Grants Council Reviewer Nominations: Season 4

Please post your self-nominations for the Season 4 Grants Council here, according to the template and process outlined here.

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Hi everyone! Happy to be the first to apply!

Council Reviewer Self-Nomination Template

Council sub-committee:
Growth

If you are a delegate, please provide the link to your delegate commitment:

If you are a delegate, please indicate what % of votable supply is delegated to you:
1.8%

If you are a delegate, please indicate your voting participation rate in OP governance to date:
100%

Please link to your voting history and any voting rationale you’ve shared:
My voting rationale is linked in every individual proposal.

Please outline any other contributions to the Optimism ecosystem to date:
I started the OP Community calls and attend regularly, I was the lead of Defi Committee A in season 2, and last season I was a reviewer on the Growth Committee Grants Council.

Do you have a technical background? If so, please elaborate:
No

Have you previously served on a Token House Council or committee? If so, please specify which:
I was the lead of Defi Committee A in season 2 and a reviewer on the Growth Committee Grants Council last season.

Please demonstrate any experience you believe is relevant to this role:
I have been in the Defi space for over 5 years with 3 and a half years at the Maker Foundation and 2 years at an investment firm composed of former Maker Foundation employees - UDHC.

Please demonstrate expertise relevant to your Council sub-committee:
I have been very involved in the Optimism ecosystem and governance. I have also been in the broader defi space for a long time, and have hands-on experience providing feedback to project founders through my current role at a successful VC firm.

Please describe your philosophy on what makes a good Governance Fund grant:
A good governance fund grant attracts new and different types of users to the ecosystem, has clear and measurable KPIs and a well designed distribution plan that executes on the intended goal.

What types of grant applications do you think will help achieve Intent #2?
I would like to see grant applications that bring in a broader set of users through gaming, identity, NFTs, social applications and other novel areas that push the limits of Web 3 as a whole.

Please disclose any anticipated conflicts of interest:
Any portfolio companies for UDHC would be a conflict of interest.

Please verify that you agree to abide by the Code of Conduct :
Yes

Please verify that you understand KYC will be required to receive Council rewards at the end of Season 4:
Yes

Please verify that you are able to commit ~20 hours / week to reviewing grant applications and other Council operations:
Yes

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Council sub-committee:
Growth
If you are a delegate, please provide the link to your delegate commitment:

If you are a delegate, please indicate what % of votable supply is delegated to you:
0.45%
If you are a delegate, please indicate your voting participation rate in OP governance to date:
99% https://www.karmahq.xyz/profile/sugma.eth#optimism
Please link to your voting history and any voting rationale you’ve shared: (You may link to your Snapshot profile for voting history. You may link to your delegate communication thread, or any other medium you use to communicate with your delegators, to share your voting rationale.)
Doug Sugma.eth Delegate communication thread
Please outline any other contributions to the Optimism ecosystem to date:
grants council, active delegate and Shadow committee,
Do you have a technical background? If so, please elaborate: basic coding and solidity skills, professional background in tech/aerospace.

Have you previously served on a Token House Council or committee? If so, please specify which:
Shadow committee
Please demonstrate any experience you believe is relevant to this role:
In the early days i helped multiple projects mature through governance and other means (Wing.finance, Synthetix, Deus, RiskHarbor) i also feel i have a edge from being actively involved in all prior grants and having served on the previous council reading through over 100 proposals.
Please demonstrate expertise relevant to your Council sub-committee: (if applicable)
A lot of my previous work revolved around bizdev and integrations, through my time spent in the space i can easily identify what works and helps sustain a network.
Please describe your philosophy on what makes a good Governance Fund grant:
A good grant returns value in the form of users/engagement and capital inflow, team/culture is also a major factor and our grantees should be held to highest level of standards and ethical practices.

What types of grant applications do you think will help achieve Intent #2?
Ideally it would be good to bring in innovative projects that can rope in users from other chains and in the end create new Optimism users. The only things needed for user retention are good products.
Please disclose any anticipated conflicts of interest:

Please verify that you agree to abide by the Code of Conduct : Yes

Please verify that you understand KYC will be required to receive Council rewards at the end of Season 4: Yes

Please verify that you are able to commit ~20 hours / week to reviewing grant applications and other Council operations: Yes

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Council Reviewer Self-Nomination Template

Please keep your answers as concise as possible while conveying all relevant information.

Council sub-committee: Growth

If you are a delegate, please provide the link to your delegate commitment: Commitment

If you are a delegate, please indicate what % of votable supply is delegated to you: (voting power can be referenced here) 7.88% is delegated to the SNX Ambassadors.

If you are a delegate, please indicate your voting participation rate in OP governance to date: (You may link to your profile on Karma , if applicable. If not, you can divide the number of Optimism votes under your Snapshot profile by 87, which is the number of Token House votes through Season 2, and add a possible 2 votes from Agora.) The original SNXAmbassador wallet faced multisig issues from the start, and the new OPSNXAmbassador wallet was created after a few rounds of voting. In my opinion, it wouldn’t be helpful to judge participation based on this.

Please link to your voting history and any voting rationale you’ve shared: OPSNXAmbassador Snapshot + SNXAmbassador Snapshot + Voting Rational for Shadow Committee

Please outline any other contributions to the Optimism ecosystem to date: I was elected to the Grants Council for Growth Experiments in the prior epoch and have helped guide projects through this new process. I also discuss this later on.

Do you have a technical background? If so, please elaborate: I do not have direct technical experience, though I rely on the expertise of members of the SNXAmbassadors who have solidity, sql, and other development experience.

In my role as a Synthetix Core Contributor, I explain complex technical matters and core mechanisms of the protocol. So even without ‘technical experience’ I feel I’m still able to hold my own.

Have you previously served on a Token House Council or committee? If so, please specify which: Yes I have, I served on the Shadow Committee (recognized by Optimism) and the Grants Council for Growth Experiments.

Please demonstrate any experience you believe is relevant to this role:

  • I am a former Optimism Grants Council for Growth Experiments member, and have helped guide projects through the new Grants process. I’ve worked alongside great grants council members, and have used my deep knowledge of DeFi, and my understanding of what’s necessary for Optimism to grow to provide valuable feedback and approve projects that’ll help grow Optimism.

  • I am currently a Core Contributor for Synthetix, where I primarily focus on Communications, Marketing, and Partnerships. I have had the opportunity to take on various projects and initiatives, such as supporting SNX’s international presence (SNX Country Leads) and community marketing (SNX 300), and helping new protocols build on top of Synthetix as part of partnership efforts.

  • I was also recently re-elected as one of the five SNX Ambassadors. The SNX Ambassadors are an elected council that represents Synthetix through governance across the ecosystem and works on partnerships/business development alongside CCs and other councils.

  • I have collaborated with many protocols across Optimism to support their growth, a prime example being Synthetix Spartan Spaces on Twitter, which I host as an SNX Ambassador. This platform promotes great protocols across both Optimism and ETH mainnet and helps them explain their protocols to users. These efforts have led to many successful partnerships and integrations for Synthetix and other ecosystem partners.

  • I have the ability to concisely communicate complex technical topics in a way that is easily understood by end users.

  • Extensive knowledge of the DeFi landscape and what it takes to support a protocol in various aspects.

  • I have been a DeFi user since the early days of the space. Before the days of complex gov tokens and during the great times of yearn and curve being used together being the most interesting use-case

Please demonstrate expertise relevant to your Council sub-committee: (if applicable)

I have a pulse on the Optimism ecosystem and have worked extensively with protocols onboarding to Optimism, helping them navigate the process of growth on Optimism. I have firsthand experience of onboarding new users into the ecosystem and supporting them with a great product and ongoing incentives to keep them engaged in the long term. Based on this experience, I believe I am a strong candidate to serve on the Optimism Growth Experiments Committee, with the goal of driving growth for Optimism in the long term.

Please describe your philosophy on what makes a good Governance Fund grant:

  • Great product / usecase for the protocol within Optimism and the greater DeFi ecosystem

  • A clear path to non-incentivized growth - We should not incentivize projects for the sake of incentivization, this should always be a temporary measure.

  • Clear KPI’s

  • Milestones tied to token amounts to release grants.

  • Quality team (on all facets - devs, community, marketing, etc)

  • Healthy Treasury which reduces the chance of OP token misuse

  • Potential contingency plan / alternate path to distributing governance fund grant

  • Path to protocol decentralization / Governance structure

What types of grant applications do you think will help achieve Intent #2?

Intent #2 is extremely important, and we should always try to incentivize the core areas of DeFi that still aren’t decentralized. The following are types of projects I beleive should be incentivized:

  • Scalable Decentralized Stablecoins
  • Scalable Decentralized BTC / other wrapped assets
  • Decentralized Bridging
  • Decentralized Oracles
  • Cross Chain Messaging (Read & Write)
  • Interoperability / Infrastructure tools for the OP Stack (ties in with above)
  • OP Stack alternative incentives

There’s many types of applications in this list, but all of them cover either core areas of DeFi that haven’t been explored, haven’t been properly decentralized, or will help to grow a core area of focus for Optimism for the future. I’m excited about all of these (and much more) and think this greatly fits within #2 - Innovating on Novel Applications. I’d like to make clear that there’s no way this covers all of the novel applications, I’d argue that most novel applications haven’t even been thought of yet!

Please disclose any anticipated conflicts of interest: I am an elected member of the SNX Ambassadors and a Core Contributor at Synthetix.

Please verify that you agree to abide by the Code of Conduct : Yes

Please verify that you understand KYC will be required to receive Council rewards at the end of Season 4: Yes

Please verify that you are able to commit ~20 hours / week to reviewing grant applications and other Council operations: Yes

8 Likes

Council Reviewer Self-Nomination Template

Council sub-committee:
Growth

If you are a delegate, please provide the link to your delegate commitment:
Our delegate commitment can be found here. A thread with our total activity as delegates can be found here.

If you are a delegate, please indicate what % of votable supply is delegated to you:
3.8%

If you are a delegate, please indicate your voting participation rate in OP governance to date:
The only voting participation that was missed was due to technical limitations with Snapshot, and are documented in our delegate communications thread linked above.

Please link to your voting history and any voting rationale you’ve shared:
A thread with our total activity as delegates can be found here.

Please outline any other contributions to the Optimism ecosystem to date:
GFX served on the DeFi Committee A, and also on the Growth Subcommittee of the Grants Council last season.

Do you have a technical background? If so, please elaborate:
The GFX Labs governance liaison does not have a technical background, but has access to multiple senior engineers.

Have you previously served on a Token House Council or committee? If so, please specify which:
GFX served on the DeFi Committee A, and also on the Growth Subcommittee of the Grants Council last season.

Please demonstrate any experience you believe is relevant to this role:
GFX Labs is most well known for governance work at Optimism, MakerDAO, Uniswap, 0x, Arbitrum, Compound, and Hop.

Please demonstrate expertise relevant to your Council sub-committee:
GFX served on the previous Growth Subcommittee, as well as DeFi Committee A (a precursor to the existing grants structure).

Please describe your philosophy on what makes a good Governance Fund grant:
Successful, strong grants are those that aim to migrate some combination of users, assets, and developers to Optimism that were not previously on Optimism. Chains, including Layer 2s, are frontiers, and their value is determined by the number and quality of those that settle them.

What types of grant applications do you think will help achieve Intent #2?
We prefer to evaluate grant plans on a case-by-case basis, and don’t have existing priors except that they clearly target migrating users, assets, and developers to Optimism who are currently not engaged or only lightly engaged with Optimism.

Please disclose any anticipated conflicts of interest:
GFX Labs is active in governance and development of multiple protocols. Current and recent relationships include Uniswap, MakerDAO, 0x, Optimism, Arbitrum, Wormhole, Interest Protocol, Hop, and Compound.

Please verify that you agree to abide by the Code of Conduct :
Yes

Please verify that you understand KYC will be required to receive Council rewards at the end of Season 4:
Yes

Please verify that you are able to commit ~20 hours / week to reviewing grant applications and other Council operations:
Yes

8 Likes

Council Reviewer Self-Nomination Template

Council sub-committee: Builders

If you are a delegate, please provide the link to your delegate commitment:
Link

If you are a delegate, please indicate what % of votable supply is delegated to you: 0.3%

If you are a delegate, please indicate your voting participation rate in OP governance to date: 97% I missed: Qi DAO, BarnBridge, and Test 2 votes.

Please link to your voting history (and delegate communication thread, if applicable):
Voting History: Delegates of Optimism DAO
Gonna.eth (Dhannte) - Delegate Communication Thread - #2 by Gonna.eth

Please outline any other contributions to the Optimism ecosystem to date:
I funded EthernautDAO which brought 12 core developer contributors to different projects in optimism. Synthetix, Aelin, Grateful, Optimism, and Kwenta.

Do you have a technical background? If so, please elaborate:
I made a career as a game designer and I understand code, graphics, and narrative on the base layer while focusing on project management and creative solutions.

Have you previously served on a Token House Council or committee? If so, please specify which: Yes, DeFi committee C, first Grant Council.

Please demonstrate any experience you believe is relevant to this role:
I’ve been working as the founder of EthernautDAO to grow the developer space for the last year and a half, my experience so far:

  • Developer mentorships coordination: Mentorships - EthernautDAO
  • Envision and coordinate dev hackable smart contracts for educational purposes:
  1. Staking | Address 0x805f02142680f853a9c0e5d5d6f49aec28c31e8b | Etherscan
  2. https://goerli.etherscan.io/address/0xbbcf8b480f974fa45adc09f102496edc38cb3a6c
  3. https://goerli.etherscan.io/address/0x4b90946ab87bf6e1ca1f26b2af2897445f48f877
  4. https://goerli.etherscan.io/address/0xc357c220d9ffe0c23282fcc300627f14d9b6314c
  5. https://goerli.etherscan.io/address/0xa5343165d51ea577d63e1a550b1f3c872adc58e4#code
  6. https://goerli.etherscan.io/address/0x445d0fa7fa12a85b30525568dfd09c3002f2ade5
  7. https://goerli.etherscan.io/address/0xf3cfa05f1ed0f5eb7a8080f1109ad7e424902121
  8. https://goerli.etherscan.io/address/0x00f4b86F1aa30a7434774f6Bc3CEe6435aE78174
  9. https://goerli.etherscan.io/address/0x66408824a99ff61ae2e032e3c7a461ded1a6718e… https://goerli.etherscan.io/address/0x07abfcced19aeb5148c284cd39a9ff2ac835960a… https://goerli.etherscan.io/address/0x012f0c715725683a5405b596f4f55d4ad3046854…
  10. https://goerli.etherscan.io/address/0x66ec6b0f30754123bdf9acf4d8f4e2bdf5d36f4f
  11. https://goerli.etherscan.io/address/0x43ff315d0003365fe1246344115a3142b9ebfe0b
  • Developer community growth: Discord Developer Portal
    Active Ethernauts (voters) on discord: 81
    Past mentors: 15
    Future mentors role picked: 201
    Mentee’s role picked: 1.100

  • on-chain developer attestation, EXP soulbound token given by nomination of peers when an educational contribution is done

  • developer bounties for NFT creation, smart contracts and hackable smart contracts

  • Developer partnership searcher, my main job today, looking for new projects who want to expand their developer teams and deploy their contracts in optimism. Last project to be onboarded by governance proposal: Shapeshift (working with the team on the proposal) and Game7 (sponsoring a developer educational game to run in optimism)

  • Sponsoring developer meetups like “Crypto para mortales” https://twitter.com/CryptoPMortales/status/1575962741877379072

  • Hosting knowledge online talks for developers to hear from peers about their projects, last one: https://twitter.com/EthernautDAO/status/1594488959022895107

Please demonstrate expertise relevant to your Council sub-committee:

  • Deep understanding of what works to maximize the number of developers’ growth.
  • An active member of big developer communities.
  • Worked on the first Grants Council as a reviewer and promoted ideas for the rubric.

Soft skills:

  • Adaptability
  • Comunication
  • Decision making
  • Self motivation
  • Empathy
  • Work Ethic

Hard Skills:

  • Multilingualism
  • Product design
  • Project management
  • Research skills
  • Toknomics, code and narrative at base level

Please describe your philosophy on what makes a good Governance Fund grant:

  • Clear objective to be accomplished
  • Clear milestones and math distribution of the fund
  • Target onboarding solutions for new users
  • Accurate and simple project communication
  • Active and positive feedback loops on the proposal thread

What types of grant applications would you like to see (or what RFPs would you create?):
I created a proposal in the past [Review] [GF: Phase 1 Proposal Cycle 8] EthernautDAO It was approved after 3 voting cycles of feedback.

I would like to see:

  • Tooling proposals, like a new and better hard hat or foundry.
  • Developer educational games like https://ethernaut.openzeppelin.com/ or https://www.damnvulnerabledefi.xyz/
  • Online hackathons with job interviews at prices
  • On-chain auditing prices
  • Hacker teams to incentivize projects security (Hats Finance, Inmmunefi)
  • GitHub, Twitter, Online developer history integration for developer on-chain attestation and anti sybl attacks systems.
  • All kinds of experiments involving developers to get their hands in the mud and build something
  • Research teams at the protocol level
  • Tooling and infra, avoiding revenue models, giving a free experience to users and committed to being supported by RPGF

Please disclose any anticipated conflicts of interest:
None, even if there’s an EthernautDAO fork I’ll promote it and consider it a peer.

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 4: Yes

Please verify that you are able to commit ~20 hours / week to reviewing grant applications and other Council operations: Yes

7 Likes

StableLab Council Reviewer Self-Nomination

Council sub-committee: Growth

If you are a delegate, please provide the link to your delegate commitment:

Delegate profile | Delegate Commitment

If you are a delegate, please indicate what % of votable supply is delegated to you:

0.18%

If you are a delegate, please indicate your voting participation rate in OP governance to date: (You may link to your profile on Karma 3, if applicable.)

99% - Karma Profile

Please link to your voting history and any voting rationale you’ve shared:

StableLab Delegate Communication Thread

Please outline any other contributions to the Optimism ecosystem to date:

  • Member of DeFi Committee A for Season 2.
  • Token House badgeholder
  • Have been active delegates in the ecosystem voting on and providing our rationale for all our Optimism Votes

Do you have a technical background? If so, please elaborate:

Yes, we have technical resources on the team and are familiar with many technical aspects of governance from our work with numerous leading protocols, including MakerDAO, Balancer, and Element Finance, among others. Having these roles requires us to have a grasp of the technical elements of a protocol.

Have you previously served on a Token House Council or committee? If so, please specify which:

Token House Badgeholder | DeFi committee A

Please demonstrate any experience you believe is relevant to this role:

We are the leading professional delegate team with a track record across major DeFi protocols, including MakerDAO, Optimism, Aave, 1inch, Balancer, Element, InstaDapp, Hop and more.

We pioneer delegation work through high governance standards, extensive research, hands-on expertise and the consistent use of a code of conduct. Pushing forward web3 and DeFi since 2018, StableLab’s co-founders previously spent 3.5 years at the Maker Foundation.

List of governance delegates and roles currently (or previously) held by StableLab.

View all our proposals, votes and milestones at stablelab.xyz /governance.

Please demonstrate expertise relevant to your Council sub-committee:

  • We are the operations lead at Element Finance and have helped build the infrastructure for Element DAO. In doing so, we have worked with external providers to tailor their services for Element Finance, such as reviewing grant proposals and recommending amendments to create a successful proposal.
  • We are the Governance Facilitator at Euler DAO where we help the DAO grow by implementing strong operational processes and working with external service providers to improve the DAO.
  • StableLab is the Co-lead of the Uniswap Accountability Committee. We are tasked with evaluating new proposals concerning cross chain deployments and alternate deployments for the Uniswap protocol. This has given us experience assessing new initiatives and keeping them accountable to their commitments.
  • We are also one of the lead domain allocators of the Compound Grants Committee and are working with Questbook to structure the grants program at Compound.
  • During our work in various protocols, we have worked with different service providers and can spot opportunities to insert relevant providers to elevate a protocol or network. For example, we introduced ShowKarma to Optimism.

Please describe your philosophy on what makes a good Governance Fund grant:

We expect a successful grant application to demonstrate some of the following characteristics:

  • Clear milestones
  • Granular explanations for the amount of funding requested
  • Effective and efficient distribution of grant funds
  • Consistent communication with the community
  • Clear value-add to the ecosystem
  • Achievable goals within a set timeframe

What types of grant applications do you think will help achieve Intent #2?

We believe grants that will help achieve intent #2 are those that continue to increase the reach of blockchain technology. As Optimism continues to improve scalability for blockchains it is important to create novel applications that can draw even more users to the space. It is also important to continue to innovate on infrastructure applications to continue to make it easier for new users to interact with and understand the technology.

The following are some examples of projects we think could improve growth and help achieve intent #2

  • Applications that help align incentives either economically or socially for groups or organizations
  • Applications that help with proving identity
  • Applications to attract users from traditional gaming to move to web3 gaming
  • Easier on/off ramps and bridges to easily allow users to get started in crypto
  • Applications that improve user experience

Please disclose any anticipated conflicts of interest:

Through our holding company, we have invested in multiple projects to advance growth and governance for them. See the full list here.

We contribute to various protocols’ governance, such as MakerDAO, Optimism, Aave, 1inch, Balancer, and Element. See the full list here.

When applicable, we will disclose potential conflicts of interest in our rationale.

Please verify that you agree to abide by the Code of Conduct:

Yes

Please verify that you understand KYC will be required to receive Council rewards at the end of Season 4:

Yes

Please verify that you are able to commit ~20 hours / week to reviewing grant applications and other Council operations:

Yes

6 Likes

Hey Everyone! As a member of the Grants Council in Season 3, I fulfilled my goals and promises made in my previous nomination (more details later in this post). For Season 4, I aim to continue the momentum. If you have any questions for me, feel free to comment or reach out to me in a DM.

Council sub-committee: Growth Experiments

If you are a delegate, please provide the link to your delegate commitment:
Delegate Commitments - #21 by Michael

If you are a delegate, please indicate what % of votable supply is delegated to you: 0.19%

If you are a delegate, please indicate your voting participation rate in OP governance to date:
100% participation since becoming active July 7, 2022

Please link to your voting history and any voting rationale you’ve shared:
Voting History:

Videos explaining rational in various rounds.

Please outline any other contributions to the Optimism ecosystem to date:

  • Community Governance Call Host. This involves creating an agenda, sourcing agenda topics from the community, running the actual calls, and creating recap posts for the calls.

  • Season 3 Grants Council Member & Season 2 Committee Member

  • Contributor to Optimism codebase (link to pull request)

  • Multiple Educational Videos about Optimism, L2-related EIPs, The OP Stack, and Optimism Protocol Tutorials.

Do you have a technical background? If so, please elaborate:
Yes.

  • I worked as a machine learning engineer and have been coding smart contracts for 3 years.

  • I’ve placed in multiple web3 hackathons, including 1st out of 27+ teams.

  • Code contributor to Optimsm (link to pull request)

  • Master of Science in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, focus on machine learning & incentive systems.

Have you previously served on a Token House Council or committee? If so, please specify which:

I served on the Grants Council in the Growth Experiments sub-committee in Season 3. I also served on the NFT committee in Season 2.

Please demonstrate any experience you believe is relevant to this role:
As a member of the Grants Council in Season 3, I followed through on my commitment and plans made before the season. Through strong feedback, projects under my review altered their grant requests to create stronger milestones-based targets for their proposals. They shifted away from mercenary-style grants and more towards community engagement grants with a long-term focus. In may cases, I also worked with proposees to drastically reduce the size of their grant in order to better align with the program that they were targeting. Along with all of these efforts came valuable lessons in how best to work with the proposees to modify grants in a way that was a win both for the Optimism Ecosystem and that specific project.

Consumer facing product manager at high-growth tech startup, learned how to understand and capture users

Crypto educator. 333k+ views on YouTube, ability to communicate complex topics to a youtube audience

Technical ability: contributor to Optimism codebase, machine learning engineer, smart contract dev

Please describe your philosophy on what makes a good Governance Fund grant:

Guiding Principle: Grants should be an efficient use of funds to drive us closer to the Optimistic Vision.

Specific things I’d like to see with grant proposals:

  • Clear milestones with milestone unlocks.
  • Definition of what “success” of grant use would be, with trackable metrics.
  • Accomplishes something that would be difficult to accomplish without the grant (bootstrapping liquidity, competitions, meetups, education)
  • Solid logic for why grant will push forward the goals of Intent #2.

What types of grant applications do you think will help achieve Intent #2?

With EIP-4844 and the Superchain on the horizon, it is important that we can help seed applications that are building towards the future.

What applications will be enabled with low fees? What applications will bring in the next wave of real-world users? These are the questions that I am asking myself when evaluating new applications

Examples:

  • Social games and networks
  • Identity-based applications
    • World ID’s proof of humanity just announced it’s Optimism launch, what novel applications can be built with this?
  • Zero-Knowledge enabled applications
    • There is a new design-space enabled by ZK-proofs. What are applications taking advantage of that?
  • Cross-chain bridges and messaging
  • Community coordination applications and tooling
  • Real-world DeFi (decentralized stablecoins, perps, oracles, etc).

Please disclose any anticipated conflicts of interest:
No current conflicts of interest.

Please verify that you agree to abide by the Code of Conduct: Yes

Please verify that you understand KYC will be required to receive Council rewards at the end of Season 4: Yes

Please verify that you are able to commit ~20 hours / week to reviewing grant applications and other Council operations: Yes

9 Likes

Council Reviewer Self-Nomination Template

Council sub-committee: Growth

If you are a delegate, please provide the link to your delegate commitment:
We are active as DAOStewards, along with @thinkDecade and @hirokennelly. More info: here

If you are a delegate, please indicate what % of votable supply is delegated to you: 0.03%

If you are a delegate, please indicate your voting participation rate in OP governance to date:here 63%

Please link to your voting history and any voting rationale you’ve shared: here

Please outline any other contributions to the Optimism ecosystem to date:
As part of BanklessDAO, I coordinate multi-lingual content production where we have produced number of articles about optimism in ukrainian, spanish, bulgarian, german, malayalam and japanese. More info here. We received significant OP tokens as part of RPGF2 due to our contribution.
I also coordinate the metagovernance group at BanklessDAO which is an active governance participant in Optimism. We started participating actively this quarter.

Do you have a technical background? If so, please elaborate:

We have access to the technical talent at BanklessDAO and I myself have a technical background in data science with a fair overview of smart contracts.

Please demonstrate any experience you believe is relevant to this role:

I have been part of the grants committiee at BanklessDAO for 6 months where I co-evaluated 30+ applications on various topics from content production to operations and technical docs. I also helped co-create many grants review strategies and a general outlook towards treasury sustainability to combat sell pressure from grantees.

Please demonstrate expertise relevant to your Council sub-committee: (if applicable)

I have been on both sides (evaluating and receiving) of grant programs in the ecosystem. This experience helps me see the point of view of both sides. As an evaluator I focused on identifying objective measurable metrics on all types of projects and measuring results/past performance as a key data point while making decisions.

Please describe your philosophy on what makes a good Governance Fund grant:

In my experience the grants strategy should focus on:

a. Past experience of the team to deliver similar results as being proposed
b. Knowledge and network of the team within the ecosystem
c. Clear milestones with fixed timeframe
d. Bias towards highly innovative ideas

What types of grant applications do you think will help achieve Intent #2?

Combining innovation with low-cost, fast execution can be a major unlock as long as it gains adoption both within the existing crypto community as well as the broader world at large. Often the focus is on building killer apps, while what actually drives adoption is simple use cases which can attract middle-of the curve users. Applications such as

  • remittance,
  • 1 click on/off ramps,
  • user friendly mobile frontends
  • existing mass adopted fintech apps using L2s on the backend,
  • web3 gaming(play and earn)
  • attestation of real world artefacts
  • focus on groups/communities which are ignored by legacy institutions

will be the applications which will help the collective strive towards intent 2 achievement

Please disclose any anticipated conflicts of interest:

DAOStewards is an active governance participant in several DAOs including banklessdao, 1inch, safe, vita, OP, Arbitrum, AAVE

Please verify that you agree to abide by the Code of Conduct : Yes

Please verify that you understand KYC will be required to receive Council rewards at the end of Season 4: Yes

Please verify that you are able to commit ~20 hours / week to reviewing grant applications and other Council operations: Yes

7 Likes

Hello, I am running to keep my place on the Builder Grant subcommittee of the Grant Council, which recieved an NPS of 9.3 last season. I am proud of the work I’ve done there – and of the directions I’ve helped guide it in – and would like to continue this work.

Council sub-committee: Builders

If you are a delegate, please provide the link to your delegate commitment:
https://gov.optimism.io/t/delegate-commitments/235/136

If you are a delegate, please indicate what % of votable supply is delegated to you: (voting power can be referenced here ) 0.37%

If you are a delegate, please indicate your voting participation rate in OP governance to date: (You may link to your profile on Karma , if applicable. If not, you can divide the number of Optimism votes under your Snapshot profile by 87, which is the number of Token House votes through Season 2, and add a possible 2 votes from Agora.)
81% (100% since posting a delegate commitment)

Please link to your voting history and any voting rationale you’ve shared: (You may link to your Snapshot profile for voting history. You may link to your delegate communication thread, or any other medium you use to communicate with your delegators, to share your voting rationale.)

[Jack anorak - delegate communication thread](https://Communication thread)

Please outline any other contributions to the Optimism ecosystem to date:

  • Integral contributor to Velodrome’s design and launch, with coordination of OP Labs
    High level of contributions to OP governance as delegate, commenter, grant council member
    Aided in the onboarding of some 30-odd protocols to Optimism, made introductions, advised on optimal product and liquidity strategy
    Advised several OP protocols as they applied for governance grants
    Published Optimism’s first review of passed grants, which lwas directly responsible for making builder grants in scope for Governance.
    Leading most comprehensive retrospective of OP grants to date, which has already surfaced major insights and revelations of protocols’ handling of OP Recieved RPGF for this
    Was voice influencing major changes in direction of grants, including the implementation of the Grants Council itself, requests for grants, and increased focus on builder grants

Do you have a technical background? If so, please elaborate:

I’m technical right up to the point of the actual software engineering of protocols. Conversant in code and design. Deeply involved in quantitative protocol construction and am credibly ‘technical’ in defi. Regularly code to extract insights and perform actions onchain.

Without going into specifics, my professional background is quantitative in nature.

Have you previously served on a Token House Council or committee? If so, please specify which:
I was on the shadow committee, which was an unofficial committee that I believe made valuable contributions.

I was then on the Builder Grants subcommittee of the Grant Council, which I’m currently rerunning for.

Please demonstrate any experience you believe is relevant to this role:

I am a builder and have gone through the process of going from zero to a major ecosystem player, building something while facing a threadbare budget, maximum skepticism, and vocal detractors. My team has gotten an OP Labs Grant and an OP governance grant and I believe raised the bar on applying for and reporting on grants of this nature.

As a delegate, I’ve voted on grants, and as a member of the Shadow Committee, I’ve helped to push people’s thinking on what grants ought to be used for.

As a Grant Council member, I pushed for a more proactive stance on what sorts of grants we want to give out and introduced a new level of rigor to our selection process.

As an individual, I’ve proposed ecosystem-wide initiatives rethinking how Optimism manages its resources, and I’ve staked much of my career in crypto on making Optimism succeed.

In short, I’ve experienced virtually all tasks and perspectives that could go into the construction of grants, and there’s little in the way of subject matter that I haven’t personally worked with, from crosschain messaging to staking to security to NFTs.

I’ve now also been on the Grant Council and have an intimate understanding of how it works and how processes will improve next round.

Please demonstrate expertise relevant to your Council sub-committee: (if applicable)

I chose to apply for builder grants instead of growth experiments for three reasons.

  • I already have a track record of independent voting and have advised my delegators that I would always vote and argue against Velodrome’s immediate interest if it was in conflict with what I thought was best for Optimism. That said, it seems that perceived conflicts of interests are less pronounced in this group; more growth experiments are likely to touch velodrome than builder grants.
  • This vertical also plays well into my day job, which has me doing a lot of outreach to builders. In this capacity, hopefully it’s not a stretch to say I’ve likely spoken with more active and prospective builders on Optimism than anyone outside of the OP Foundation. In this way I can help guide builders to the program and get the initiatives we’re looking for.
  • I think builder grants at this stage are more critical for the long-term viability of the Optimism project; there’s a lot of exciting stuff that OP is going to roll out that the builder community needs to be prepared to exploit.

Please describe your philosophy on what makes a good Governance Fund grant:

I believe in a structured approach, where the council articulates where OP is and where it wants it to go. It should outline what sorts of people, teams, and activities are needed to get to this desired future, and it should shape and approve grants that get Optimism those people, teams, and activities.

Grants should be designed with justifiable, measurable, and achievable objectives, and they should be reviewable periodically so that the Grants Council can guide them and retain the ability to withhold future grants. They should be scaled appropriately to the objectives (and the objectives’ value to the ecosystem), not to the projects’ size or perceived importance.

Although there is room to take a slight shotgun approach, grants should go to the projects that are most promising in their domains. This requires the Grants Council to have an informed opinion about the likely winning teams in each space.

Just like the best tools are multifunction tools, the best grants will have second-order benefits affecting the largest number of builders. That is, you fund the project that makes other projects more achievable. This is how you accelerate ecosystems.

In the course of a grants program, major things might change. This is crypto. So the grants council should also allow for some opportunism in approving grants.

What types of grant applications do you think will help achieve Intent #2?

Please refer to a thread I wrote some time ago on what sorts of grants I"d like to see.

Top of mind remain a generalized price oracle, audits/bug bounties to support innovative applications, and proofs of concept highlighting the OP stack, Account Abstraction, and new forms of lending (especially with staked ETH).

That is, we want to fund the things that let builders know that we can offer the best ecosystem to work in, the best tools to work with, and the best funding to derisk experimentation.

Please disclose any anticipated conflicts of interest:

If I am elected, I will review grants that could have a material impact on Velodrome. As I did last season, I will make clear to my subcommittee when a grant seems to be in Velodrome’s area.

They will attest that, as before, I’ve consistently voted in Optimism’s interest, even when doing so would be against Velodrome’s immediate interests. I do so because I want Optimism to win, and in any case I see Optimism’s success as more necessary for Velodrome’s success than any individual grant.

Please verify that you agree to abide by the Code of Conduct : Yes

Please verify that you understand KYC will be required to receive Council rewards at the end of Season 4: Yes

Please verify that you are able to commit ~20 hours / week to reviewing grant applications and other Council operations: Yes

9 Likes

I’ve been a part of the Builders Subcommittee in Season 3 and previously the Tooling Committee in Season 2. We had the pleasure of reviewing dozens of applications and spent hours discussing what to look for, which projects would bring the most value to Optimism, and how to evaluate applications to ensure fairness, effectiveness, and accountability. I think we did a good job, and I would like to continue that work, building on the experience we already have.

Council sub-committee: Builders

If you are a delegate, please provide the link to your delegate commitment: Delegate Commitments - #147 by kaereste

If you are a delegate, please indicate what % of votable supply is delegated to you:: 719.83K OP, 1.88% Delegated Votes according to Tally | delegate.l2beat.eth

If you are a delegate, please indicate your voting participation rate in OP governance to date: 67% (Delegates of Optimism DAO 2), we have missed some early votes, yet now we have a role among our team (me) dedicated solely to governance activities, so we’re increasing our rate right now (up from 62% last season, 100% since creating a dedicated role).

Please link to your voting history and any voting rationale you’ve shared:
https://vote.optimism.io/delegate/delegate.l2beat.eth
https://gov.optimism.io/t/l2beat-delegate-communication-thread/

We’ve been also discussing our voting rationale on #governance channel on our public Discord + we organise monthly Governance Community Calls for our delegators. We are happy to explain our voting strategy or rationale in person as well if anyone’s interested (you can DM me).

Please outline any other contributions to the Optimism ecosystem to date:

L2BEAT is by definition ingrained in the L2 ecosystem. We’ve been early fans and supporters of Optimism. On our website we present detailed information about Optimism (Optimism – L2BEAT) including project milestones, live TVL and activity tracking. We have created the risk framework for both L2s and Bridges so that first of all we keep the users informed about the risks they’re taking but also we push the protocols (including Optimism) to strive for a better, decentralized, permissionless and trustless future. We are running an Optimism node in a validator mode and we’re actively monitoring if everything is running correctly.

We also actively engage in governance discussions during Bi-weekly delegate calls, on forum and on Discord.

Do you have a technical background? If so, please elaborate:

Yes, I am fluent with code and software architecture. I used to be a developer and sysadmin a long time ago. I also have a UX and product management background. For the last 15 years I’ve been working as a product manager/product owner. I am used to scheduling and planning IT projects and working with the development teams. I’ve been responsible for project delivery in various projects ranging from ecommerce through financial services to AI systems.

As L2BEAT we have a very experienced technical team with deep expertise in L2s and crypto development.

Have you previously served on a Token House Council or committee? If so, please specify which:

Yes, the Tooling Committee in Season 2 and as a reviewer in Season 3 Grants Council Builders Grants Sub-committee.

Please demonstrate any experience you believe is relevant to this role:

I have a decent experience with non-crypto granting programs (mainly EU and government funds but also private pre-accelerator programs), both from the perspective of grant receiver as well as grant operator, I believe this might be useful in this role. No matter if I get elected or not, I’ll be sharing my input on how to facilitate proper grant distribution.

As L2BEAT we have a good overview of existing tooling in the L2 ecosystem and we have some vision of what’s lacking and what would be interesting to have. We will be sharing those views as RFPs and will engage in discussions to help the relevant teams deliver the best results possible.

In the Grants Council in the previous Season we have already established a good framework for working with proposers to have the best proposals in our intake. I’ve been active in direct outreach, which has resulted in some very successful applications. In this season I would like to continue this work to establish patterns and procedures that can be followed in future programs.

Please demonstrate expertise relevant to your Council sub-committee: (if applicable)

I have lots of experience in working with teams to properly plan and schedule projects. While reviewing the proposals I will be working closely with proposers to make sure their proposals are both realistic and focused on delivering the most value to the Optimism ecosystem. I’ve been already working on the Tooling Committee in the previous season and been engaging in productive discussions with the proposers, hope to continue this in the upcoming season.

I believe that the grants council should be more involved in the discussion with projects while fine-tuning the grant proposal so that the proposals are either abandoned early or are written properly so that they are more likely to pass. Especially that going forward we won’t have an open voting but just a Grant Council approval, it is crucial to have a healthy and open discussion on what are the Council’s expectations and goals.

Members of L2BEAT team have been involved in the development of many web3 tools, including Earl.js, DethCode, TypeChain, ethTx, TokenFlow and others. I believe that we have the necessary experience and knowledge to make a valuable addition to the Council.

Please describe your philosophy on what makes a good Governance Fund grant:

A good grant is one that is deliverable in the proposed schedule and budget. I prefer smaller budgets and timeframes with a specific plan for execution. It’s easier to pivot and adapt on a smaller scope than on the very ambitious, multi-month project.

A good Builders grant not only focuses on delivering the product itself but also on getting early traction, involving external contributors or having the product integrated with other projects in Optimism. The best proposals are those that not only make very good use of the part of the cake they receive, but that make the whole cake bigger - through cooperation, enabling (but in practice, not just in theory) others to build in the ecosystem or through education and helping other bridge the gap and make their first steps.

It is essential that all proposals include clearly defined and quantifiable key performance indicators (KPIs). This will enable the evaluation of the project’s impact in the future and provide future grantees with valuable insights and lessons learned from the execution of previous projects.

When it comes to software, we are firmly committed to supporting open-source, decentralized, and permissionless systems that prioritize the security and privacy of the users. While we acknowledge that certain compromises may be necessary in certain cases (such as with most Layer 2 solutions today), we will always give preference to proposals that align more closely with these values when presented with multiple options.

What types of grant applications do you think will help achieve Intent #2?

This season I would like to see much more experimentation with novel use cases and technologies:

  • more gaming-related projects,
  • novel uses of NFTs,
  • smart application of AI (in governance for example),
  • experimentation around OPStack and Superchain
  • new metrics/patterns/dashboards/guidelines to analyse onchain activity
  • integration and cooperation between different OP-chains
  • new tooling to make building in Optimism easier and more effective
  • advanced developer tooling (like more sophisticated block explorers, etc.) that enhance developer experience and makes it easier to build, test and deploy software on Optimism
  • tools and resources that facilitate maintenance of Optimism rollup, like tooling that helps run an in-house Optimism validator node and monitor for the issues, in the future the possibility to submit fraud proofs

Please disclose any anticipated conflicts of interest:

I don’t think there are any existing personal conflicts of interest. If there are any during my tenure, I will immediately reveal them.

As L2BEAT, we are running a research and analytics platform for the L2 ecosystem (https://l2beat.com/ 1) so obviously any competing project could be considered as posing a conflict of interest. However, in all cases, I will work closely with the projects for their best interest and best interest of the Optimism and Ethereum ecosystems.

Furthermore, as L2BEAT we might be applying for Optimism grants as well - in such cases, I will abstain from voting and will not engage in the Council discussions on this specific proposal.

Please verify that you agree to abide by the Code of Conduct 2: Yes

Please verify that you understand KYC will be required to receive Council rewards at the end of Season 4: Yes

Please verify that you are able to commit ~20 hours / week to reviewing grant applications and other Council operations: Yes


On top of the standard form, I would like to present my perspective on what I would like to achieve in Season 4 as a reviewer.

First of all, I understand my job as a Grants Council reviewer is not only to do a fair assessment of the applications that are submitted for the next Grants cycle.

I believe it starts with spreading the word that we have such a grant program and reaching out to all perspective builders who may be interested in building innovative and useful things on top of Optimism. I’ve already reached out directly to prospective projects last season and it proved to be very effective, this season I’d like to double those efforts.

In addition, I would like to schedule a quick 1-1 call with each applicant to explain what we are looking for in these applications, how we evaluate projects, and how the proposal can be improved to better fit the goals of this grant program and the overall vision of Optimism. I found such calls very helpful last season, I’ve also practiced it in other grant programs I’ve been involved with in the past, and I’d like to experiment with it this season in this Grant Council. Of course, this requires a significant amount of time, so I’m not even proposing that this be a standard practice for the entire Council, but rather my own experiment - and of course I’ll share my experiences from this experiment with others so that we can decide if and how to include this as a practice in future grant programs.

Finally, in reviewing applications from previous seasons, I have noticed that there are some similarities between certain “types” of grant applications. I would like to try to help applicants learn about previous similar applications so that they can excel in their own proposals.

There are also two other areas where we could improve in terms of Grants Council results. The first is working on practices and schemas to hold applicants accountable - we already made a big step forward in this area last season with the introduction of the Benchmark Framework, now we should evaluate how it is working and try to improve it. The other is to popularize the impact of our work. We should make it more visible how much impact Optimism Grants have already made, and we should be proud of all the great projects we’ve helped build. We need to make sure we have some space to brag about grantees. While both are probably outside the scope of this Grant Council focus, I will keep them in mind and try to provide some feedback on both.

In summary, if I am selected for next Season’s Grant Council, I will focus not only on selecting the best project to fund but also on experimenting with our processes and helping to make those processes better and more efficient in the future.

7 Likes

Builder’s Subcommittee Application: Oxytocin

Council sub-committee: Builders

If you are a delegate, please provide the link to your delegate commitment: Delegate Commitments - #163 by Oxytocin

If you are a delegate, please indicate what % of votable supply is delegated to you: (voting power can be referenced here ) 0.00% (I however represented ParaSwap on Season 3 on the Protocol Delegation Programme)

If you are a delegate, please indicate your voting participation rate in OP governance to date: 100% vote rate for Agora Votes (when I begun participating in governance), 3% overall vote rate

Please link to your voting history and any voting rationale you’ve shared: Oxytocin - Delegate Communication Thread

Please outline any other contributions to the Optimism ecosystem to date:

  • Participated as an Active delegate and Protocol Delegate
  • Applied for a Phase 1 Grant in Season 1
  • Spearheaded the inclusion of PSP onto Optimism, as well as integrations of ParaSwap in the Optimism landscape.

Do you have a technical background? If so, please elaborate:
While I am able to understand how things work on a technical basis (such as smart contracts, DeFi infrastructures and the Ethereum systems/Optimistic Rollups), my limited coding skills are not relevant to Web3 , as my background before working with DAOs was mostly Academic.

Have you previously served on a Token House Council or committee? If so, please specify which: No

Please demonstrate any experience you believe is relevant to this role:

As discussed previously on the topic of the Protocol Delegation Programme, one of the key ideas which lead to the creation of this initiative was to encourage the participation of more protocol-aligned individuals to the DAO. After getting acquainted with the structure of the Token House during Season 3, I believe that the expertise built during my time with ParaSwap would be helpful in the Grants Council!

To be more specific, some of the relevant expertise includes:

  • Ease participating in the usual DAO environments, such as Discourse and Discord. This can be seen both on my forum activity here as well as on ParaSwap Discourse.
  • Awareness of the Optimism Ecosystem and wider DeFi environment.
  • Willingness to communicate with Council Peers and applicants on how to best proceed with a certain application.

Finally, as a only first-time applicant for the subcommittee I am participating in, I believe that my new perspectives will allow for different angles to be considered when working on the Council this Season, which will both help provide a fresh perspective in how each applicant is assessed , as well as the procedure running the grants council!

Please demonstrate expertise relevant to your Council sub-committee: (if applicable)

In addition to being familiar with the daily challenges of running and building a Web3 project, as an aggregator ParaSwap tends to be frequently used by new projects through integrations and inclusion in the routing process.

This experience both with building a project and seeing new projects being made on a daily basis is very important when assessing qualitatively a project, which is even more important in the Builders subcommittee as these projects tend to be less established than those in the Growth one.

Please describe your philosophy on what makes a good Governance Fund grant:
Other than the pre -requisites needed for a project for this category, I believe the most important part of a good grant is one that helps build a thriving and promising ecosystem.

Of course, there are the usual due diligence requirements that make an application stand out, such as a thorough explanation of the project, reasonable budget and well-known developers, but these grants should ideally be granted to members that will either stay in the Optimism Collective in the long term or will setup a good environment for others that are wishing to stay in the future.

With the introduction of Co-granting this season, I believe that this criteria is more important than ever. Now that collective members can participate in co-granting, it will be our role as Council Members to be critical of any potential shortcomings of projects, as well as communicate with grantees and token house members about the current appicants.

What types of grant applications do you think will help achieve Intent #2?
When predicting how the future will look, we humans are notoriously bad at seeing how things will develop despite it looking obvious in hindsight. This makes it hard to know what Novel Applications are around the corner, especially in the Builders subcommittee where these projects are aiming towards the future. However, regardless on the What, I think they will all leverage one of the following How:

  • Using the Superchain environment to build applications that were previously less likely in a one-size-fits-all system
  • Leverage attestations, trust scores and other measures of on-chain identity to create stronger communities
  • Abstract the complexity of blockchain systems away, allowing for a clearer understanding of the OP stack and allowing builders to build even more complex applications thanks to this newfound clarity!
  • Create applications that use the power of blockchains such as decentralisation and trustlessness, all while the end-user almost not noticing it! Just like we currently do not notice the complex TCP/IP system when navigating the web or using an IoT device, I believe the ecosystem is mature enough to start seeing more of these ‘only Web3 on the back’ applications

Please disclose any anticipated conflicts of interest:
Of course, if any protocol looks like it could be a competitor of ParaSwap, even indirectly, I will make sure to express that as clearly as possible and minimize my engagement with this project. As someone involved with ParaSwap and a Protocol Delegate, this would be a clear conflict of interest I would seek to avoid.

Please verify that you agree to abide by the Code of Conduct : Yes

Please verify that you understand KYC will be required to receive Council rewards at the end of Season 4: Yes

Please verify that you are able to commit ~20 hours / week to reviewing grant applications and other Council operations: Yes

7 Likes

The nomination period is now closed. Valid nominations will be added to the voting roundup.

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i bileave op hs best l2 in all l2 eth

What does NPS mean here?

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apologies - NPS is short for ‘net promoter score’, often considered among the highest-signal questions one can ask on a feedback survey.

Applicant projects were asked this and gave the Grant Council a 9.3 out of 10 on average. This is considered very high.

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To further clarify, all grant recipients in Cycle 10 & 11 were required to fill out a feedback form before receiving their grant distributions.

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Does this mean the Councils S3 NPS refelcts the sentiment of only those projects approved for funding?

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