GovNFT Incentives Program Retrospective
Last week, we concluded our GovNFT Incentive Program, an experimental program aimed at incentivizing participation in Optimism Governance.
GovNFTs are a project developed by the team at Velodrome. They are NFTs that control a vesting amount of OP, with the additional feature that the owners of these GovNFTs can delegate the vesting OP before it is actually vested!
This process has been managed manually by the foundation to date. In the future, it may make sense to distribute grants and/or retrofunding rewards using GovNFTs.
The GovNFT program was specifically designed to test-drive this new primitive. Its goals were twofold:
- Showcase and test the GovNFT technology developed by Velodrome
- Create a new type of incentive program to bring high-quality contributions to Optimism Governance
Overall, the program was a great success! Here are some highlights:
- 146 GovNFTs chose a delegate
- 212,440 OP was delegated from those GovNFTs
- 20+ GovNFT recipients posted their reasoning on why they chose a specific delegate (see end of post for examples)
- 100+ responses on threads discussing upgrades, RetroFunding, community call discussions, and other Optimism Governance topics
- Increased attendance to community calls
That said, there were some challenges. While we received many high-quality responses, there were instances of low-quality participation, such as copying and pasting passages from the Optimism docs instead of contributing meaningfully to the discussion. We addressed this by manually verifying the quality of the responses.
Additionally, although we had a decent level of participation, the majority of distributed GovNFTs were not delegated. This may be due to communication silos. These GovNFTs were distributed based on on-chain usage of Velodrome, but users who didn’t actively follow the Velodrome team’s account on X or check Discord announcements may not have been aware of the program.
As many of you know, increasing valuable participation in governance is challenging! I’d rate this program as having moderate success, along with many learnings for future efforts.
On-chain stats for the GovNFTs from this program can be tracked on the public Dune dashboard.
Example delegation reasonings:
Thanks again to everyone who participated, and I am looking forward to seeing where we can take the open source GovNFTs in the future.
- Michael