Here’s a broader rundown in light of these questions:
What this Mission Request does
Proactive grants are one of the Collective’s primary levers—if not the primary lever—helping to onboard DeFi protocols and capital. We’ve seen consistent success in diverging from simple liquidity mining and similar short-term practices, offering more builder grants and combined initiatives such as Velodrome’s locking incentives, which lead to an increase of capital committed to Optimism for years, and Synthetix’s perps trading rebates, which established hundreds of millions of trading volume with a high enduring retention rate. Superfest had several UX issues, but there absolutely were success cases that we can learn from in continuing catalytic grants to promising builders.
When the Grants program shifted from being application-led to Mission Request-led, many new DeFi builders found themselves—unless they were building something already specified—without a clear way to apply for grants, effectively locking them out in many cases from Superchain DeFi. Although this move has been helpful in reducing noise and overhead for the Grant Council, it’s important to maintain some flexibility to allow these builders to give us their best ideas and to allow the Collective to offer compelling pitches to launch with us.
OP Mainnet is in the middle of an identity crisis, but that doesn’t mean we stop funding DeFi. Many protocols in the wings could be on track to service the entire Superchain and need somewhere neutral to launch from. Some may end up on their own chains – this should be a launchpad for them.
Who we’re targeting
Anyone in defi, in high-potential verticals. We want to prioritize initiatives/projects that:
- can onboard capital throughout the Superchain
- can onboard other protocols throughout the Superchain
- have seen onchain success in another ecosystem
- unlock some new fundamental composability in anticipation of Superchain interop
- are something we haven’t seen before!
What we’re going to track
Superfest (and this Mission Request) had TVL as a simple success metric. As we know, this is a valuable dimension but not the complete picture we’re talking. We want to see durability of users, of integrations, of verifiable, high-quality builders, and of new capital, i.e., the capital that hasn’t already moved between ecosystems chasing grants. Applications should think expansively along these lines, being specific to what exactly they’re going to deliver—otherwise they will not be approved.
How we’re going to accomplish this
A problem we’ve had at the Collective – and one that even persisted throughout Superfest – is the relative lack of coordinated BD efforts to notify high-potential protocols and guide them throughout.
We’ve seen grant consultants claim to do this, but realistically we’ve seen very little quality come through this direction because incentives aren’t aligned. They get paid on grant approval, not on success.
There is a concurrent Mission Request out that is looking to map available growth avenues, and ideally we’ll be able to tap into work in this direction.
This is all going to take administration
As of now, it’s going to fall to the Grant Council to make this all work. I think the work is important and doable, but as many ppl here have noted, it’s also a lot. To this end, we should also entertain applications by groups who will expand on the ideas in this document and offer means of administering this project to success. As a disclosure, in response to suggestions I am weighing administering the BD and reporting along with a group (i don’t want to do this for a market rate, i want to see this succeed), but my time’s also stretched and I think there is an opportunity for a capable group to come in and offer ideas / work that I have not or could not.
One of the main challenges with SuperFest was its confusing UI/UX and the lack of coordination to present the initative as a cohesive effort. Administering a program like this will take time and require centralized management to streamline protocols efforts and engage users. This could be as simple as creating a Notion page to outline the types of use cases we’re incentivizing and providing resources for further learning, or as complex as developing a custom Ethena-style dashboard to highlight participating projects.
