Thanks for putting these thoughts together. While we do view this as an “investor relations service” there is still a public goods infrastructure component we feel fits into the Governance Fund. As the docs state:
The Token House is welcome to consider any and all proposals which would drive growth or address a gap in the Optimism ecosystem, including public goods projects.
A clear gap in the Optimism ecosystem has been governance accountability which we are planning to directly address in our recurring governance reporting. These aren’t just one-off reports but we’ll be open-sourcing the entire data layer to enable others to extract valuable insights from and build on over time.
In terms of driving growth, it’s pretty clear how accessing over 250k crypto natives and 1 million active users across three of the largest research platforms in the world will get Optimism in front of nearly every major financial institution and large corporate who are not only getting smart on crypto but increasingly committing resources to partner with and even interact on chain with various protocols.
Lastly, we feel the counter-proposal shouldn’t be swaying the decision here as it was a last-minute copy/paste attempt to provide services we’ve spent over a year building with a team of ~50 employees working full-time in our Protocol Services arm. Not only is there no experience having done any type of long-form financial reporting or governance research but no detail was given as to who would be producing these reports nor any insight into the reach they would receive.