Council sub-committee: Growth Experiments
If you are a delegate, please provide the link to your delegate commitment:
Commitment
Communications Thread
If you are a delegate, please indicate what % of votable supply is delegated to you: 2.39% of total OP votable supply is currently delegated to GFX Labs, from 5,466 addresses.
If you are a delegate, please indicate your voting participation rate in OP governance to date: Participation has been complete since the beginning of Optimism governance, though GFX Labs utilizes a multisig that sporadically is unable to vote through Snapshot. Details for which votes these apply to can be found on GFX Labs’ communications thread, and generally have been added to vote counts by hand by the OP team in the event they would be decisive.
Please link to your voting history and any voting rationale you’ve shared: Communications Thread
Please outline any other contributions to the Optimism ecosystem to date: GFX Labs served on DeFi Committee A along with @Katie, @linda, @Bobbay_StableLab, and @fig (Flipside).
Do you have a technical background? If so, please elaborate: GFX Labs includes multiple people with technical talent and experience. The liaison serving on this council is not a person with a technical background, but has deep experience with governance and spending programs in DeFi. They also will have access to GFX technical, legal, and other specialized staff internally.
Did you serve on a committee in Season 2? If so, please specify which: DeFi Committee A.
Please demonstrate any experience you believe is relevant to this role: GFX Labs has deep experience at Uniswap, Compound, MakerDAO, and Hop. Particularly at MakerDAO, there have been many lessons learned about how to handle, disburse, and monitor large budgets.
Please demonstrate expertise relevant to your Council sub-committee: GFX Labs staff have been part of more than 50,000,000 of budgets allocated, approved, and disbursed across multiple protocols. This includes both grants and ongoing budgets. Much of this is around financial or operational improvements to grow revenues, user bases, and use cases – growth.
Please describe your philosophy on what makes a good Governance Fund grant: There should be a clear path for a grant to be both useful and measurable in its effects. Soft goals like raising awareness are inappropriate, and programs such a user acquisition need to clearly demonstrate that spending is sourcing new users or assets for Optimism, rather than compete within Optimism for the same users/assets.
Additionally, there needs to be tight control by Governance Fund representatives when disbursing funds to grantees. In a traditional organization, there would be a full time position tasked with monitoring incoming reports by grantees. That may not be appropriate or possible for Optimism, but handing over large piles of assets without any grant agreement in place needs to end, even if such an agreement is not enforceable legally.
Going forward, most grants should be made on a competitive basis. The Grants Council should identify key areas it would like to see improved, and then solicit competition offers from prospective grantees for a finite grant budget. There should still be room for grantees with novel applications to approach Optimism for funding without such a process, but in general, all grants should be competitive unless they are a continuation of a previous grant that has been deemed successful.
GFX Labs prefers to take a lifecycle view of grants, where even at the pre-grant stage there is planning for how the grantee will report on their expenses, their measurable effects, and how the grant will wind down. Overall, the common theme is that much of the tedious or less exciting work of grant allocation and monitoring has not occurred, and GFX Labs is ready to assist with many of those tasks.
What types of grant applications would you like to see or what RFPs would you create? Optimism, like other L1s and L2s, is at its core a new frontier that has been opened for settlement. Within a certain range, technology will not decide which of those L1s and L2s will become useful and which will not. Just like historical frontiers that were opened for settlement, Optimism needs settlers. It is the people and assets finding productive use on Optimism that will determine its ultimate success.
This requires bringing in new users and new assets, since it is the activity of this users and assets that create value on Optimism. In general, we would like to see grants that migrate users and assets to Optimism in a way that is targeted and measurable.
Governance of Optimism and increasing the usefulness of the OP token are also priorities, but less relevant for this nomination.
Please disclose any anticipated conflicts of interest: GFX Labs generally does not hold tokens in its own right, but does have significant delegations on MakerDAO, Hop Protocol, and Uniswap.
Please verify that you agree to abide by the delegate code of conduct : Yes
Please verify that you understand KYC will be required to receive Council rewards at the end of Season 3: Yes
Please verify that you are able to commit 12 hours / week to reviewing grant applications and other Council operations: Yes