Firstly, I really like @latruite.ethās idea of an Intent to bring regen into the foreground even more, thatās the side of Optimism that got me interested in the first place and why I want to involvedā¦ but I thought it was still worth posting another alternative.
Rather than Public Goods, how about an Intent focused on Public Bads?!
This would fund Missions focused on identifying, understanding and minimizing the effects of possible future disasters in Optimism.
My background is in astrophysics, where a perfectly legitimate field of study is the risk of asteroid impacts. In astrophysics and astronomy this primarily means trying to identify all the Near Earth Objects, but other studies have looked at the best ways to deflect an asteroid (which is probably by āGravity Tractorā, if you ever need to knowā¦), long period comets, asteroid composition and other aspects of the danger.
A more obvious analogy to the kind of thing this Intent might resemble might be the IPCC and other organizations studying Climate Change. There is a big, existential risk to the planet, so we fund people to study it and come up with possible solutions. Iām suggesting we fund research into existential risks to the crypto ecosystem weāre playing in.
In Optimismās context examples of different types of mission might include things like:
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Identifying unsustainable DeFi applications for which a significant number of the participants misunderstand the risk (e.g. scenarios like Iron/Titan or Terra/Luna etc);
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Subsidizing bug bounties for smaller projects with small budgets that have grown quickly and now have a significant potential reward vs effort for attackers;
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Examine potentially exploitative interactions between otherwise safe projects and work with teams to generate solutions (similar to how OpenZepplin is used by Synthetix and others to reduce risk of things like flash loan attacks);
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Explore L1 risks and fund L1 teams working on solutions, ranging from potential attestation capture of the Beacon Chain to regulatory changes causing mass validator exits and the associated reduced security for Ethereum;
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Study and educate on specific L2 risks, answering questions like whether there is some unforeseen attack surface introduced with Cannon or whatever other future upgrades;
Iām sure you can think of loads more things on along the same vein, these are just illustrations of the kind of thing I mean.
I also think this idea fits well into the model of Collective Intents as it would naturally lead to broad spanning alliances between disparate groups and individuals. No one is an expert on every aspect of all the different dApps, and rollup construction, and L1 clients etc, so it should lead to interesting mixes of experts working together. This in turn may inspire interesting ideas for collaborations and future building, in addition to the immediate objectives associated with the Mission being worked on.