One of the key tensions for grants experiments has been that it has historically sat in a kind of No Man’s Land in terms of objective.
Historically, the Grants Council has deferred to Foundation’s strategic goals for a given grants season. In practice, this has presented a lot of challenges – goals determined by Foundation would change frequently or would be underdeveloped.
A good example of this was the Superchain Grants in 2024, which provided 12m OP to support members of the Superchain that were not Optimism itself. This program encountered a lot of challenges, in part because Foundation’s definition of who was in the Superchain (and who within the Superchain was eligible) kept shifting even as the process was ongoing. This led to a confusing experience by partner chain applicants and meant that a significant grants program expense was not tightly focused on a particular deliverable.
The Grants Council has also struggled with the lack of clear strategic direction of Optimism. There have been consistent calls from various members of the community for quite a while to see an updated business plan. That business plan has never been articulated clearly other than a focus on growing the Superchain (still very loosely defined and in flux) and maximizing sequencer revenue (no other plans for monetization or strategic expansion into other businesses have been announced).
That is why
is such a difficult statement to understand. What is the current business strategy? How is it different from the past business strategy?
History being our guide, it seems clear what is needed is either a clear, communicated strategic plan provided that Grants Council can support or for Foundation to step back and let governance determine its own strategic plans for Optimism. Neither of these are what recent years of Token House-based grants programs have been.
If Foundation/Labs are dissatisfied with the output of community-led grant experiments, then it is important to be honest about the level of “leading” that was done by the community – in the context of Token House grants, they have long been Foundation-led grant experiments.
Our recommendation is to either commit to very clear, stable, narrow mandates for Grants Council to focus upon, or entirely leave strategic direction up to the GC.
Because GFX Labs has historically tried to stay out of Citizens House affairs, we cannot comment on Retro Funding. Generally, we do agree with the decision to pause it.