Polynya - Delegate Communication Thread

No worries, I have returned the 1235 USDC back to you. Stay safe!

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Great cooperation by you and @polynya
Very positive vibes to see as an outsider.
Stay optimistic, both of you :smiley:

This sounds really interesting.

And in theory, you might even be able to make these recurring payments indefinitely (or at least much longer/larger than originally planned). I.e. Instead of receiving x OP as a one-off, you could instead be entitled a recurring % of x OP for an indefinite period of time.

This ‘trailing commission’ for RPGD would also incentivise long term growth in OP, as receivers would desire a larger reward down the track as time & rewards extend out. This is in direct comparison to a time zero, one-off drop which can incentivise quick gains at other holders’ expense.

I’m keen to hear other’s thoughts, in particular from large delegates or Optimism insiders.

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Looking back on the Bedrock proposal, and further delays that have since happened, next time I’m only going to vote “For” if it’s actually ready for mainnet exceeding all go-live criteria, and the upgrade proposed is identical to the one that goes live. Preferably, the upgrade code payload is part of the proposal itself. This Bedrock proposal was the last time I vote for an upgrade proposal as just a vote of confidence.

I look forward to Season 4 - happy to see the experimentation, so I won’t say much early on, though I have some concerns around over-complexity and verifying reputation/accountability of Mission leaders.

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I didn’t know where to put this, but a short message to Missions proposers, as many have tagged me / DMed me - I have been going through proposals bit by bit every day over the last week. But I have limited bandwidth, and I approved as many as I could before the deadline. My activity in crypto now is mostly Optimism governance (quit Twitter a month ago) but this all I have bandwidth for - so I apologise if I couldn’t get to your proposal. We shall discuss how we can make future Mission Proposals, if it happens again, more seamless and scalable.

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Due to the unique situation with Mission Proposals, the key metric to look out for is the approval threshold of 5.897M OP. Per my back-of-the-napkin preliminary calculations (please correct me if I’m wrong), pretty much every proposal that meets this threshold is guaranteed a grant, because the approved proposals are less than the overall budgets. Effectively, this means my vote will be roughly ~42% of the way to funding a proposal. As a result, I’ll need to be more observant and strategic this voting cycle and I’ll be voting towards the end around 12th of July. To proposers, please don’t send me DMs or tags, it will not sway my opinion - I’ll consider all proposals and vote accordingly given the overall situation described above. This will be my last update for this cycle - look forward to the next one!

Update: I have examined the proposals over the last week. Because the allocated budgets for all Intents are being significantly underallocated, I’ll be lenient and vote for as many proposals as possible, within reason. Obviously, we don’t have to complete the allocations, but it’s enough so we can take more of a risk - who knows, maybe some of the less convincing / more experimental proposals will make more headway into the specific Missions than expected.

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Just wanted to say kudos. Think this was absolutely the right approach given the risk of under allocating. Cheers, ser.

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Seconding this. By more or less sacrificing the opportunity to be opinionated, @polynya has more or less saved this voting cycle from voter apathy risks.

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I have voted For all proposals this voting cycle, except for the Code of Conduct violation, where I’ve abstained. These proposals are certainly worth experimenting with, however, I’m now wary Optimism Collective may be heading down the path of over-governance. It’s right on the edge. I was glad to see Optimism embrace some governance tools from centuries of history, but with stuff like Code of Conduct Council or Anticapture Commission, we’re starting to play with fire.

One of the great learnings from centuries is that perfection is the enemy of democracy. For the simple reason that governance is subjective, and different people have different ideas. It’s OK to leave plenty of room on the table for imperfect outcomes, the trade-off of being less divisive is almost always worth it. For example, instead of an entire Code of Conduct Council where a few people are making difficult and potentially contentious calls that may breed contempt, we could just let the Token House and Citizen House keep the behaviour of delegates in mind for their future voting/delegation activities.

I would like to see Optimism Foundation take a more mature approach to organising governance, and look deeper into the consequences of over-governance.

On a separate note, I’m very disappointed by the cadence of token distribution, in particularly airdrops. I had symbolically voted Against the Treasury Appropriation proposal, and despite commitments to do better, somehow things have only gotten more lackadaisical. We’re going to be very far behind the projections going into Year 3, and I’ll once again vote Against for the next Treasury Appropriation proposal. Things have to change dramatically now if there’s any hope for gaining my vote for Year 4 in 2025. At this point, confidence in the $OP token has been greatly undermined, hurting the sustainability of the Token House.

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Many great points here. The collective is still young enough to let grow in an organic manner. The implementation of these councils have taken away a lot of energy from the main concern you bring up about tokens being further behind the projections going into year 3.

I think looking back down the road there will be a lot of confusion as to how the OP governance has formed due to these quick decisions being made to put different councils into place.

3 years later and here we are. The balance of power between delegates is being discussed and many conflicts have already left people wondering if we should be voting on CoC violations. Which take away the focus from much more important issues.

There has been a lack of focus on Grantee accountability and that surely can’t help the token house understand how OP is making an impact. In my opinion there needs to be more data driven initiatives from these protocols. Instead of seeing large sums of OP tokens being distributed and never hearing about it ever again.

It’s great that Optimism has formed so many partnerships but it would even better if PROOF OF IMPACT threads :thread: like the one I created on the governance forum were actually utilized by other members of the collective to show any impact at all… More community participation is needed from the grantees who are dedicated to showing others how to set a positive example.

I highly encourage others to take the initiative themselves. We are highly dedicated to building on the Optimism network and it has been extremely difficult to find the support for our project here despite our contributions directly to the network. It has made us think twice about whether this is the right approach to building. We have continued working together with our team and at a certain point in time it became apparent that our independence would carry our project forward.
Dumping all of our resources into building on Optimism from the funding we received in the RetroPGF round 2 did nothing to help us with a grant application for a builders grant either.

These types of opportunities appear to be hopeless no matter how deep your commitment goes. Especially if you are hit with one of these suspensions like Carlos is at the moment. We can also say that the CoC violation may have also contributed to the way that council review members evaluated our proposals during Cycle 14 & 15 of the application period for the formal grants process. We were denied for both cycles.

Not only that people have dropped off like flies when it comes down to the amount of contributions that were being made to the RetroPGF.eth address directly from a number of our projects which hurts the overall collective.

You can see how this relates in our dune analytics charts. There is a shear drop off that occurred when we were suspended for 3 months from the discord & governance forums.

https://dune.com/fractalvisions/rpgfdonations

During that time period we were not allowed :no_entry_sign: to apply for any grants & were completely excluded from forming our own alliance or mission for the collective.

So please :pray: take things like this into consideration when making big decisions. We are a small team of dedicated builders who had their spirit crushed by the governance here.

It’s amazing how things have changed over the last year.

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Hi @FractalVisions - Your feedback is valuable, thank you! I would like to clarify a few things for accuracy:

  • The Collective currently only has one peristent Council: the Grants Council. This Season would add two additional Councils, a Security Council and a Code of Conduct Council, if the related votes are approved. Each Council goes through an initial period of experimentation and iterative evaluation, and is subject to renewal via governance before it can become a persistent Council. The approach to Councils is very intentional as the Collective can only support a few, high impact Councils. I recognize the feedback about the Code of Conduct Council and the best approach is being actively considered; it is very possible the Code of Conduct Council would not be continued in future Seasons if it is found to be ineffective or undesirable.

  • FractalVisions, the project, should not have been prohibited from applying to grants or submitting a Mission proposal as an Alliance during your individual delegate suspension. Delegate suspensions pertain to individual participation as a delegate within the Optimism community. The project you are associated with was not suspended, and therefore the associated project and/or other members of your project should not have been prohibited from participating in the community and/or applying for any grants, including Missions.

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I abstain from voting on any project or proposal I’ve had anything to do with. I sponsored a proposal under Intent #4, given the threshold vote abstaining would be effectively a negative vote, plus I don’t stand to benefit from this proposal at all, so I think it’s fair to vote for it. As additional feedback, 1 week is not enough time for these threshold votes with dozens of proposals to examine - need a minimum of 2 weeks.

Separately, I haven’t made an update in a while, I have just made comment replies where required, or posted reasons in Agora. Part of it the governance maturing so my input isn’t necessary with plenty of active participants, but also, my personal disillusionment of decentralization taking way longer than projected or expected - in the forms of technical, token distribution and governance processes. I’ll continue to examine and vote on all proposals, and complete all delegate duties, but my participation beyond that will remain limited until sufficiently decentralized (IMO).