Grants Council Reviewer Nominations: Season 4

🏛 Token House Governance Elections
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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

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