Reiterating my earlier comments on the counteroffer, while weāre big fans of DL I donāt believe their proposal was anything more than a last-minute copy/paste attempt to derail our efforts.
Weāve spent over a year building this offering with a team of ~50 employees working full-time in our Protocol Services arm. In contrast, they have zero experience having done any type of long-form financial reporting or governance research and provided no detail as to who would be producing these reports nor any insight into the distribution they would get.
Between the open-source subgraphs and free data dashboards, there is definitely a component of tooling and UX. For example we have a Velodrome page charting TVL, trading volume, revenue, liquidity added/removed from both the macro level and on an individual pool basis.
I am voting against the messari proposal at this time. The tooling recommendation was to abstain and each delegate to decide on their own.
Based on the feedback given by messari here and the description of the service I donāt see the value by hiring messari to do these reports for optimism at this time.
But I ask to come again in the future with a revised proposal that may make more sense for optimism as a whole.
Note: I edited the answer to remove reference to LLama as this is not what drove the decision and gave the wrong impression.
To clarify, my decision was not primarily driven by the counter offer. My initial comments on pricing were from before the counter offer was shared. I mentioned in the earlier post, the amount appeared to be adjusted based on the OP token price but the amount charged for the work didnāt have an adjustment so wasnāt able to get to a yes before.
While thereās been a lot of great conversation around this season of voting, Iād be remiss if I didnāt voice what feel like logical inconsistencies in terms of justifications for the Messari proposal relative to voting behavior*. The points made for abstaining/no have been the following:
Gov funding is the wrong route:
Weāve received clarity from the OP Foundation that GF is in fact the correct path for us. So in the case that delegates disagree with the mandate, Iād love to hear an explanation as to why DefiLlamaās retro funding for their dashboards does qualify while ours does not (especially when DLs is entirely retroactive while ours is for work to be completed in the future)
Value vs. price
Our ask is similar to what DeFiLlama has requested with the bulk being their data dashboards. While our free dashboards are only a few months old and weāre continuing to grow the product, what weāre building is even more comprehensive tracking TVL, trading volume, revenue, liquidity added/removed not only from the macro level but on an individual pool basis as well (with the underlying infrastructure also open source-source)
This is in addition to the long-form reports that reach >250k crypto natives and 1m+ through 3 of the largest research platforms that get 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. (Think Polygon/Starbucks or KKR/Avalanche)
Alternate proposal
Iāve outlined my concerns here and in the above comments but the fact there has been not a response shows it was not a serious proposal with any thought put into actually executing on it
*While this comparison is to DeFiLlamaās current proposal as thatās the closest comp, Iām not saying that is not worth funding, just that voting yes for DL while no to ours for reasons that apply to both is inconsistent.
I would like to share my two cents on this. Lets look at description on gov fund in our Operating manual.
This roughly translate to; any proposal is eligible to submit a grant request as long they are seeking fund from gov and believe that their proposal will grow OP ecosystem. Its not OP foundation job to evaluate each proposal and pass their judgement, any one can reach out to OP Foundation and ask if their proposal falls under gov fund or not and as long they are using the right proposal format and using $OP from gov fund, they will say Yes. And, in my opinion, that is what happened during the call.
At the end its delegates duties to decide and make a call on the proposal. While comparison is good, we also need to understand that each proposal is different is one way or another. I dont have anything new to add one other points, though.
Iām one of the Synthetix Ambassadors, and I support this proposal. However, I am only 1 of 5 elected ambassadors, so this is not an indication of a yes vote (we currently have voted abstain, following the committee).
Optimism GREATLY lacks an official DeFi media presence, so this proposal is an excellent step in the right direction. Iād go further and say that Optimism should have these sorts of agreements set up with other media groups.
Though I will say that Iām afraid I massively have to disagree with this decision being pushed onto Delegates. The OP foundationās marketing + comms CCs should handle this internally (alongside other media agreements similar to this one). Itās a tough decision to push onto delegates whose typical mandate has strayed far from this one.
I know the OP foundation has advised that this is the correct path, but I disagree. They should handle this one internally and use the pot of OP they have to pay for it, or even do some 50/50 split.
But anyway, this proposal is still up in the air, and I think it is helpful and a step in the right direction for OP. The Ambassador vote is still the same (abstain), but I just wanted to drop my thoughts here as other delegates decide.
Hi Katie - Ryan Selkis here. I wanted to provide some higher level context on why I believe this is important industry infrastructure, and how this falls under tooling and UX in particular.
For some context, Messari has been working on crypto community disclosures standards for five years. Our work informed SEC Commissioner Peirceās āSafe Harborā proposal, which was introduced as a bill in the US by the next Chair of the House Financial Services Committee (oversees the SEC). We believe designing bottoms up professional reporting standards will be an existential need for the industry in the coming quarters given an imminent regulatory crackdown. Proving that communities are invested in reducing information asymmetries by providing grant funding for financial reporting will be helpful in showing policymakers - in the US AND internationally - that the industry is taking steps to self-regulate and clean up some of the messy self-dealing that has plagued us for years.
The UX matters. We have analysts that cover: project descriptions and risk factors (human capital dependent), ācorporate actionsā and governance activity (human capital and taxonomy dependent), and descriptive overviews of quarterly performance and key milestones (human capital dependent). We also have a large team invested in creating and maintaining open subgraphs with common data structures (as Jack has mentioned) that is fully open source, and we ensure these reports and data are distributed broadly and freely. This grant is about providing scalable data and reporting standards, broad distribution, and consistent messaging to policymakers about standards setting work the industry is working towards.
This will be critical for the industry moving forward, and I hope this community will be cognizant that quality matters and shortcuts on research, data standards, and distribution wonāt help where it matters in the next few yearsā¦among regulators. We know weāll do a good job helping solve this broader problem, and in adding significant value for the OP community.
I hope you will note where we are in the industry right now, and acknowledge that there is value in the standards setting, distribution, and professional processes we have crafted in this realm over the past year+. We donāt cut corners on this, or angle to be the ācheapā provider, but we DO invest systemically in getting this right, cover our overhead so we can freely distribute this data, and your initial response explicitly called out a competitive bid from an entity with no infrastructure or experience in the types of financial reporting we do.
Hey Ryan as I wrote to you in DM too I really appreciate all Messari is doing for this industry and thank you for mentioning it here too.
Regarding this particular proposal as I said I am not convinced that in its current iteration itās in the best state for the optimism ecosystem governance fund to vote for it.
Perhaps as others stated the optimism partner fund would be a better fit?
Perhaps itās best for the foundation to handle this at the foundation level as @MattL suggested above?
Perhaps more time to discuss the proposal, make more suggestions and rethink on the next round/s?
Grants approval process is an iterative process and going through back and forth and feedback process only serves to strengthen grants and make them better both for the proposer but also the optimism ecosystem.
The DL counter proposal has not been considered at all during this round. It did not make the cut.
Hi Ryan, thanks for reaching out and providing additional context. I was originally against this proposal because I donāt think itās aligned with the purpose of the governance fund (same with the Defi Lama proposal) and would be better suited for the partner fund or the retroactive public goods funding program. The Foundation clarified that the governance fund is the appropriate pipeline for this proposal, but governance is not really equipped to handle decisions around this type of vendor proposal at the moment. @JackPurdy_Messari has done a phenomenal job of addressing concerns and answering questions. Ultimately, I donāt think this is the right time for this particular proposal type and standby my decision to abstain, and not vote against. I have massive respect for the Messari team and everything you guys do!
In the spirit of transparency would you mind sharing how DeFiLlamaās current proposal that you voted for does in fact fit the scope of the program?
The charter states
The Governance Fund may make grants to support either private or public goods, so long as there is also an expectation of future work
And yet youāre agreeing to fund purely retroactive funding for DLs data analytics work while simultaneously saying no to a similar initiative that provides more expansive data dashboards on top of the reporting and distribution in our proposal.
Iāve yet to see a single explanation for why that falls under the scope while ours does not.
(I understand the case youāve all made and weāre happy to pursue other routes but the inconsistency with how youāve voted elsewhere hasnāt given us any clarity into your rationale)
As Iāve noted in the DefiLlama proposal (not the counter-offer, but their current Cycle 8 proposal) - their proposal is more directly aligned with improving user experience and aiding with immediate user onboarding. Also, please note that different proposals have multiple nuances and are not directly comparable.
I didnāt refer to anything about scope so that was not an issue for me personally. Although I do agree with @MattLās points around this probably would have made more sense for OP Foundation to handle internally (but again was not what the issue was for me).
Great engagement on this thread! Since there has been a lot of discussion about the various funding routes this type of work could take, I wanted to provide some additional clarity about my comments on the last community call. My intention was to clarify that the best route through Token House was through the Governance Fund as there is not another proposal type (to contract service providers, for example) that is applicable at this time. Our next round of RetroPGF would be a good avenue for funding something like this (more details to be shared soon!)
