GFX Labs - Delegate Communication Thread

🏛 Token House Governance Delegate Updates
22

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
23

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
24

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
25

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.

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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
27

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.

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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.

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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
30

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.

4 Likes
31

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.

3 Likes
32

3 Polls Closing January 24, 2024

Code of Conduct Enforcement Decisions
Summary: This is a summary of action taken by the Code of Conduct Council. It involved decisions on 3 reported code of conduct violations, resulting in two enforcement actions against delegates - 1 warning and 1 full suspension.

Recommendation: Take no action. This poll will be optimistically approved unless 12% of votable supply vetoes it. There is no need to take action unless you oppose this change.

Generally speaking, we would prefer more details around enforcement actions - a kind of “show your work” requirement, at least in the case of suspending a delegate from discord, voting portal, or forum platforms. This is the first cycle with a Code of Conduct Council, though, so we are confident they will iterate upon and improve the process over time.

Reclassify Grant Misusage Enforcement
Summary: This poll asks OP holders if they support making minor policy changes that place the responsibility for grant misuse sanctions on the Code of Conduct Council. Currently this responsibility rests with Token House as a whole.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. This is in response to feedback from a large number of top delegates, who have expressed they have no special expertise or time to handle grant misuse allegations.

Delta Network Upgrade
Summary: This poll asks OP holders if they approve of the Delta network upgrade, which adds span batches to OP stack chains.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. The risk is represented as being very low to implement this, and would lower gas costs on L1 for less active chains. Given the recent shuttering of PGN, lowering costs for nascent or hyper specialized OP stack chains presents a competitive advantage and is a positive development.

Anticapture Commission

Internal to the ACC, we mirrored the above votes. We do not feel the ACC should be voting its 10m OP except in direct response to specific identified threats. We will propose internally to the ACC that it abstain from voting on most polls.

3 Likes
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4 Polls Closing February 14, 2024

Protocol Upgrade #4
Summary: This upgrade provides a Superchain-wide pausing mechanism. Technical details can be found here. A minor bug fix and allowing for custom-decimal-places tokens are also included.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. We have reviewed the changes, their reasoning, and see them as value additive. For those who wish to view the audit, it can be found here.

Mission Requests: Intent #4, 1.33M OP
Summary: This poll asks OP holders which Mission Requests they support. Mission Requests are RFPs that Optimism publishes and are then administered by the Grants Council. The maximum budget available between these requests is 1,330,000 OP, regardless of how many are approved.

Recommendation: Vote 4G, 4C. We feel these two initiatives have a high probability of creating value – extending Optimism’s brand into the educational realm, and a Superchain grants tracker. The latter in particular is an extremely small grant amount.

NB: GFX Labs holds a seat on the Grants Council. Failure of GFX to vote for a Mission Request does not indicate an unwillingness to administer that Mission Request in a way that maximizes the intended value.

Mission Requests: Intent #3, 1.33M OP
Summary: This poll asks OP holders which Mission Requests they support. Mission Requests are RFPs that Optimism publishes and are then administered by the Grants Council. The maximum budget available between these requests is 1,330,000 OP, regardless of how many are approved.

Recommendation: Vote 3A, 3L. These two initiatives are modest grant RFPs for improving privacy capabilities on Optimism and account abstraction.

NB: GFX Labs holds a seat on the Grants Council. Failure of GFX to vote for a Mission Request does not indicate an unwillingness to administer that Mission Request in a way that maximizes the intended value.

Mission Requests: Intent #2, 4M OP
Summary: This poll asks OP holders which Mission Requests they support. Mission Requests are RFPs that Optimism publishes and are then administered by the Grants Council. The maximum budget available between these requests is 4,000,000 OP, regardless of how many are approved.

Recommendation: Vote 2A, 2B, 2D, 2E, 2I, 2J, 2L. In particular, we would like to draw attention to missions that are aimed at fiscal sustainability and onramping. Onramping is one of the biggest frictions in all of crypto, and has been inconsistently solved everywhere we’ve seen it. We’re skeptical this mission will produce a home run immediately, but when someone does have a good solution, hopefully it will prompt them to come to Optimism first.

NB: GFX Labs holds a seat on the Grants Council. Failure of GFX to vote for a Mission Request does not indicate an unwillingness to administer that Mission Request in a way that maximizes the intended value. Mission Requests 2B and 2E were submitted by the Grants Council itself.

Mission Requests: Intent #1, 1.33M OP
Summary: This poll asks OP holders which Mission Requests they support. Mission Requests are RFPs that Optimism publishes and are then administered by the Grants Council. The maximum budget available between these requests is 1,330,000 OP, regardless of how many are approved.

Recommendation: 1A, 1C. 1A supports continuing to maintain client diversity for Optimism stack, while 1C adds bounty funding to white hats looking at fraud proofs. Both are critical for improving decentralization of Optimism, particularly 1C. Fraud proofs need to be perfected before the sequencer can be meaningfully decentralized.

NB: GFX Labs holds a seat on the Grants Council. Failure of GFX to vote for a Mission Request does not indicate an unwillingness to administer that Mission Request in a way that maximizes the intended value.

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2 Polls Closing March 6, 2024

Protocol Upgrade #5: Ecotone Network Upgrade
Summary: This upgrade implements the Dencun update in line with mainnet, and implementing blobs availability. Full details can be found here. Coinbase and OP Labs engineers reviewed the code independently, but consistent with the low risk profile, no audits were performed by external parties.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. This update keeps Optimism up to date with the newest features and standards on Ethereum. Blobs in particular should be accretive to the protocol’s earnings by lowering costs.

Protocol Upgrade #6: Multi-Chain Prep (MCP) L1
Summary: This upgrade allows all Superchain blockchains to be updated simultaneously in a single transaction. The audit report via Cantina can be found here.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. In the event of a bug, governance needs to be able to push a patch to all Superchain members atomistically. This is a significant upgrade in security for the Superchain and also differentiates being a member vs a simple fork of OP tech that doesn’t immediately get to benefit from urgent security upgrades.

1 Like
35

2 Polls Closing April 17, 2024

Season 5: Intents Budget Proposal #2
Summary: This poll asks if OP holders support reallocating an unused 1,040,000 OP to support Mission Requests rather than return the unused OP to the Governance Fund.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. This is standard practice to shift OP from underutilized grants categories to oversubscribed grants categories. It may also still result in some OP being returned to governance.

Governor Update #1: Improve advanced delegation voting
Summary: This poll asks if OP holders support an upgrade to the governor proxy to allow a single txn when voting in all cases. Currently those who receive delegation through the new partial delegation feature must sign multiple txns when voting. The implementation is at 0x637DA4Eeac836188D8C46F63Cb2655f4d3C9F893.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. People have been put off by doing multiple txns. In a security-conscious industry like crypto, simplicity and clear communication and expectations are better.