accountant, which is a skill set sorely needed in DeFi, so securing a relationship with them is worth the gamble on an otherwise unknown person. Bubli’s work at Index Coop caught our attention.

Ratification of Law of Chains
Summary: This poll asks OP holders to ratify the Law of Chains documents. Most notably, this allows governance to whitelist new sequencers.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. This is an important step to decentralize Optimism further.

Season 5 Intents Budget
Summary: This poll asks OP holders to approve 9,000,000 OP for use across four Intents for Season 5. Unused budget will be returned at the end of the season. The breakdown of the budget is as follows:

Intent #1: Progress Towards Technical Decentralization:1,330,000 OP
Intent #2: Grow the Superchain: 4,000,000 OP
Intent #3: Improve the Consumer Experience: 1,330,000 OP
Intent #4: Improve Governance Accessibility : 1,330,000 OP
1,000,000 reserved for general allocation

Recommendation: Vote Yes. This grants budget gives the Grants Council flexibility and funding to provide grants in these areas.

Grants Council Reviewer Elections: Builders

Summary: This poll asks OP holders who should be elected to the newly expanded (to five seats) Builders Subcommittee

Jack Anorak
Gonna.eth
Mastermojo
Ethernaut
Hyprdev
Kaereste
0xMilton
Joxes
DanSingjoy
Encrypted_soul

NB: Voters may select up to 10 options for 5 seats.

Recommendation: Vote Jack Anorak, Gonna.eth, Mastermojo, Kaereste, Joxes, Ethernaut. Jack Anorak, Gonna.eth, and Kaereste are seeking re-election. We have worked closely with them from the Experiments Subcommittee side of the council and support their re-election. Mastermojo is affiliated with Synthetix, and we are positively disposed towards their participation at other protocols. Joxes is part of SEED Latam, which is a relatively new governance-focused organization. Their participation on other protocols, such as MakerDAO and Arbitrum, has shown itself to be thoughtful and useful. The Ethernaut was the technical lead at Synthetix for several years, and is well suited to evaluating builder proposals. On supporting the three sitting members seeking re-election: This will be the last season that the Grants Council Lead will be able to continue due to term limits, so ensuring there are a number of veteran members available to provide competitive options for next Season is an important consideration.

Chain Delegation Program
Summary: This poll asks OP holders approve the Chain Delegation Program for Season 5. This would authorize up to 10,000,000 OP to be delegated across up to 10 OP chains.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. While this represents an increase from 5,000,000 OP available for chain delegation last season, this is an important time to convince new L2s to join the Superchain. Also, it is only fair that chains which are remitting a portion of sequencer revenues back to OP Governance are allowed to have a voice in that governance.

Grants Council Reviewer Elections: Growth Experiments
Summary: This poll asks OP holders who should be elected to the Growth Experiments Subcommittee

Michael Vander Meiden
Nanobro
Katie Garcia
MoneyManDoug
GFX
Matt L
Brichis
Subli_Defi
Derbygold.eth
Fujiar
Divergent

NB: Voters may select up to 11 options for 5 seats. GFX Labs is also required to vote for at least as many options as open seats to be eligible to vote for ourselves.

Recommendation: Vote GFX, Michael Vander Meiden, Katie Garcia, MoneyManDoug, Matt L. The Grants Council has made significant progress over the past two seasons, and we recommend returning all of the sitting members. Notably, this will be the last season that the Grants Council Lead will be able to continue due to term limits, so ensuring there are a number of veteran members available to provide competitive options for next Season is an important consideration.

Grants Council Reviewer Elections: Milestones and Metrics
Summary: This poll asks OP holders who should be elected to the newly formed Milestones and Metrics Subcommittee

Ocandocrypto
Mmurthy
Feiwian
Juanbug_PGov
Srijith
Raho
LauNaMu
Chain_L
v3naru_Curia

NB: Voters may select up to 9 options for 3 seats.

Recommendation: Vote Juanbug_PGov, mmurthy, v3naru_Curia. As stated above in the Code of Conduct Council vote, we are familiar with and have had generally positive experiences with Juanbug. Code of Conduct Council is not anticipated to be very active, so we feel comfortable voting for them on both positions. Mmurthy and v3naru_Curia have both already produced dashboards that track metrics, so they seem like natural fits for this role.

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2 Polls Closing December 5, 2023

Upgrade #2: Canyon Protocol Upgrade
Summary: This poll asks OP holders to authorize the second upgrade of the Optimism network, named Canyon. The Canyon upgrade contains the Shapella network upgrade from Ethereum, a change to reduce the volatility of the base fee, and several minor bug fixes. This upgrade maintains EVM equivalence and includes several OP Stack specific improvements.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. This upgrade will allow Optimism to continue to modernize with the latest changes to Ethereum. More can be read here. The testnet deployment has not encountered any major issue.

Ratify Security Council Members
Summary: This poll asks OP holders whether to approve the following inaugural members of the OP Security Council (as a single slate).

Cohort A (12 month initial term)
Kris Kaczor (Phoenix Labs)
Layne Haber (Connext)
Jon Charbonneau (DBA)
Alisha.eth (Glowworm Foundation, former ENS)
Mariano Conti (Independent, former MakerDAO)
Martin Tellechea (The Graph Foundation)
Yoseph Ayele (Borderless Africa)

Cohort B (18 month initial term)
OP Labs PBC
Yoav Weiss (Ethereum Foundation)
Test in Prod
Kain Warwick (Synthetix)
Coinbase Technologies, Inc. (Base)
Elena Nadolinkski (Ironfish)
L2Beat
Alejandro Santander (Independent, former Synthetix)

A Council Lead will be appointed by the Foundation at a later date.

NB: Since posting the poll, the Foundation has indicated Alisha.eth will serve as the lead.

Recommendation: Vote Abstain. We do not support voting on large bundles for important decisions, since it discourages due diligence on the part of delegates who will be overwhelmed or simply recognize that it would take a particularly egregious objection to derail the entire process. GFX does not oppose any of the individual members and is abstaining on the basis of process.

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