Grants from the GovFund given directly to builders, projects and protocols are required by the Foundation to be locked for a year. There are two reasons:
- This creates long-term incentive alignment with Optimism. The Collective will be most successful with a community of builders and users who care about the Collective’s vision and are on board with the work required to get there. Locking grants helps prevent grantees from treating the GovFund as a short-term fix and aborting.
- OP is a governance token. It is not intended to fund operations or the cost of running a business. Locking token grants helps communicate to interested parties that the primary purpose of OP is for governance and incentive alignment, not for cash. Importantly, it also mitigates legal risk for both the Foundation and grant recipients.
Why isn’t there an expiration of the “no-sale” rule for growth experiments?
Grants in the “Growth experiments” category are intended to be used to drive consumer interactions and usage of applications on Optimism. The “no sale” rule is included to make an implicit guideline explicit: that grants in the “growth experiments” category should not be sold by the protocol that receives them; instead they should be distributed to drive consumer usage in line with the experiment outlined in the grant.