L2BEAT - Delegate Communication Thread

Delegates 🏛 Delegate Updates
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Hey!

In the previous voting seasons, we were one of the most prominent governance delegators, engaging in various discussions and leading Tooling Governance Committee.

Today I would like to announce that we are shifting gears with the onboarding of Krzysztof Urbanski. Krzysztof has been assisting me during the last few weeks and, from now will replace me in the role of L2BEAT Governance Delegate.

Personally, I am very excited about this change because @kaereste is a perfect candidate for this role, with extensive knowledge of both the crypto landscape and various grant programs.

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First of all, I’m super excited to be involved in the Optimism Governance as L2BEAT Governance Delegate. Some of you already know me, those that don’t might want to check my official commitment.

I’m happy that as L2BEAT we are able to dedicate time and resources to make sure that our involvement in governance activities is more meaningful. I hope that we will be able to help ensure that the core values that brought us here will be reflected in future discussions and decision-making.

In the near future, we will be publishing our policy on what exactly we want to achieve as governance participants. I will be also reporting regularly on our involvement in public debates and governance processes.

If anybody is interested in talking to me, my DMs are open here, on discord (krst#6650), on telegram (@kaereste) or on Twitter (@kaereste).

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We have recently voted in three governance issues, below we present what have we voted for with some explanation.

https://snapshot.org/#/opcollective.eth/proposal/0x37fc8a6ae60cff2e4e72fe9c0567f739bb9a78262c2ada236892fcbc7af2c32d

Special Voting Cycle #9a: Grants Council

We have voted for this proposal. Being involved in the grants processes in previous seasons, we see a big need for a better structured processes both for grantees and for delegates. We do have some comments that we shared during the Delegate Call (and we summarize them below), yet we still think that this proposal should be accepted and the details may be clarified during the upcoming Season 3.

Below are some of our comments on the proposal:

  • the budget for Growth Experiments Sub-Committee is ~5x bigger than the budget for Builders Sub-Committee. Even though we understand the rationale behind this, and we agree that having more users in the ecosystem benefits the builders in the first place, still we think in the future rounds it should be more balanced
  • we would like to see a broader OP strategy towards grants distribution programme so that most of the grants funded act together for the growth of OP ecosystem. In previous seasons we saw many proposals that were made by great teams and made a lot of sense individually, but we were not sure how they composed altogether into something bigger. That’s not necessarily bad, and it was probably the best way to bootstrap the whole programme, but as we already have some insights and experience, we might want to think about the bigger picture already. We’re seeing a good start with the planned RFPs created by sub-committees.
  • with the grants council limited to very few people and no token holders voting we are afraid that there might be less public discussion regarding the proposals and their goals, we feel that sub committees should be encouraged to spark public discussion and to gather feedback from the community regarding the proposals (for example by organising AMA sessions with proposers, or public calls where each proposal is being discussed). We will be encouraging for such activities anyway.
  • we feel that additional resources should be allocated towards preparing better framework for grants applications and monitoring already funded projects’ progress. We should have more resources towards how potential grantees should prepare their proposals and report on them later on.

However, we think that the Grants Council is a good step forward towards achieving better grants distribution, thus we are voting for this proposal and we will plan to be involved in the future works, we are also planning to self-nominate ourselves to the grants council…

https://snapshot.org/#/opcollective.eth/proposal/0x3a1f9a30c47d6060f3b732404f3a6b2ceba3da07be0505ef0f93b6dab7fa3185

Special Voting Cycle #9a: Protocol Delegation Program

We have voted for. We agree with the goals of the proposal and the proposed approach. We believe that having protocols with a lot of stake in Optimism more involved in the governance processes can only benefit those processes. We do share some concerns (that were already stated in the thread and during the Delegate Call by others) regarding the bonus for OP native protocols and those that already have an active delegate. But the reasoning behind those two bonues seems fair and it’s worth trying it out in the field and potentially adapting those parameters after first season. We’re looking forward to seeing PDP in action!

and finally:

https://snapshot.org/#/opcollective.eth/proposal/0x22d4c3ab56832de58c1774d1a0aeb61ba6dde8b16c0f8382f85d8935f3ee1f11

Badgeholder Nomination Voting

We have voted for Katie Garcia, Linda Xie, Bobbay, Lefteris, Polynya, Scott Moore and Joxes from DeFi LATAM. We have very good experience working with them previously and we are confident that they will make perfect Citizen House members.

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To promote transparency and communication as delegates, we’ll be regularly updating the below thread with our actions in the governance of Optimism. Our updates will include how we voted for different proposals and our rationale.

Update #1

Voting

Intent 2 Budget Proposal 2 - Voted Abstain

As L2Beat, we had to abstain from voting as @kaereste is a member of the Grants Council.

L2Beat’s Optimism Office Hours

To further our communication with our constituents and any interested party in the community, we’ll be hosting recurring Office Hours on Google Meets.

The office hours will be held every Teusday at 3pm UTC/ 11am EST

During the Office Hours, you will be able to reach L2Beat’s governance team, which consists of kaereste (Krzysztof Urbanski) and Sinkas (Anastassis Oikonomopoulos) and discuss our activity as delegates.

The purpose of the office hours is to gather feedback from the people who have delegated to us, answer any questions in regards to our voting activities and rationale, and collect input on things you’d like us engage in discussions about.

You can add the L2Beat Governance Calendar in your Google Calendar to find the respective Google Meets links for every call and to easily keep track of the Office Hours, as well as other important calls and events (e.g. voting deadlines) relevant to Optimism that L2Beat governance team will be attending or hosting.

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Update #2

Voting

Anticapture Commission - Voted FOR

After having our concerns addressed, we voted in favour of the proposal and we committed ourselves to actively participate in the commission given it’s approved.

Code of Conduct Violation - Voted AGAINST

Given we did not have enough information to make a fully informed decision, we decided to vote against.

Code of Conduct Council Budget - Voted FOR

Even though we are a bit sceptical about the effectiveness of the proposes code of conduct council, the recent CoC violation vote (see above) made it clear that mobilising the entire DAO for such cases isn’t a sustainable approach. Given that, we decided to vote in favour of the CoC Council.

We also voted in the subsequent CoC Council’s member elections

Security Council Vote #1 - Voted FOR

The implementation of a security council is one of the most important steps towards decentralisation and therefore we voted in favour of its establishment.

Developer Advisory Board - Voted FOR

We voted in favour of the proposal as we’re fully onboard with the idea of having a board with the necessary knowledge to assess proposals for their technical merit and assist delegates with their decision-making in the process.

Ratify Developer Advisory Board Members

Since we voted in favour of the developer advisory board, we also voted to ratify its initial members who were appointed by the Foundation. Although we’re not familiar with all the appointed members, we have confidence in the Foundation’s choices.

Grants Council Operating Budget - Voted FOR

We believe the grants council proved to be effective in Season 4 and we are in favour of its continuation. We subsequently voted to elect reviewers for each of the 3 categories.

Season 5 Intent Budgets - Voted FOR

After seeing the reasoning behind S5 intent budgets and how the data from the respective S4 budgets were taken into account when determining the amounts, we voted in favour of the proposal.

Ratification of Law of Chains - Voted FOR

After participating in the discussion around Law of Chains and having our questions addressed, we voted in favour of ratifying it.

Chain Delegation Program - Voted FOR

Although we have some reservations about chains being delegated tokens rather than obtaining them directly, we believe this program to be a good step forward to getting these chains involved in governance. As a result of this thinking, we voted in favour of the program.

Ratify Security Council Members - Voted ABSTAIN

L2BEAT is appointed as a member of the security council for the second cohort and as such we had to abstain from voting.

Upgrade #2: Canyon Protocol Upgrade - Voted FOR

We voted in favour of the proposed upgrade since we didn’t see anything wrong with it.

Discussions

Law of Chains v0.1: Full Draft

When the Foundation introduced the first draft of the Law of Chains, we had some questions/concerns regarding some points that were rather vague. We raised those points in the forums and also invited members of the collective to our office hours to discuss the Law of Chains further.

Welcoming Base to Optimism Governance

Onboarding Base is a great step towards the vision of the Superchain and it was definitely exciting to see the announcement. However, we also understand that since it’s the first chain to be onboarded, we must be careful about the precedent we set. To that end, we raised some questions under the original post.

How Base will participate in Optimism Governance

Extending on the topic ahead, we also directed some questions to Base about how they’ll participate in Optimism’s governance.

Anticapture Commission

We participated in the discussion around the Anticapture Commission after it was first introduced and before the relevant voting cycle.

Collecting RFP Input

In Season 5, top 100 delegates will be able to submit RFPs which anyone can apply to. As L2BEAT, we have some ideas in terms of things we’d like to see accomplished, but we’d like to involve the community as much as possible. To that end, we’ve invited the community to our office hours (every Tuesday at 4pm UTC / 11am EST - call link) to collect input on the RFPs

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Season 5 Mission Request Voting Rationale

The below response reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @kaereste and @Sinkas, and it’s based on the combined research, fact-checking and ideation of the two.

Contrary to Season 4 Mission Proposals, a Mission Request passing the vote doesn’t immediately equal the proposer ‘receiving’ the grant requested. Instead, it opens up the opportunity for anyone to apply to fulfill the Mission, and it’s up to the Grants Council to decide which application will receive the grant.

With that structure in mind, our approach to voting was different than it was in Season 4 - instead of going through the process of which Mission Request to vote for, we went through the process of elimination, deciding which mission requests (if any) we don’t want to vote for. Working through the 4 different Intents, we asked ourselves the 3 following questions:

  1. Is there a Mission Request we do not want to fund for some specific ****reason?

2a) Is the Intent’s budget enough to fund all the Mission Requests under it?

2b) If not, which Mission Request will we not vote for?

Intent #1

The available budget for Intent 1 is 1,330,000 OP while the total amount requested through the 6 mission requests is 1,050,000 OP. With enough budget to go around, and no Mission Request with which we don’t feel comfortable supporting, we’ll be voting in favor of all 6 of them.

Intent #2

The available budget for Intent 2 is 4,000,000 OP while the total amount requested through the 14 Mission Requests is ~5,050,000 OP. Since the budget is not enough to fund all Mission Requests, we had to think through which ones we will not vote for.

For intent #2, we decided to not vote for the following missions:

Facilitate Capital Migration to the Superchain

Layerwide New Project Support

Additional Revenue Sources to fund RPGF Rounds

OptiHack

Intent #3

The available budget for Intent 3 is 1,330,000 OP while the total amount requested through the 13 Mission Requests is ~2,326,000 OP. Since the budget is not enough to fund all Mission Requests, we had to think through which ones we will not vote for.

For intent #3 we decided not to vote for the following missions:

Deliver a Best-in-Class Perp Dex

Crowdsourcing Useful Verifiable Data

Intent #4

The available budget for Intent 4 is 1,330,000 OP while the total amount requested through the 10 Mission Requests is 508,000 OP. With enough budget to go around, an no Mission Request with which we don’t feel comfortable supporting, we’ll be voting in favor of all of them.

Disclaimers:

We will be abstaining from voting for Mission Requests which we have sponsored or proposed.

Furthermore, given the fact that we did not vote for some Mission Requests simply because there wasn’t enough budget under their respective intents (but we still think they’re valuable initiatives that should be funded by the Collective), we’ll be supportive of any initiative to move surplus budgets (e.g. ~0.5M from Intent 4) from other intents around to ensure we fund as many successful Mission Requests as possible.

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Update on what we’ve been up to between December 2023 and April 2024. The list doesn’t include @kaereste’s actions as part of the Grants Council.

Voting

Upgrade Proposal #3: Delta Network Upgrade - Voted FOR

We voted in favor of the proposed upgrade as we believe it makes Optimism more accessible and easier to integrate.

Proposal to Reclassify Grant Misusage Enforcement - Voted FOR

We voted for the proposal as we believed it would make grant oversight more effective and streamline the grant review process.

Protocol Upgrade #4 - Voted FOR

After reviewing the proposal and consulting with our researcher, we voted in favor of the proposal.

Protocol Upgrade #5: Ecotone Network Upgrade - Voted FOR

With the Dencun upgrade taking place, it made sense to prepare to adopt EIP-4844 blobs for data availability and activating Dencun L1 extensions. We reviewed the proposed changes and the executable code and voted in favor of the proposal.

Protocol Upgrade #6: Multi-Chain Prep (MCP) L1 - Voted FOR

After reviewing the proposed changes and the associated executable and finding no issues with the implementation, we voted in favor of the proposal.

Discussion

Request for Proposals - Season 5

In the context of Season 5, we submitted 1 RFP on behalf of L2BEAT and sponsored 2 more.

  1. Onboarding existing communities/organizations to Optimism, solving real-world problems
  2. Interactive Educational Program for Delegates and Governance Contributors
  3. Create Videos about Optimism

Grants Council

L2BEAT’s governance lead @kaereste remains in the grants council for Season 5 and performs all the associated duties.

L2Beat’s Optimism Office Hours

We want to remind to everyone that in order to further our communication with our constituents and any interested party in the community, we’re hosting recurring Office Hours on Google Meets.

The office hours are held every Tuesday at 3 pm UTC/ 11 am EST

During Office Hours, you will be able to reach L2BEAT’s governance team, which consists of kaereste (Krzysztof Urbanski) and Sinkas (Anastassis Oikonomopoulos) and discuss our activity as delegates.

The purpose of the office hours is to gather feedback from the people who have delegated to us, answer any questions in regard to our voting activities and rationale, and collect input on things you’d like us to engage in discussions about.

You can add the L2BEAT Governance Calendar in your Google Calendar 2 to find the respective Google Meets links for every call and to easily keep track of the Office Hours, as well as other important calls and events (e.g. voting deadlines) relevant to Optimism that L2BEAT governance team will be attending or hosting.

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The following reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @kaereste and @Sinkas, and it’s based on the combined research, fact-checking, and ideation of the two.

After carefully considering all Mission Requests under each intent, we decided to vote in favor of the ones listed below. We chose the Mission Requests based on how aligned they were with their respective intent, how big of an impact we believed they could have, and how much their requested budget was.

Intent 1

Request 1: Cross-Chain Voting
Request 3: Grants Claiming Tools
Request 4: Analysis of Grant Programs
Request 6: Farcaster Social Graph
Request 7: Develop non-technical solutions for increasing both voter and token participation in the DAO
Request 9: Create and Distribute Videos about Optimism Collective Governance
Request 10: Integration of Optimism Gov and RPGF into University Courses

Intent 3A

Request 1A: Optimism Dominance in Yield-Bearing Assets 1
Request 1B: Optimism Dominance in Yield-Bearing Assets 2
Request 1C: Optimism Dominance in Yield-Bearing Assets 3
Request 1D: Optimism Dominance in Yield-Bearing Assets 4
Request 2: Subsidized Audit Grants
Request 3: Developer Tools
Request 5: Microgrants for Experimental Projects
Request 10: Develop Onchain Social Games that attract Builders to Optimism - v2
Request 13: Support on-chain games close to launch
Request 14: Optimism as Venture Studio
Request 15: Gaming Infra in the Superchain
Request 16: Marquee Governance Hackathon
Request 17: Accelerating Game Development in the Superchain

Intent 3B

Request 1: Grow Application Developers Across the Superchain

Feedback for next season

One thing that we’d like to take the opportunity to express is that we felt there wasn’t enough time between the submission of Mission Request proposals and their vote. Reviewing 33 Mission Requests, providing feedback, and deciding how to vote all within a week is very demanding and time pressuring.

We would suggest that there’s at least a week of cut-off between the deadline for Mission Request submissions and the beginning of the vote reserved just for comments and changes so there’s enough time for delegates to review everything without sacrificing diligence.

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Update on what we’ve been up to between April and July 2024.

Voting

Governor Upgrade #1: Improve advanced delegation voting - Vote FOR

We voted in favor of the proposal, and we also expressed our feedback that changes to the governor should be discussed with delegates beforehand to avoid going back and forth through the governance process.

Season 5 : Intents Budget Proposal #2 - Voted FOR

We voted in favor of the proposal as we felt reallocating the OP to the proposed Mission Requests was a sensible thing to do and a value add for the DAO.

Protocol Upgrade #7: Fault Proofs - Voted FOR

We voted in favor of the proposal to implement fault proofs, even though some concerns were raised. We voted in favor of the proposal anyway because it wasn’t an on-chain vote with the executable attached but rather a directional temp-check of sorts.

Protocol Upgrade #8: Changes for Stage 1 Decentralization - Voted FOR

Bringing Optimism closer to ‘Stage 1’ as defined by our framework was a no-brainer vote for us, and we voted in favor of the proposal.

Governor Update Proposal #2: Improvements to advanced delegation allowance calculations - Voted FOR

We did not find the proposal contentious, and it was about fixing issues with the governance process, which led us to vote in its favor.

Season 6: Code of Conduct Council Renewal - Voted FOR

Although we were in favor of extending the CoCC, we were against the proposed budget, and therefore decided to vote against the proposal.

The proposal was reintroduced in a later voting cycle with a renewed budget, and we voted in its favor.

Season 6: Intents Ratification - Voted FOR

We voted in favor of the proposal as we believed it provided a good foundation for expanding the Optimism Collective and the Superchain vision.

We also voted in favor of the subsequent vote for the budget of each respective intent.

Season 6: Developer Advisory Board Renewal - Voted FOR

After considering both proposals for the renewal of the DAB, we ultimately decided to vote in favor of the one by Zach.

Season 6: Grants Council Operating Budget - Voted FOR

We voted in favor of the proposed budget for the Grants Council, as we found it reflects the increased workload that the council processes.

Upgrade Proposal #9: Fjord Network Upgrade - Voted FOR

We voted in favor of the proposal since the proposed changes included in the upgrade were reasonable improvements to the OP stack.

Anticapture Commission Amendment - Voted FOR

We voted in favor of the proposal as the proposed amendments made sense and helped define the role of the ACC as well as the responsibilities of its members more clearly.

Chain Delegation Program Amendment - Voted FOR

We voted in favor of extending the program even though it wasn’t utilized in Season 5. We believe engagement of the member chains in governance is important for the vision of the Superchain to succeed. We went a step further to add that we wanted to see representatives from the chains that receive delegation actively participating in governance and the day-to-day discussions in the DAO.

Grants Council Reviewer Elections

Having reviewed the applications of all nominees for all the respective roles, we have decided, after careful consideration, to vote in the following way:

Missions

  • Katie
  • GFXLabs
  • Jackanorak
  • MattL
  • Michael
  • Jrocki
  • Brichis
  • Mastermojo
  • MoneyManDoug
  • Tane
  • Boardroom
  • Sov

Audits

  • AnthiasLabs
  • M4rio.eth

Milestone and Metrics

  • V3naru_Curia
  • Juanbug_PGov
  • mmurthy

We decided based on our assessment of a combination of relevant experience, appropriate skillset, and alignment with Optimism. We believe our chosen nominees embody the necessary qualities to contribute positively to their respective roles.

Developer Advisory Board Elections

Having reviewed the applications of all nominees, we have decided, after careful consideration, to vote for the following:

  • Devtooligan
  • wildmolasses
  • wbnns
  • blockdev
  • anika

Each of the aforementioned nominees brings adequate experience to the table along with the relevant skillset to successfully carry out the Developer Advisory Board’s mandate.

Discussion

L2BEAT Invitation to discuss Season 6 and Optimism

We invited delegates and other governance participants to discuss the structure of Season 6, as well as all things Optimism, ahead of the beginning of Season 6.

L2BEAT’s Optimism Office Hours

We want to remind to everyone that in order to further our communication with our constituents and any interested party in the community, we’re hosting recurring Office Hours on Google Meets.

The office hours are held every Tuesday at 3 pm UTC/ 11 am EST

During Office Hours, you will be able to reach L2BEAT’s governance team, which consists of kaereste (Krzysztof Urbanski) and Sinkas (Anastassis Oikonomopoulos) and discuss our activity as delegates.

The purpose of the office hours is to gather feedback from the people who have delegated to us, answer any questions in regard to our voting activities and rationale, and collect input on things you’d like us to engage in discussions about.

You can add the L2BEAT Governance Calendar in your Google Calendar 2 to find the respective Google Meets links for every call and to easily keep track of the Office Hours, as well as other important calls and events (e.g. voting deadlines) relevant to Optimism that L2BEAT governance team will be attending or hosting.

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The following reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @kaereste st and @Sinkas, and it’s based on the combined research, fact-checking, and ideation of the two.

We voted in favor of Rolling Mission Requests, as having an available budget but having to wait for next season to utilize it doesn’t seem reasonable.

We also went through the Mission Requests for Cycle 27 and decided to vote for the following:

R1: Subsidized Audit Grants V2
R2: Experimentation of Infrastructure Subsidies
R5: Optimism Dominance in Yield-Bearing Assets - DEX Liquidity for YBAs
R6: Decentralized Solvers and Aggregators on OP Mainnet / Superchain
R7: Targeted extension of Superfest

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Update on what we’ve been up to between July 2024 and July September 2024.

Voting

Code of Conduct Council Elections

While participating in the elections of the Code of Conduct Council, our vote was erroneously cast as ‘Abstain’ instead of towards the members we wanted to elect. However, we commented in the forum to signal our support and also raised the issue with Agora.

Upgrade Proposal #10: Granite Network Upgrade

Although we supported the proposal and signaled this with our comment, we missed the voting deadline by a few minutes.

Security Council Elections - Members & Lead

We participated in the elections for the Cohort A of the Security Council. You can find the people we voted in favor of as well as our full voting rationale here.

L2BEAT’s Optimism Office Hours

We want to remind to everyone that in order to further our communication with our constituents and any interested party in the community, we’re hosting recurring Office Hours on Google Meets.

The office hours are held every Tuesday at 3 pm UTC/ 11 am EST

During Office Hours, you will be able to reach L2BEAT’s governance team, which consists of kaereste (Krzysztof Urbanski) and Sinkas (Anastassis Oikonomopoulos) and discuss our activity as delegates.

The purpose of the office hours is to gather feedback from the people who have delegated to us, answer any questions in regard to our voting activities and rationale, and collect input on things you’d like us to engage in discussions about.

You can add the L2BEAT Governance Calendar in your Google Calendar to find the respective Google Meets links for every call and to easily keep track of the Office Hours, as well as other important calls and events (e.g. voting deadlines) relevant to Optimism that L2BEAT governance team will be attending or hosting.