We started this call with a “Praise session”, an idea brought by Bricia, since everyone is working hard and doing such a great job, is a gratifying thing to recognize and appreciate, including ourselves, the people we work with sometimes! So go ahead and check “Feel the love” channel on Discord.
Voting cycle 14 ended and the proposal for repurposing the remaining budget passed.
Badgeholder distribution due to September 15th, so if you are a badgeholder keep that in mind.
We had two mission proposals milestones updates from:
All feedback and comments are welcomed and appreciated!
Grants cycle 14 updates from Dane: Check Cycle 14 Round up on the forum to get more details.
To see more information about the Roundups, how people scored, what feedback was given, etc, take a look to CharmVerse (Linked downbelow)
For those interested in making a proposal for Cycle 15, apply on CharmVerse before August 24 (19:00 GMT) to receive an additional credit for their proposal. Proposals are due by August 31 (19:00 GMT)
Also feel free to check the OP Governance Calendar to keep track of any information about dates of your interest.
One big announcement last week was Base’s introduction in Optimism Governance, in order to collect feedback from the community Base and the Optimism team made a post on the forums on How Base will participate in Optimism Governance, raising some main point such as transparency, participation, etc, as always any feedback is more than welcomed. We recommend this article from Base about their involvement in Superchain Base’s Commitment to Decentralization with the Superchain.
We finished the call with an open discussion, not only mentioning the topics above but also a great insight over The Superchain and Law of chains (Read the post for more information, comment and leave feedback). Also a shout-out to Bankless and their video over the Superchain: Crypto’s Endgame: The Superchain Explained with Jesse Pollock & Ben Jones, always great to see such active participation in the community!
Member list is still in process, long process for verifying them
This vote is a vote to approve the idea of a security council and create a 2/2 multisig with the foundation and the council to sign off on future upgrades
In charge of assessing historical grant finalist progress on milestones, confirming final milestones for Season 5 grants, and maintaining relevant council and reviewer metrics
More Builders Positions
Feel free to reach out to Dane, Kryzstof, myself, or any previous council members if you have questions!
RetroPGF Questions
How does KYC work for group participants? Is there a way to avoid everyone on the multisig completing KYC?
Can individuals apply?
Yes! Just make sure to follow rules for applying
What if it is indirectly related?
If it impacts the Optimism Collective, its eligible!
Zora, Base, etc. are also included in the Optimism Collective
The Nomination period for Code of Conduct & Grants Councils ends November 1st at 19:00 GMT: if you’re interested in either the Grants Council or the Code of Conduct Council, make sure to put in your application.
For the Grants Council, there are three different categories that you can be nominated in:
Security Council: Vote #1 - Change to Security Model
Developer Advisory Board Budget
Developer Advisory Board Ratification of Members
Grants Council Operating Budget Proposal
Code of Conduct Council Budget
Anticapture Commission: a group of independent delegates that receive voting power, This won’t be up and running until January, till season five. For more info and feedback: Anticapture Commision
The Chain Delegation Program passed. As said before this program would allow OP Chains to actively participate in Optimism’s governance in Seasons 5 and 6. It will be added to the Superchain through a governance process. Season five will start with no delegation from this program, then over the course of the next year chains can qualify and then participate in this program. Check the link to the forum for more information.
There are two cohorts of members. Cohort A will serve for 12 months and cohort B will serve for 18 months. All of these members were nominated by the foundation and they will have to go through rehearsals and approval process in order to actually become a part of the multi-sig. Here is the list of members: Security Council Vote #2 – Initial Member Ratification. For more details see the Security Council Charter.
Canyon Upgrade: this is a network update for OP Mainnet, a minor upgrade compared to bedrock. If the vote passes, it will be upgraded five weeks later, on January 11th, 2024. This upgrade has already been activated on internal devnets in coordination with Base & Conduit. Successfully activated on op-goerli, op-sepolia, base-goerli, base-sepolia, pgn-sepolia, & zora-sepolia. For more details and information: Upgrade Proposal #2: Canyon Network Upgrade
Mission Request:
Mission Requests drafts must be posted to the forum by January 17th, then they’ll need 4 delegates approvals by February 7th.
All top 100 delegates can create these mission requests. If you are not a top 100 delegate, post your idea for a Mission Request here: Seeking Mission Request Sponsorship.
The Foundation will also host a Mission Request Workshop in early December.
There will be a mission request discord channel for any questions and also for collaboration.
The We Love the Art campaign is happening! All art is welcomed, not necessarily related to Optimism.
The foundation is looking for feedback on the govNERDs program. So definitely go in and try and help improve the program. Here is the form: govNERDs Experiment Feedback
RetroPGF It’s in full swing right now. The badgeholders are in the process of making lists and creating their applications, which you can check out through Agora RetroPGF 3
Check the thread Badgeholder Conflict of Interest Disclosures, this thread is self-reported by the badgeholders where everyone is listing out some of the projects that they have a conflict of interest on this cycle.
We love to see all of the amazing developments with the we love the art contest on Optimism. This is definitely a conversation starter for many community projects in the space and we have been discussing this topic multiple times over the past few weeks with creators who are interested in the ecosystem.
RetroPGF voting ends at 19:00 UTC on December 7th and the results will be announced on January 10th. For any feedback leave comment in this post: RetroPGF Round 3 Feedback Thread
#16c Voting cycle ends tomorrow (Security Council Members and Canyon Upgrade). This will be the last cycle of the year, don’t wait until the last minute!
We’ll have a governance break from the 23rd to January 3rd Up until December 23rd. Season five will start on January 4th.
Mission Request Creation:
Workshop tomorrow at 19:00 UTC, the workshop will be recorded and posted later.
Is now active! The top 100 delegates can submit their request, and non-delegates can request sponsorship on a request from a delegate (Seeking Mission Request Sponsorship).
There’s a few requests already posted on the forums, as always feedback is more than welcomed: Mission Requests.
As mentioned before Mission Requests drafts must be posted to the forum by January 17th, then they’ll need 4 delegates approvals by February 7th.
For any feedback, collaboration, etc, go to the Mission Request discord channel.
Anticipation Commission Onboarding:
Just as a reminder, this is kind of a set 10 million OP delegation for independent delegates, made to counterbalance some of the other delegation programs going on for the chains and protocols.
After voting cycle #16c is over, delegates who qualify will be calculated based on participation. At the end of this week or the beginning of the next there will be a post of all the delegates that qualified and then they will be reached out to with an opt-in form and all the additional details that they need.
Builders Grants Delegation S5:
Locked grants from S4 can now be delegated.
Everyone who received a Builders Grant in the past 12 months will get a form via email that they can fill out and then delegate to whoever they want. This is going to happen in the next two weeks.
We also had @Sinkas.eth talking a little about the Delegates Corner Podcast, where they interview delegates to learn about their background and involvement in Optimism governance. Most importantly: doing an open invitation to delegates who want to participate on the podcast to reach out to him to be interviewed.
Sinkas can be reached: via twitter @Sinkas_. Mirror @Sinkas_eth or telegram @Sinkas5
L2Beat is looking for ideas to propose for mission requests, if you have them, reach out to @kaereste or attend L2Beat office hours.
Delta Upgrade currently in veto period: badgeholders only need to vote if they are vetoing the upgrade, 45 badgeholders are needed to veto and the vote occurs in snapshot . This will happen to all protocol updates.
Voting Cycle 18 starting, is now in review period.
RetroPGF retrospective blog post coming out in approximately a week and half, expect to see follow up posts in the next rounds.
Anonymised RetroPGF3 votes will be released soon.
The design for the next RetroPGF round will be decided by the foundation, currently looking into progressive steps to hand this power to the Citizens House. One change that will be made from round 3 to future rounds is more feedback cycles as proposed designs are published.
The previous process of citizen and voting badge distribution made step by step with the rounds will change in the future (no dates mentioned) where citizenship distribution might be separate from any round.
Expect the next RetroPGF round to run around May or June.
Mission Proposals are in approval period right now, each mission proposal needs four approvals by February 7 19:00 GMT, they’ll be ranked according to token house voting, allocating funds to those that are the top projects within the allocated budget per intent.
For those who want to know which delegates are assigned to evaluate each mission: Delegate Assignments. If you are a top 100 delegate without an assignment, please remember that you can still provide evaluations without an assignment.
Voting cycle #18 ends tomorrow, there is two main groups of proposals:
Mission Request:
A lot of mission request still have not yet met the quorum, so make sure to cast your votes. And yes, it is okay to vote in your own mission request or/and the ones you sponsor.
There is Anticapture Commission office hours on February 29th, check OP Governance Calendar.
Security Council is now in effect with Upgrade Proposal #4, assuming it passes, they will participate in a 2/2 multi-sig with the foundation to upgrade.
Helping Grants Council assessing approved delegate mission requests and applications under Intent #1, making sure each mission request actually moves toward technical decentralization.
In order to determine if proposals are aligned with those goals, voting will take place inside the board, detailing the results of the vote later on, as well as providing feedback on why it was rejected or accepted on top of helping the proposer by adding clarifications, fix details, etc.
After some delegates voiced that the process wasn’t very clear, the simplest answer was “First DMR comes in, we review it, we discuss, we take a vote, we provide feedback, and then the delegates proceed to vote”
Proposals #5 and #6 passed Token House and are currently in Citizens House veto period which ends tomorrow. Proposal #5 should activate on March 14th 00:00 UTC.
We are currently in Voting cycle #20 review period without any proposals actively going on.
Agora is now posting bi-weekly changelog updates onto their website. To see all major and minor updates: Agora Changelog
How to gradually involve more and more of the collective in the process.
Currently in phase 0, Community informed design process taking all sources of feedback and then incorporating them.
Moving into phase 1, which is open sourcing more of the design principles, governance goals, different strategies, citizenship identity etc.
10 citizens and 15 delegates will be announced in the next one/two weeks to form part of a commission to feedback on early design drafts.
In the collective DAO archives we added DAO design principles that we use in practice now when we do governance design which are an important piece of context for anybody who will be involved in this.
Members of the Collective Feedback Commission were selected: 10 citizens and 15 high-context delegates.
Here’s the list of candidates: Introducing the Collective Feedback Commission, everyone in the lists will be reached out with the form they need to opt-in. Forms must be completed by March 31st.
The Collective Feedback Commision will not be replacing feedback from the forums, Discord, ect, but will be in addition to.
Commission members will get notified today to opt-in via a form
The partnership team has the goal to get 5-10 OP Chains onboard this year.
It’s most likely that as part of that process they’ll get grants, read the forum post Onboarding OP Chains to Optimism Governance to know more about the approach to aligning incentives and active participation in Optimism Governance.
Retro Funding rounds for this year were announced!
Transitioning from broad scoped rounds to more narrowly scoped rounds:
Onchain Builders: May
OP Stack: late July/August
Governance: August
Dev-tooling: October
Contributions which fall outside of the scope of upcoming retro rounds include consumer facing tools, education initiatives and events. The Collective can still support these contributions via Token House Missions
Similar to the last round, there will be an application review process to determine which projects are eligible to participate in each round, working as a filter to ensure every project is relevant to the scope of each round.
The amount of rewards for each round will be announced 8-12 weeks before its start.
Each round will last about two and half months.
Projects can apply for multiple categories.
The application process will be similar to the last round with some improvements based on feedback.
Both individuals and teams are considered on rounds, there will be some minimum threshold within the scope to qualify, more information will be posted in 2 or 3 weeks.
We’re looking for individuals to be judged based on their contributions specifically, rather than their brand.
The decision to include more rounds will be based on how scalable different experiments are and how they perform
Check the Contributions Board to see things you can built that are align with Retro Funding: Builder Ideas | Optimism
Read RetroPGF3 Learnings & Reflections for a comprehensive summary of all the things learned from RetroPGF3 and the attempt to synthesize the main takeaways from this round and what will be done moving forward.
314 applications total in this cycle. 62 were left out on the intake filter. 252 applications were scored by at least two reviewers. And ended up with 104 finalists that every reviewer scored and 43 grantees.
All non-granted finalists from the first round will be considered for round two if the mission request is open, no need to reapply, they have to incorporate all feedback they got on their application.
Grant applications are extended to March 29th 19:00 UTC. This does not modify the penalty for late submissions, anything submitted after March 25th will be considered late.
Optimism Foundation new members:
Governance Onboarding Lead: Maxwell maxwell@optimism.oi, op_mxwell on Telegram
Citizenship PM: Emily @OptimisticEmily on Telegram, Emilyfurlong.eth on Farcaster
For those of you who were on the call, you know we got zoom bombed by a troll. Awesome job pivoting to Discord mid-call, thanks! Here’s a picture of a kitten in case you still need to cleanse your eyes.
As season 5 is about to end, now is time to leave feedback: S5 Feedback thread
We had Ben Jones talking about three different upgrades are coming in voting cycle #23A:
Governor upgrade: all upgrades that are governor contracts, will go through a token vote. It will be a quite small upgrade; bug fixes, UX improvements, etc.
Fault proofs upgrade: fault proofs will be soon out to mainnet.
Modification to the pause structure: will be splitted into two proposals. The other one is effectively a role change in the smart contracts system, right now the Optimism Foundation plays the guardian role for the OP Mainnet and this is effectively the ability to pause the system in the event of emergency fixes, being too much control for the foundation to have directly, the second upgrade along with fault proofs, will basically shift the fundamental ability to pause over to the Security Council.
The Security Council will be able to unilaterally revoke the right from the Foundation to permanently pause the system in case it is misused.
The round sizing will be of 10M OP, the impact generated between October 2023 - June 2024 will be rewarded.
Sign up: May 23rd - June 6th
One of the topics on the forums post on what impact will be rewarded is “Interactions from Optimism users with high trust scores” this refers to onchain reputation. Data sets are being currently collected and the aim is to try to find an index of reputation scores or experiment with different reputation data to determine this.
Anybody will be free to create and propose impact metrics, a survey workshop will be coming up with Badegeholders to get input on what type of metrics the voting process should feature.
If you want to know better how the design for the voting interface looks like, there is a calendy link to schedule a call for user testing in the badgeholder discord/telegram channel.
Eligibility criteria: in order to facilitate the voting process, reduce low-quality applications and reward as many quality builders as possible, a more specific set of requirements was set for eligibility.
For NTFs or ERC20 contracts to be eligible it is important to be the actual person that deployed that contract, applicants will need to sign a message with the deployer address.
We are holding a Speed-Networking event on Zoom this Friday 26th at 17:00 UTC - 13:00 ET - 19:00 CET, make sure to be there!
to see all of the amazing developments with the we love the art 
contest on Optimism. This is definitely a conversation starter for many community projects in the space and we have been discussing this topic multiple times over the past few weeks with creators who are interested in the ecosystem.
