OP Application
Council sub-committee: Builder
If you are a delegate, please provide the link to your delegate commitment: Not a delegate.
If you are a delegate, please indicate what % of votable supply is delegated to you: N/A
If you are a delegate, please indicate your voting participation rate in OP governance to date: N/A
Please link to your voting history and any voting rationale you’ve shared: N/A
Please outline any other contributions to the Optimism ecosystem to date:
I have not actively worked within Optimism or crypto in an official capacity but have been on Optimism since the very beginning and was a recipient of the first OP airdrop. I began to really pay attention to Optimism when I discovered Velodrome and their community back in July 2022. Since then I have continued to learn and explore the ecosystem as it has developed over the last year and a half.
Do you have a technical background? If so, please elaborate:
I have a bachelors in engineering and work as a software developer / business analyst in my current role.
I work primarily with React, Vue, Javascript, Python, SQL mostly scripting or working to develop new applications or enhancing current applications within the business.
Have you previously served on a Token House Council or committee? If so, please specify which:
N/A
Please demonstrate any experience you believe is relevant to this role:
I have been in crypto since mid 2020 and have learned a lot about the technology, various ecosystems and apps. I have kept in the loop with new developments on almost a daily basis through various podcasts or YouTube videos such as Bankless, The Daily Gwei or keeping up with various projects through Discord.
As a developer in my current role, I build applications but I also meet with stakeholders and work with them to understand their business needs to manage new projects from start to finish.
Please demonstrate expertise relevant to your Council sub-committee: (if applicable)
As a developer and someone who loves crypto and economics, I believe this would help in evaluating grant applications since I would have the technical knowledge to evaluate the project as well as the broad crypto understanding to be able to determine the effectiveness and purpose of a given project and how it compares to other projects in that specific vertical.
Please describe your philosophy on what makes a good Governance Fund grant:
The “SMART” (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound) framework is a great way to begin on how to best evaluate if a grant does not only makes sense but will be effective. Detailed goals with measurable outcomes should be the foundation for any grant, ensuring that any worthy contribution to the Optimism ecosystem is rewarded and scaled according to the impact being delivered by the project.
A good grant should be focused on achieving desired intents of Season 5. A better grant should go above and beyond that, not only delivering a key intent but multiple intents or have second or third order benefits is even better.
What types of Mission Requests do you think will help achieve the Season 5 Intents?
In terms of moving towards technical decentralization, I believe projects focused on decentralizing sequencing are important as well as projects providing auditing services and technical support. The best way to ruin a party is a new hot app that goes live without sufficient auditing to only get exploited and leave a bad taste for users, especially if they are new to crypto.
For growing the Superchain, I believe that Optimism needs projects that further research interoperability tech. Also in terms of UI/UX, projects focusing on account abstraction is important to build better experiences for the end user and make it simple for less tech savvy people to experience apps on various OP chains.
For improving consumer experience, I believe improving UI/UX of crypto is key. Since I’ve been in crypto, I’ve seen some moderate improvements in UI/UX from wallets and various applications, however if we are to grow and get more people onchain then we need projects that do the following:
- take a simplified approach to their frontend (where possible)
- projects that display a clear understanding of what the app does
- goes out of its way to assist users and minimizes mistakes on part of the user.
Furthermore projects working on account abstraction is an important focus in order to achieve this Season’s Intent to improve customer experience.
Lastly on this point of consumer experience I would love to see novel applications working on areas outside of Defi. I love Defi but I do think that in bear market lulls, having “evergreen” type applications with real world use cases, or other practical applications would assist future user retention during boring or brutal bear markets, where application success and user growth doesn’t depend on price action would be great to see.
As far as Improving Governance, I believe that it is important to grow how many users come onchain but also stay onchain. Whenever the next bull market arrives, it will be even more difficult to measure the true success of user retention until that bull market ends. This is where projects that not only increase governance participation but also education users on key crypto values such as decentralization, importance of retro PGF, Ethereum aligned values, avoiding scams etc is key in order to grow not only users by number but users by quality. Users that will stick around when prices go down, that will help grow the community and further enrich the Optimism ecosystem.
Please disclose any anticipated conflicts of interest: None
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 5: Yes
Please verify that you are able to commit ~20 hours / week to reviewing grant applications and other Council operations: Yes