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.