Season 8 begins on July 24th and runs through December 24th. The New Protocol Upgrade process will go into effect on August 1st.
Please read Governance in Season 8: The Next Phase for additional context on Season 8 updates.
Don’t want to read? Join the upcoming community call for an overview of Season 8.
You can find all community calls and other dates on the public governance calendar.
Celebrating Season 7 Accomplishments
- Thank you to all governance participants that contributed in Season 7. You have played a critical role in bootstrapping the Collective’s governance system. You can find retro rewards for Season 7 Coming Soon Rewards are made in accordance with the Collective Rewards Framework.
- In Season 7, we made important steps towards decentralization milestones, which have been updated to reflect Season 8 changes.
- Governance passed 6 protocol upgrades
- Maintenance upgrades (optimistic approval) were introduced to react to L1 hard forks or to perform bugfixes and maintenance on a shorter timeframe
- The first onchain token transfers were executed
- The Milestones and Metrics Council managed grant delivery, largely replacing the Foundation in this process
- The Budget Board was introduced, bringing the first portions of economic policy online
- OP Labs published a public roadmap and SUP process
- Governance approved staking a portion of sequencer ETH to earn yield for the Collective
- 14 OP Chains were onboarded to Optimism Governance via the Chain Delegation Program
- The Grants Council, Retro Funding, and Futarchy experiments all worked towards pre-defined and measurable success metrics
- The Collective participated in a futarchy experiment to better understand different methods of making predictions
- Guest voter experiments continued to further understand different Citizenship selection methods
- The Foundation published regular updates on our working models for decentralization and joined community calls to discuss progress with the community
How did we get here? Seasons 1 - 7
- Season 1 Theme: Genesis and unstructured community grants
- Season 2 Theme: Establishing structure with grant committees
- Season 3 Theme: Refining structure with the Grants Council
- Season 4 Theme: Working as a Collective (Introduction of Missions, Intents, and Trust Tiers)
- Season 5 Theme: Governance resiliency (Introduction of the Security Council, Law of Chains, Developer Advisory Board, and Anticapture Commission)
- Season 6 Theme: Optimizing to support the Superchain (Streamlining of Mission process and other structures, Blockspace Charters, Superchain grants, Chain Delegation Program)
- Season 7 Theme: Shared success (Alignment around singular Intent and common Mission framework, introduction of Success Metrics)
The evolution of Seasons are based on 100’s of pieces of feedback documented by the Foundation throughout the Season, reports and analysis conducted by the community, periodic feedback surveys, public feedback threads, the Collective Feedback Commission, retrospectives conducted by community representatives, etc.
Season 8 Theme: Purpose-built governance
The purpose of Optimism governance is to reduce platform risk for the Collective’s stakeholders.
Platform risk is the risk to a customer or user that a platform they depend on changes against their interests. It is a common risk of Web 2 platforms and is a key consideration for the largest partners building on the OP Stack.
Season 8 introduces several big governance updates that enable our governance system to transition from being “general-purpose” to “purpose-built,” resulting in a system optimized to reduce platform risk for customers and users of the Superchain. See Governance in Season 8: The Next Phase for more info.
In Season 8, all contributors to the Collective will leverage this purpose-built governance system to execute on a core pillar of our Superchain Product Vision: Interoperability.
Intents
Intents are high level goals. Please see the Season 8 Intents for full details.
There are three main objectives that will allow us to achieve this intent.
- Ship Interop
- Grow TVL on the Superchain
- Drive Developer Adoption of Interop
Missions
Collective contributors work towards the Intents by executing Missions. Missions are specific initiatives aimed at making measurable progress towards the Intent. They are clearly scoped, and can be executed by Collective contributors start-to-finish in less than 12 months.
In Season 8, Missions are organized under each objective and may be supported by the Governance Fund or Retroactive Public Goods Funding, as outlined below.
Token Allocation
All incentive programs and the chain delegation program for Season 8 will be available to chains on a fully-standard, governance-approved release of the OP Stack and that have opted into the Security Council (or are on track to). This corresponds to the green + yellow chains (see Superchain Index.)
| Project | Budget Proposed by Budget Board | Fund | Who selects projects? (Module I) | Who evaluates impact? (Module H) | When is impact evaluated? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Onchain Builders | TBD | Retroactive Public Goods Funding | All eligible projects can participate | OSO | Regularly throughout Season |
| Developer Tooling | TBD | Retroactive Public Goods Funding | All eligible projects can participate | OSO | Regularly throughout Season |
| OP Stack Dependencies | TBD | Retroactive Public Goods Funding | All eligible projects can participate | OSO | Regularly throughout Season |
| Governance Fund: Grants Council | TBD | Governance Fund | Grants Council | Milestones and Metrics Council and/or Open Source Observer | At the end of the Season |
| Governance Fund: Futarchy | TBD | Governance Fund | Contest outcomes | Milestones and Metrics Council and/or Open Source Observer | At the end of the Season |
| Governance Fund: Developer Advisory Board | TBD | Governance Fund | Developer Advisory Board | Milestones and Metrics Council and/or Open Source Observer | At the end of the Season |
Councils, Boards, and Commissions
- All Councils and Boards will operate on 12 month terms
- The Grants Council, Developer Advisory Board, and Security Council are all persistent Councils expected to continue in Season 8 & 9 unless a Dissolution proposal is put forward and approved as outlined in the Operating Manual. Details about the Council and Board renewal process can be found here.
- Guidance for Councils, Commissions, and Boards can be found here. Additional information about elections will be posted to the forum soon.
Updates to Citizenship
- As of Season 8, we’ve arrived at a public definition of Citizenship. Three categories of Optimism stakeholders will be represented in the Citizens’ House: chains, apps and end-users. You can read more about the full definition and eligibility requirements in the gov docs.
- Past Citizens can register for Season 8 if they meet the definition of being an end-user (having been active on the Superchain in at least 3 of the past 6 months).
Important Voting Changes
- Please see Operating Manual for full details
Progress Towards Decentralization
- See updated Decision Diagram and Decentralization Milestones (additional context on updates can be found in the comment here.)
- The Foundation will continue to post mid-point and end of season progress updates on milestones
See the Season 8 Reflection Period Guide for detailed outline of what delegates and Citizens need to do during the Reflection Period.
We understand delegates have other commitments and may need to step away. Please see the Delegate Resignation Process.