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