Jack anorak - delegate communication thread

🏛 Token House Governance Delegate Updates
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I scatter my opinions everywhere but will try to maintain an ongoing record in a single place.

Current votes are on the Grants Council, the Protocol Delegation Program, and Badgeholder votes.

I voted for the grants council and the protocol delegation program – I’ve been an advocate for movement in these directions, and these are really thoroughly thought out. Feedback sessions on these have been fun and constructive.

Re badgeholders: everyone on the list is fantastic; choosing between them seems futile. The only real alternative I could imagine to voting for the individuals I nominated, which I’m doing, is voting for everyone, which felt unhelpful.

The one exception I’m granting myself is voting for Juanbug because he went an extra step and asked for my support. We also go back – he’d been following veDao and volunteered to be on our multisig (didn’t happen), and that’s always stuck with me as an example of enthusiastic, proactive citizenship.

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Going to go back and outline previous votes in anticipation of a self-nomination for grants council.

~ Aug 1 votes:

Proposals in this cycle (4) were, as in previous cycles, heavily weighted toward liquidity mining, which at that time seemed well timed to bring a wave of users from other ecosystems. In mid July, activity on OP started to heat up, and the thinking was that good liq mining would have gotten us the ‘Rush’ moment people missed in early June. It was in the aftermath of this (and some of the more egregious proposals) that I started to take a harder line on liquidity mining and suggesting alternatives.

Byte Mason - For. Background aside (and anyone who’s followed knows I have some personal experience in what occurred with Solidly), they laid out a decent case for bringing on Fantom users. Standards for grants at the time were abysmally low, and they more than cleared them. In hindsight, I’d have worked with them to refine the ask, but turning them down was a miss.

xToken Terminal et al - Abstained despite arguing against its passing. I can’t remember why I did instead of voting against.

Beefy Finance - For. I reasoned it was a massive player that promised to add utility to other projects and bring people. It has.

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dHedge - Voted For, though the revised proposal later on was stronger.

Rocket Pool - For. The calculus was simple: liquid staking was guaranteed use, and better rates would migrate these core, sticky Eth derivatives over.

Committee Votes
Voted for all committees except DeFi Committee C.

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Cycle 6

Reasoning behind DeFi proposals can be found here: DeFi Shadow Committee: Season 2 Recommendations

Tarot For.
Kromatika Against.
Interest Protocol For.
dHEDGE For.
Revert For.

Others.
Across Protocol For.
OptiChads For, though this was a tough one. I was deeply skeptical about the likely success of the approach, but it seemed like a fine enough proposal to get some data on.
Others:
Socket, Abstain. Just didn’t get enough information on it.
Bankless, Abstain. This seemed like something better for an RFP but I wasn’t read up enough.
Otterspace. Against based on recommendations.

Cycle 7

Reasoning behind DeFi is here.
Yearn Against.
Overnight.fi For.
Overtime For.
Tarot For.
Alchemix Abstain.
Sushi Abstain.
Abracadabra Against.

Other
Li.Fi For, following rec.
Dope Wars Abstain. Couldn’t get the info i needed in time.
Karma - For, following rec.
Otterspace - Abstain, couldn’t get to DD in time, probably could have just moved to follow recommendation.

Cycle 8

Alchemix - Got improved more or less up to standard.
Arrakis - This lacked the necessary detail.
Curve - This, on the other hand, had footnotes.
Symphony - Against. I laid out my thinking pretty exhaustively in the proposal thread.
Homora - Against. This was a poorly done proposal with limited likely positive impact.
PoolTogether - For. You pour gas on the things that are working.
Angle - Abstain. It didn’t seem great, but I couldn’t articulate a good reason to say no, when the core primitive is so useful. I think I could have stuck my neck out more on this one.
InsureDAO - Against. Let’s see the model work first.
Overnight - For, following logic from earlier.
Socket - For, following recs.
EthernautDAO - For. @Gonna.eth even offered to return unused OP!
Tally Ho - Against, following rec.
Messari - Abstain, following rec.
Ambire Against. By this point I’d gotten skeptical of wallet solutions without a clear view of winners.
Mochi For, following rec.
Velodrome - For. I’m proud of the work our team put into this one.

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special cycle 9b

protocol delegation

I voted revert, qidao, thales, beethoven, polynomial, kwenta, lyra, ens, dhedge, agora, and li fi because they’d all shown promise in engaging governance. For the rest, I either didn’t know them well or hadn’t seen any meaningful engagement in governance up to now.

grant council, growth experiments

i voted gfx labs, matt, michael, doug, fig, solarcurve, and katie. these are individuals and orgs i think would be thoughtful in moving governance from a reactive to a proactive positioning when it comes to making growth grants. we’ve correctly taken a few lumps for underperforming on a number of these grants, and i’m glad these ppl were in the running to shape things up

grant council, builder grants

voted for dhannte, krzysztof, juanbug, and myself. these are the people in the running who i think would have the subject matter expertise and good judgment to foster the kind of building that will set Optimism apart from other ecosystems and move it toward its broader, loftier goals

excited for this next step.

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voted for bedrock and code of conduct enforcement

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Protocol Delegation Renewal
Summary: This poll seeks to renew the OP Foundation program of delegating voting power to the most gas-intensive protocols on Optimism.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. This is something I’ve been a pretty strong advocate for throughout - we want a broader set of voices in governance, and the people behind the protocols have some of the best perspective on how best to direct resources to meet Optimism’s goals. Delegating them tokens is only one piece of this; for the experiment to work we also must increase the impact of voting on outcomes for OP>

Intent #1 Budget Proposal
Summary: This poll seeks to affirm governance support for Intent 1: Progress Towards Technical Decentralization and a 1,000,000 OP budget for grants related to it.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. This is part of Optimism’s key reason for being and competitive advantage. We should absolutely get buyin around this.
Intent #2 Council Budget Proposal
Summary: This proposal seeks to renew the Grants Council. It largely expands on the previous Season’s budget and scope, with some additional operational costs that are required for ongoing work.

Recommendation: Vote Yes. I was on Grant Council and will likely run again for next season. I’ve seen how voting and research have worked both pre grant council and in last season, and this budget would help us capitalize on the work we’ve been doing for the Collective.

Intent #3 Budget Proposal
Summary: This poll seeks to affirm governance support for Intent 3: Spread Awareness of the Optimistic Vision and a 1,000,000 OP budget for grants related to it.

Recommendation: Vote Abstain. I just think this suffered from a lack of planning or scoping. There’s going to have ot be a lot of work to prevent useless grant application, and now as far as I can tell, it’ll be up to governance to determine what works best for us. It’ll be an uphill climb.

I registered onchain as “For” but am unable to change the vote. In any case, this is one where we’ll have to be careful to make sure we’re funding the right stuff.

Intent #4 Budget Proposal
Recommendation: Vote For
Not sure what’s going to get funded as a result of this, but it’s worth the experiment for sure.

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for this past special election:

voted

FOR the inflation adjustment proposal – although it’s not in itself a huge needle mover, i think signals the kinds of things we could be able to accomplish as governance. i wouldn’t mind pushing this a bit more in future proposals.

and FOR the treasury appropriation – i’ve been pretty vocally skeptical about a few things with OP tokenomics and we’re i think in early innings wrt what we ought to do, but I think the Foundation get it and are working toward something we can all get behind.

and ABSTAINED from the grant council votes…but on accident. I would have voted for the existing grant council members on both growth and builders. I’m proud of the work we’ve done, and Dane’s been fantastic as a leader. Really looking forward to the new mandates this coming season – the two groups here are highly aligned and motivated.

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Holding this spot for some strong opinions on the current slate of missions. Before i put my thoughts down, i want to signal that i’ll be preparing a broad review, for anyone who doesn’t have enough time to vet everything and is interested in what i might have to say.

In general, I recommend holding votes until late to allow proper debate to form. It’s really unfortunate (unless there’s something I’m missing) that votes are locked per epoch.

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When I started writing this, I’d had a plan to categorize everything by topic to demonstrate what was considerable overlap in missions. The delegate filtering seems to have worked, so it’s not as pronounced now, which is great!

However, there are some remaining missions here that appear as outright giveaways relative to the value they are going to create. Just because we have budget doesn’t mean we have to spend it.

I’d like to remind people: to realize Optimism’s broader vision of whole-world impact, we first have to win. ZKSync hasn’t had its airdrop, and they’re hiring. Arbitrum still has more devs, TVL, and mindshare. Other L2s with pending airdrops are going to be coming in as well, each learning from the last. Everything we do here has to be done with competition in mind, and that means running a governance process that can compete with centralized entities. I think we’re close, but the first-mover advantage that we’ve had is shrinking.

I’m not going to vote on these until the end, because I’m on a limb with some of these proposals. I’m open to being wrong on some stuff.

I’m trying to call this as I see it; I don’t want to discourage people from applying for more of these missions. We can just do a lot more to bring these into spec.

The reality is that there really hasn’t been a whole lot of thoughtful feedback on these – maybe because pushing back on stuff is unpopular? I don’t know. I can’t be one of a handful of people trying to do this stuff!

In no particular order:

Intent 3

Content creation

Fueling RetroPGF Growth through Education, Collaboration, and Active Marketing Bankless, Giveth - 130k OP AGAINST

Look at each part of this and ask yourself whether anything here is competitive.

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Let’s do this by milestone.

50k OP for

  • 500 twitter followers (gameable, low impact)
  • 30 meaningful conversations (doable for much much less resource)

34k OP for

  • 5 case studies (this is good RPGF work imo)
  • 3 blog posts, 3 videos, and 3 infographics (not competitive rate)
  • 10k page views on website (gameable)
  • 500 more twitter followers (though unclear if they mean 500 more or 500 total)

27k OP for

  • a lesson (need to see what’s representative — if it’s anything like Decentralized Exchanges | Bankless Academy, the research and copy are trivial to do and could be chatGPT’d and finished in a weekend
  • a twitter space, a newletter article, and three tweets
  • no KPI! they’re just tracking badges. no expectations set
  • integration with thank optimism, which is asking for another large sum (note: these may be related parties)

19k OP for

  • merch (note, they already have some from the current stuff so is this new design? unsure)
  • integration with pairwise (yet another related party)
  • 100k impressions of content, but this is basically a given considering the unreliability of website views. I think i might actually be with lee in trying to standardize KPIs in some minimal way

Two gitcoin passport stamps is trivially sibylable imo — it’s just an ens and a google account you need. They’d have to have stronger requirements throughout for this to be meaningful.

Bizdev

Travel

I’m just going to vote against these until i see some sort of coherent framework across all these different groups.

Front Page

Intent 1

Overall, nice variance in missions. No real grouping.

Superchain Governance Deepdive 20k (Alliance: Tally) - FOR. technical appraisals of governance on superchain, which technically doesn’t exist yet. as a general matter we should discuss this among ourselves, for free. seems slightly ahead of where we’re at. but the milestones suggest that they do intend to have a seat at the table and focus on this one particular issue, which seems worthwhile for a fundamental question

Fully Decentralized and Independent Oracle and Data FOR 150k i think this is a great initiative done by a single dev - would be really nice to see them get funding to draw some more people in.

TechNERD Program (Alliance: OP Labs) 21k FOR - yeah, this one is straightforward. some have griped that it’s weird that they’re coming to Governance for funding on this kind of thing, but I think that’s really the point of all this!

Extend the L1Block contract to store historical blockhash data (Alliance: LimeChain) 10k FOR - i’m starting to see some evidence that much of the superchain is going to be built out in a decentralized way, asnd we should offer OP Labs as much help as they can get in this direction. full support.

Future-proofing UI/UX of OP nodes (Alliance: Dappnode) FOR 50k General Magic affiliate - seems good, my fear is that this would be overspending on a simple port from other contexts, in which case we’re simply paying for distribution, which isn’t the worst thing considering their name. This is probably 2x of what we need to spend but I don’t know how to price this work. So I’ll punt to others i trust who’ve supported this.

Spearbit + Immunefi Bug Bounty Program for Large Protocols on Optimism 100k (Alliance: Spearbit + Immunefi) - ABSTAIN Being Velodrome team, I’m not directly on this but benefit from it. However, I should vote for it because I see this as a necessary step toward broad coverage on the app level. I’d really like to see upfront commitments to cover other protocols/programs. They should get more and cover other programs fully based on systemic risk.

I don’t know how to treat this in miltiple choice so idk i’m just voting everything for which i suppose just moves everything close to quorum?

Intent #4

Podcasts:
The RetroPGF Podcast (Alliance: The RetroPGF Podcast) 8k FOR

Delegate Corner Podcast (Alliance: Sinkas) 10k FOR

these are pretty clear RPGF candidates but the outlays are low enough that idk maybe some pump priming is fine, plus wouldn’t mind more ppl coming for experiments of this type

Educational courses:

Bankless Academy
English lesson: 12,000 OP
Quest development: 3,000 OP
Marketing (through BanklessDAO + Bankless Academy): 4,500 OP
Lesson upkeep: 3,000 OP
Multi-lingual tech development: 2,500 OP

IMN
IMN Coordination: 1,500 OP
Translations and Review: 3,500 OP
Multilingual content marketing: 3920 OP

I mean, think about what’s actually being done for these. 3,500 OP for a translation seems like a lot.

EDIT: After seeing the proposal’s explanation and revisiting sample outputs, I don’t think the level of quality is commensurate with the ask.

Dashboards:

  • OPdelegate.com (Alliance: OPdelegate.com 1) 85k OP FOR
    This is where I lean on my personal understanding of the people involved. I’m expecting Michael to deliver much more than this spec for the website. He has as much context as about anybody in governance, and I trust that he has the knowhow and sensibility to deliver something genuinely interesting well beyond what’s described.

  • OP Governance Analytics Dashboard (Alliance: Governance Analytics Dashboard) 24.5k AGAINST

    On the other hand, this is a proposed build by a group of people with relatively little context. If there’s going to be one of these, I’m going with what Michael has, even with the higher price tag — because he’s now accountable as a delegate.

I

Tooling:

  • Velodrome: Fostering Inclusive Governance through Leading Optimism Builders and Long-term Users - ABSTAIN I love our team.
  • REGEN Score - Attestations for the Citizen’s House (Alliance: Trusted Seed) 95k AGAINST
    why on earth do we want to be rewarding interaction with certain tokens as part of entry into citizens house
    many of which are affiliated with the team proposing this
    i think if you cut like half of these requirements this could approach being a useful thing but as it stands, is this at risk of being a means of pumping affiliated projects of the team here and capturing
    the citizens house?
    looked at a certain way, this could be a governance attack, and delegates voting for this should take a hard look at what they’re doing
  • Improving Governance Accessibility through Praise and Contribution Based Attestations (Alliance: Praise) 112k AGAINST - this is one that iirc failed on a council grant. kudos on the team for their tenacity but I don’t think this is worth the ask. (Giveth)
  • Pairwise: Tinder UX For Web3 Community Signaling (Alliance: Pairwise) AGAINST 65k - They’ve tried before to get a grant for this. Some citizens house members may disagree, but I just don’t see how this improves on the current state of things. To me the rate limiting step to improving RPGF isn’t the UI or the manner of presenting individual proposals, nor does an up-or-down vote do much other than some light filtering.
  • Economic Co-design of Gas Fees for the OP Stack (Alliance: Common Stack) 125k AGAINST -If I understand this correctly, this deserves an entire rant on why this doesn’t make any sense to fund. In short, current OP spec doesn’t have anything related to gas, this is enormous spend for what amounts to a spreadsheet product geared for a handful of users looking to speculate.
  • DAOStar: Governance standards for the Optimism ecosystem (Alliance: DAOStar Strike Team) 78k FOR color me swayed by people who I think know better than I do on this.
  • Enable aOP as A Votable Token in Optimism’s Governance 0 (Alliance: Flipside Crypto) AGAINST Comments by nickbtts and zoomer sum up where I stand on this. You don’t shoot from the hip when dealing with core governance, and you don’t do so with arbitrary partners.

Bounty Board

NumberNERD Program (Alliance:OP Labs) 75k OP FOR

  • I think everything that is done analysis-wise should go under this set of bounties. Nice plan. Will help to get a fact base for the Collective.
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Hey @jackanorak, Thank you for your valuable feedback and concerns. We appreciate your critical thinking and the importance of resource allocation, we need more of these comments on the Forum!
We value your input and welcome any additional comments or suggestions you may have.

I’d like to further address some key points of our proposal under Intent 3
Our proposal primarily focuses on creating high-quality videos to provide comprehensive educational resources about Optimism. While reach is important, our main goal is to deliver engaging and easily understandable content to educate the community effectively.
Regarding the budget: Our alliance is committed to working almost full-time for at least 8 weeks on this mission, ensuring the delivery of high-quality educational resources to empower the Optimism community.
Thank you for your engagement, and we look forward to collaborating with you to achieve the shared vision of Optimism’s success.

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Hey @jackanorak, this is a really comprehensive and detailed post. We’d love to work with you on this point "

until i see some sort of coherent framework across all these different groups

What do you mean here? We’d love to get some guidance on the expectations to keep working together as a community. The community in Mexico is really collaborative, we have a telegram group where we were discussing our application process, and we’re all working towards the same objectives. Espacio Cripto, Cryptoversidad, H.E.R LATAM, Ethereum Mexico, and more are sister communities, and we’d love to work closer with Optimism delegates to have a deeper and larger impact.

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