[grant update] bleu Tech Partner of OP Native Projects

Mission Grants 🏹 Grants Updates
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Dear Optimism Community,

We want to provide a brief update on our “Tech Partner of OP Native Projects” grant approved in Season 5 and seek your input on our path forward.

Background

Our grant aims to offer 1,000 hours of technical support (UI/UX, backend, frontend, data analysis, launch support) to Optimism ecosystem projects. We’re eager to start but have encountered a challenge with project selection.

In the first version of the proposal, we proposed to handle vetting projects ourselves. During the review process, the reviewers asked for a change so that the Grants Council does the selection instead (see approved proposal), which got incorporated into our final grant scope. Despite the grant’s approval, though, we haven’t received any project assignments from the Grants Council so far.

We understand that the Grants Council is currently managing a high workload, which may have contributed to the delay in project assignments. Given this situation, we reached out to @gonna.eth to discuss potential solutions, and he proposed.

Proposed Approach

After discussing with @gonna.eth, he proposed an alternative that doesn’t require the Grants Council’s direct involvement given their current workload:

  1. 50% of our services to existing grantees
  2. 50% to projects we select independently, based off the selection criteria below

We like this suggestion because it potentially allows us to start working promptly, supporting both vetted grantees and new initiatives without additional Grants Council intervention.

Considerations

  • Selecting and negotiating with projects will require time that wasn’t accounted for in the original grant. We propose deducting these hours from the total grant hours to ensure we’re being fair with our time.
  • We recognize that this approach represents a change from the approved grant scope. We want to ensure this change aligns with the community’s expectations and Optimism’s governance standards, hence why this forum post.
  • The 50/50 split is not based on any specific reason. We’re open to amending the split in favor of either part down the line upon community feedback and also our own perception from watching the process unfold.

Selection Criteria

For the projects we select independently, we propose focusing on open-source projects building on Optimism. Our criteria will include:

  1. Open-source nature of the project
  2. Relevance to the Optimism ecosystem
  3. Potential impact and innovation
  4. Technical feasibility and need for our expertise

Our proposal is to announce selected projects every month, allowing the community to provide feedback or intervene if necessary.

What We Need From You

We’re seeking community feedback on:

  1. The 50/50 split between grantees and independently selected projects
  2. Our proposed selection criteria for independent projects
  3. Any other concerns we should address

Next Steps

  1. Review the community feedback in this post over the next week
  2. Do a follow-up post summarizing key points and our planned actions
  3. Share list of potential grantees that could benefit from our services by next Monday

Finally, if you’re building on Optimism and think our services could be useful, please reach out to us on Telegram at rpunktj or comment in this thread.

We’re looking forward to rolling up our sleeves and getting to work!

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I support the idea of removing the need for the GC intervention from the overall process. The approach of addressing both existing grantees and selecting projects independently is also sound. Additional feedback from the GC members would be valuable for refining the selection criteria further.

The current 50/50 split seems reasonable as an initial approach: adjustments probably will be necessary over time, which you have already anticipated.

The only thing that concerns me a bit, is how the time spent selecting projects and negotiating will be measured/recorded. These steps are crucial indeed, and can easily vary per project, making them harder to calculate and register.

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We’re back with an update on our “Tech Partner of OP Native Projects” grant. Here’s what we’ve done so far and what’s next.

Project selection

  • We realized that reviewing all grantees submissions wouldn’t necessarily increase response rates and would eat up a lot of the time we’d rather be helping projects :slight_smile:
  • Thus, to reduce time spent on project selection and any potential bias, we decided to serve teams on a first-come, first-served basis.
    • What that means is that we’ll be reaching out to everyone and making decisions as responses come in.
    • This way, we can allocate more time to delivering value to projects, allows them to self-identify their needs and also ensures we don’t miss any opportunities.
  • To start, we chose the following mission requests from Season 5, which seemed to allow for broader support rather than assisting with closed-scope projects that have already been funded:
    • Builders grants program mission request
    • Growth and experiments grants program mission request
    • Deliver a Best-in-Class Perp Dex Mission Request
    • Making Optimism a primary home of liquid staked eth
  • We’re reaching out to the 58 projects that fall into those mission requests from S5. We’ll reach out to grantees via Charmverse and TG (if we can find one). We also posted a message to Discord but got no engagement there.
    • We set up a dedicated Notion page where you can verify the status of this process.
    • Note: we’re NOT reaching out to Balancer specifically to avoid a potential conflict of interest since we’ve been grantees for Balancer in the past and one of our founders (Fábio Mendes) currently works at Balancer Labs.

Triaging interested projects

We’ve created a simple Application Form for projects to use when applying for our support. If you’re building on Optimism or know someone who is and think our services could be useful, please fill it out and post it to this thread or send it to @rpunktj (Telegram) or jose@bleu.builders or straight up schedule a call with José using this link.

Project Name:
Contact Person:
Email/Telegram:

1. Brief Project Description:

2. What specific technical support do you need? (Select all that apply)
   [ ] UI/UX Design
   [ ] Backend Development
   [ ] Frontend Development
   [ ] Data Analysis
   [ ] Other (please specify)

3. Estimated time requirement (in hours, if known):

4. Any specific deadlines or timelines we should be aware of?

5. Additional information you'd like to share:

Reporting

To @Bunnic 's point and to ensure we’re being transparent with how we’re utilizing our time and allow for community feedback about how they’re being used, we also want to show a breakdown of how hours are spent.

Here’s a link where you can check our progress broken down by task (i.e. project selection, design/UX/UI, development, and data science/analytics) and by project.

Note: op-tech-partner-s5-project-selection is our internal name for the projects “prospection” project.

Next Steps

  1. Finish reaching out to all the 58 grantees from the aforementioned mission requests in S5;
  2. Process incoming applications;
  3. We’ll share updates on the projects we’re assisting and the impact of our work.

We appreciate the community’s support and open to any feedbacks here!

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Hey folks, here’s an update on our efforts over the past two weeks:

Latest Activities

After reaching out to all 60 selected projects from S5/S6 via Charmverse, email, and Telegram (when available), we’ve received positive responses and interest from several grantees. We’re now moving forward with initial meetings and excited to roll up our sleeves!

First Impressions

As we’ve begun engaging with interested teams, we’ve faced some challenges in our initial interactions. While many teams are enthusiastic about our potential collaboration, they often struggle to pinpoint exactly where they need support within their projects.

Despite these hurdles, we’re maintaining a proactive approach, consistently following up with all teams that have expressed interest in working with us.

Addressing Challenges

To tackle these issues and optimize our collaboration, we’re considering a new approach:

  • We’ve realized that spending too much time on scope finalization could eat into our actual execution time. That’s not ideal for anyone involved.
  • We’ve opted to test a more flexible collaboration model, where we start working closely with a team’s internal members without a rigid scope. This approach allows us to dive in, get our hands dirty, and adapt as we go.
  • The goal is to streamline the process and potentially boost our productivity by being more adaptive and responsive to the team’s evolving needs.

It’s worth noting that this is an experimental approach. We’re not setting it on stone – please speak up if you have thoughts, concerns, or alternative ideas.

Highlights

Silo Finance:

They requested our help on building a Telegram bot to notify users when their borrow positions become risky (near liquidation). You can find more details on the Meeting Notes.

We’ve already delivered a PoC and received positive feedback to continue working with them. In case you’re curious, you can find the bot’s code here. Also, there’s a dev-only live version you can try out at @silo_hf_dev_bot — be warned, it’s WIP and will be potentially at times broken :hot_face:

Pike:
Also a promising start with Pike on their project for the Growth and Experiments Grants Program. We’ve sent a proposal based on the agreed-upon scope (check here the meeting notes and the proposal) and received positive feedback from the Pike team regarding our initial proposal.

The next step is to wait for Pike to share their codebase with us. Once we have access to their code, we’ll be able to refine our proposal and provide a more detailed plan for our collaboration.

Project Status Overview

We’ve added more status categories to our project tracking pipeline for better transparency. Here’s a summary of our current engagement status:

Status Count Notable Projects
POC 1 Silo Finance
Pending team proposal 4 Pike, Candide, Namespace, Covenant
Pending bleu proposal 2 Dark Forest ARES, aToken Network
Follow up 7 ETHx on OP, Strands’ Optimism Integration, Executable, and more
Contact Attempted 44 Various projects across S5, S6
Lost 2 In-depth fee tracker, dAppBooster

Next Steps

  • Continue discussions with interested projects to define specific assistance scopes.
  • Begin providing technical support to projects that have completed the scoping process.
  • Follow up with non-responsive projects one final time. Otherwise mark as lost if they don’t respond by EOW next week (Aug 30);

As a last note, if you’re building on Optimism and think our services could be useful, please reach out to us on Telegram at rpunktj or comment in this thread. We’re excited about the progress we’ve made and look forward to contributing to the growth of the Optimism ecosystem. Stay tuned for more updates!

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Hello and thank you for your continued updates here. The meeting note links for Pike and Silo do not seem to be accessible.

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I made the links public now - thanks for pointing out!

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We’re excited to provide our latest update! Here’s a summary of our recent activities and upcoming plans:

Project Status Overview

This table provides a detailed view of each project’s current status:

Project Name Status Point of Contact Estimated demand (hours)
Silo Finance (Liquidations Telegram Bot) Wrapping up Ayham (AJ) 40
Pike (Liquidation Bot Pt. 1) In progress @ladderchaos 40
Namespace (Fullstack development) In progress @thecap.eth 160, initially
Candide (Account Recovery Frontend) In progress @heymarcopolo ~100
DarkForest ARES Waiting for resources to free up (bleu) @fromddy ~100
aDeal network Waiting for resources to free up (bleu) @jacoblair 200
Optimistic Crowdstaking Waiting for scope @OxRussel Unclear
ETHx on OP Waiting for scope @AnoothiKumar Unclear
Executable: An intent-oriented Multi-Tx Tool Waiting for scope Cecilia Unclear
Covenant - Tradeable Debt Markets Backed By Any Asset Waiting for scope Alan Hampton Unclear
Strands’ Optimism Integration Waiting for scope Bella/Lochcres Unclear
Bloom Metrics Lost - no interest (at)launamu
Contact Attempted (44 projects) No response or follow-up yet Multiple Contacts

Project Highlights

Silo Finance: Telegram Health Factor Bot

  • Completed development of a Telegram Bot to notify users based on their health factor in Silo.

  • Key features: health factor monitoring, customizable notifications, group chat integration

  • Bot code available at: GitHub - bleu/silo-hf-monitor

    • It should be pretty intuitive, but you can check a user manual we wrote here.

    Silo Bot User Manual

  • Dev-only live version at Telegram: Contact @silo_hf_dev_bot (Note: consider this WIP until final delivery and may be unstable at times)

  • Next: Silo team will announce the dev version of the bot so we get feedback from users and then we’ll discuss next steps. Either deploying and maintaining a production version of the bot on a separate scope (since maintenance costs would be out of scope for this grant) or supporting them in launching their own production infrastructure.

Pike: Liquidation Bot Research

  • Completed research on liquidation bots in Optimism vs Ethereum
  • Delivered Dune Dashboard: https://dune.com/bleu/state-of-liquidations-in-optimism
  • Insights on tech requirements, MEV understanding, profitability, and liquidity sources
  • Next: Discuss POCA and new work proposals

Namespace: Project Kickoff

  • Namespace is small team of two people enabling Digital Identities management on top of ENS.
  • Gained write access to their GitHub repositories: https://github.com/thenamespace/frontend-app-v2 and https://github.com/thenamespace/namespace-backend-api
  • Analyzing codebase and running code to identify improvement areas
  • Next: Make sure they commit to making their code open source forever (which is a condition for any work done in the purview of this grant). Finalize focus areas and begin initial development

Candide: Account Recovery Frontend

  • Candide was a grantee for OP Season 1
  • Confirmed interest in building the Account Recovery Frontend
  • Next: Start development with logic-related parts this week and move to frontend as our design resources free up

Next Steps

  1. Continue discussions with interested projects to define specific assistance scopes
  2. Proceed with active development for ongoing projects
  3. Follow up with non-responsive projects one final time

You can track our progress, broken down by task and project, at our public dashboard: Metabase

As always, if you’re building on Optimism and think our services could be useful, please reach out to us on Telegram at @rpunktj, email jose@bleu.builders, or schedule a call using this link.

We’re excited about our progress and look forward to further contributing to the Optimism ecosystem!

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