Mission Request: Experimentation of Infrastructure Subsidies
Delegate Mission Request Summary: This mission aims to subsidize infrastructure providers such as RPCs and oracles to support builders on Optimism and the Superchain. The grant is set up similarly to our Audit Subsidy program, where funding is set aside for providers to apply with a list of protocols (or protocol by protocol) to provide subsidies for, including necessary funding for each or chainwide. Providers can request up to 30k OP each and must have a plan to support new and existing protocols on Optimism and the wider Superchain.
The end goal of this program is to measure the impact of subsidizing infrastructure services and the impact of morphing these into the Audit Subsidies Optimism currently undertakes.
S6 Intent: Intent 3: Grow application devs on the Superchain
Proposing Delegate/Citizen: Matt
Total grant amount: 250k OP
Should this Mission be fulfilled by one or multiple applicants: Multiple
How will this Mission Request help accomplish the above Intent? By subsidizing critical infrastructure services, this mission will:
- Lower barriers to entry for new developers on Optimism and the Superchain
- Improve the reliability and performance of existing applications
- Encourage infrastructure providers to optimize their services for Optimism and the Superchain
- Experiment with Infrastructure Subsidies to bring new service providers to Optimism & Superchain
What is required to execute this Mission Request?
Support Plan
- Providers must submit a detailed plan outlining support for:
- Existing users on Optimism and the Superchain
- New users on Optimism and the Superchain
- Funding Allocation: Providers can request up to 70k OP
Fee Structure
- Breakdown of fee structure, including:
- Gas costs (if applicable)
- Demonstration of how the subsidy will benefit builders and end-users
- Information on subsidy distribution:
- Amount paid to protocols
- Amount allocated for gas costs
Ecosystem Contribution
- Applicants must demonstrate how their service contributes to:
- Growth of the Optimism ecosystem
- Sustainability of the Optimism ecosystem
- Development of the wider Superchain
Reporting and Tracking
- Implement a mechanism to track:
- Usage of subsidized services
- Impact of subsidized services (Example: For Oracles, this may be increase in TVS or for RPC, increase in subsidized calls by users)
Protocol Subsidies
- Providers must provide:
- A list of protocols they intend to subsidize: OP will only be paid out based on subsidized service usage, approved for each user of the services, or chainwide (based on gas, etc.)
Superchain Support
- Information on usage outside of OP Mainnet
- Note: Providers can subsidize usage across the Superchain, but must at minimum support OP Mainnet to comply with OP rules (note: checking OP rules for further clarification here)
- Providers should also provide a list of the following, for the Superchain
- Chains currently supported
- Timeline for adding support to new chains
- Where to track this information for each provider
- Information related to interoperability and how their service(s) can support the Superchain/interop.
How should governance participants measure impact upon completion of this Mission?
Milestones:
- Measurable increase in the number of developers using subsidized services
- Tracking onboarding of new infrastructure services / growth of existing services to new protocols
- Improved performance metrics for applications using subsidized infrastructure
Metrics:
- Number of new developers onboarded to Optimism using subsidized services
- Increase in transaction volume or calls to subsidized services
- Reduction in costs for developers using Optimism infrastructure
Impact:
- Increased developer activity and retention on Optimism and the Superchain
- More diverse and robust ecosystem of applications and infrastructure providers
Has anyone other than the proposer contributed to this Mission Request? No.
Which metric will the success of this Mission Request be evaluated against? The North star metric for this Mission Request will be the number of active addresses interacting with grantee’s contracts (subsidized contracts). This metric directly reflects the mission’s goal of supporting and growing the user base for applications leveraging subsidized infrastructure on Optimism and the Superchain.