Guide to Season 9
Season 9 begins on January 29th and runs through June 3rd.
We’re excited to embark on Season 9! Please read Season 9: From Experiment to Organization for additional context on Season 9 updates. Below we outline what this means for governance participants in more detail.
Want the TLDR? Join the upcoming community call on January 20th for an overview and Q&A
You can find all community calls and other dates on the public governance calendar.
Celebrating Season 8 Accomplishments
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Thank you to all governance participants that contributed in Season 8. You have played a critical role in establishing and refining the Collective’s governance system.
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In Season 8, we made important steps towards decentralization milestones, which have been updated to reflect changes to be introduced throughout Season 9.
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Governance passed 2 protocol upgrades using our new protocol upgrade process
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The Governor Contract is now controlled by the Security Council
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Councils and Boards moved to 12 month election and budgeting terms, streamlining operations and reducing governance overhead
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The Budget Board was ratified and proposed the first ever DAO Operating Budget as well as proposing Mission Budgets in place of the Foundation
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The Collective earned 80.03 ETH in yield (as of 1/6/26) and ran a public RFP process to stake additional ETH with LST (Congrats to Etherfi!)
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The Foundation published regular updates on our working models for decentralization
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How did we get here? Seasons 1 - 8
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Season 1 Theme: Genesis and unstructured community grants
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Season 2 Theme: Establishing structure with grant committees
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Season 3 Theme: Refining structure with the Grants Council
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Season 4 Theme: Working as a Collective (Introduction of Missions, Intents, and Trust Tiers)
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Season 5 Theme: Governance resiliency (Introduction of the Security Council, Law of Chains, Developer Advisory Board, and Anticapture Commission)
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Season 6 Theme: Optimizing to support the Superchain (Streamlining of Mission process and other structures, Blockspace Charters, Superchain grants, Chain Delegation Program)
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Season 7 Theme: Shared success (Alignment around singular Intent and common Mission framework, introduction of Success Metrics)
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Season 8 Theme: Purpose-built governance (Protocol Upgrades 2.0, ETH Staking, Budget Board)
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, retrospectives conducted by community representatives, etc.
Season 9 Theme: From Experiment to Organization
Over the past year, we introduced a refined process for governing the OP Stack (Protocol Upgrades 2.0) aimed at reducing platform risk. Over the next six months, we’ll gradually introduce an updated process for governing the treasury (Capital Allocation 2.0) to prevent short term extraction at the expense of long term innovation (aka enshittification.)
Thanks to the hard work of all contributors of the Collective, we have arrived at an initial design that we believe will allow Optimism to adapt quickly, remain competitive, and avoid the common failure modes of both web 2 and web 3. Over the next few months, we’ll take momentous steps towards solidifying this initial design on our original four-year timeline. The Foundation - with governance oversight - will continue to monitor, refine, and update the design to ensure the Collective continuously adapts, innovates, and evolves over time.
Intents
Intents are high level goals that the entire Collective works towards. We experimented with having the entire Collective rally around Intents in Seasons 4-8. While helpful in clarifying scope for external contributors, we encountered the following challenges:
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Our product and strategy is still rapidly evolving in response to customer feedback and market developments, making it unrealistic to commit to a singular focus for 6-12 months
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As we reduce the Collective’s dependency on disparate external contributions, it is less meaningful as a strategic alignment tool
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As we streamline governance operations, we realized that ratification of the Intent was not an integral, or enforceable, part of the governance surface area
The Foundation will not propose an Intent in Season 9 or future Seasons.
Missions
Collective contributors will continue to work towards pre-determined success metrics by executing Missions. Missions are specific initiatives aimed at making measurable progress towards pre-defined metrics. Missions are clearly scoped, and can be executed by Collective contributors start-to-finish in six months. In Season 9, Missions will be supported by the Governance Fund.
| Project | Budget Proposed by Budget Board | Fund | Who selects projects? (Module I) | Who evaluates impact? (Module H) | When is impact evaluated? |
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| Governance Fund: Grants Council | 3.89M OP | Governance Fund | Grants Council | Open Source Observer | At the end of the Season |
| Governance Fund: Developer Advisory Board | 0.98M OP | Governance Fund | Developer Advisory Board | Open Source Observer | At the end of the Season |
Community-Led Grant Experiments and Contribution Paths
In order to support Optimism’s continued evolution and enterprise strategy, the Foundation believes it is necessary to conclude community-led grant experiments. These experiments have played a critical role in bootstrapping the Collective and have greatly informed the refined design of the capital allocation system. However, community-led capital allocation no longer aligns with our current business or governance strategy (see Season 9: From Experiment to Organization), which also informs our decision to pause the Retro Funding program.
As in a public company, the primary role of governance will be holding OP Labs accountable. Unlike the original vision of DAOs, the role of governance will not be to enable the broader community to drive progress themselves - via capital allocations or open contributions - but rather to empower voters to ensure those entrusted with this responsibility (OP Labs) perform well. See Season 9: From Experiment to Organization for more details.
Tactically, this means
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All Councils will operate as usual through Season 9, according to the Charters approved in Season 8.
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The Foundation will propose the dissolution of the Grants Council and Milestones and Metrics Council, subject to governance approval, at the end of Season 9.
- As critical components of the upgrade process, the Developer Advisory Board and the Security Council will continue to operate with no proposed change to their operations.
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The Foundation will not propose any Retro Funding Missions in Season 9 or 10.
- As Optimism enters a new phase focused on execution, scale, and enterprise adoption, the Retro Funding program will not run for at least 12 months to reevalaute how it fits into Optimism’s long term strategy. Public goods remain core to Optimism’s vision. This decision reflects the need to focus on the core public good Optimism provides in developing and maintaining the OP Stack. See full announcement here.
- To reflect the above changes in strategy, a proposal to re-allocate all or a portion of the tokens reserved for Retro Funding (~775M OP), and/or other uses, will be put forward by the Foundation during Season 9.
The Foundation has also adapted our communty-led approach to support, deprecating the following contribution paths: supNERDs, numbaNERDs, and techNERDs. While we still believe grassroots, community initiatives are valuable, we’ve redirected our focus away from these programs for two key reasons:
- Enterprise clients require a simplified and streamlined approach to support
- The governance surface area will be much smaller than we originally thought, meaning, we’ll have less of a need for community focused analytics.
Please note that the govNERDs will continue operating as usual through Season 9, at which point we will conduct a retrospective and evaluate ongoing needs.
All contributions to date have been extremely valuable in the development of the Collective. It is only through these contributions that we’ve been able to experiment with different structures, strategies, and governance responsibilities. Each NERD and Council/Board member has been critical in helping the Collective arrive at the clarity needed to design a new, and improved, type of organization to support the Superchain.
Updates to Citizenship
- The same three categories of Optimism stakeholders will continue to be represented in the Citizens’ House: chains, apps and end-users. You can read more about the full definition and eligibility requirements in Optimism Documentation .
Progress Towards Decentralization
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See updated Decision Diagram and Decentralization Milestones. We expect these to continue to evolve along with the Collective.
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The Foundation will continue to post mid-point and end of season progress updates on milestones
See the Season 9: Reflection Period Guide - #2 for detailed outline of what delegates and Citizens need to do during the Reflection Period.
As we arrive at an initial design by the end of Season 9, we expect to move into a much steadier state of governance. By design, this state should require much less time, participation, and effort among governance participants. As we’ve established a regular cadence of incorporating key stakeholder feedback, we expect the system to be able to continue to evolve without dedicated Reflection Periods. Accordingly, this will be the Collective’s last dedicated Reflection Period and Voting Cycles will continue uninterrupted beginning June 3rd.
As an example of ongoing engagement outside of Reflection Periods, we expect to host two workshops with select delegates and other stakeholders on two important strategy topics throughout Season 9: alternative revenue streams and the OP token. The Foundation will reach out to select governance participants with more details shortly.