Hey @OPUser, Mostly I have been putting significant weight into two main understandings:
there are two questions in the proposal template that ask specifically about usage and liquidity, but do not mention any other goals.
A central aspect of Optimism is the retroactive public goods funding. Given the spirit of not trying to pick future winners that i’ve read in Vitalik’s and optimism’s writing on the subject, i am concluding that the governance fund also isn’t designed to speculatively fund founding teams in the way that an angel or early round venture would. Rather, the incentives are intended to stimulate usage and liquidity of protocols that are already operating.
I am making assumptions because despite effort, I have not found much guidance. This is part of the reason why i added the post below. What is your take?
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this and I am totally on board with you on this.
Apart from two points you have mentioned, I would also consider adding anything that support on chain activities, dev integration, marketing and education.
Somehow I missed your post on ideas and proposals, i will share my thoughts there too.
seems a bit overambitious without any additional outside funding, would certainly like to see a poc or some early concept to prove the team can achieve what they are aiming to do. otherwise it just seems like it would go to bad use.
Hey @MoneyManDoug , here is an early tech demo showcasing some of the capabilities of the Optimistic Railway. The contracts in the video are available in our public repo to checkout and explore. Hopefully this helps give some confidence in our ability to achieve what we have set out to build.
We don’t have a GUI yet. The technology is being designed to connect to any dApp so the GUI will typically come from the specific projects that integrate with the Optimistic Railway.
We will develop some GUIs for our demos and network visualization, but right now the focus is on the core tools.
This proposal does not fit into Gov Fund Phase 1: Voting No
Value-add: Very small Amount: High for an early project Op distribution: Bad - Almost only internal development Co-incentives: Not applicable
We don’t see OP Phase 1 as the right place to get very early project funding - especially if there is no direct value-add as you’d get from fundamental infrastructure, new tooling or apps that grow the ecosystem.
We are building contract-level tooling and infrastructure that connects dapps of all kinds. This is in alignment with the governance fund and we are directly adding the value that you just mentioned, which indeed grows the ecosystem.
In response to your topics:
Value-add
We very much disagree that is a small value add. Our railway will allow dapps of all kinds to talk to one another and transport users in new and useful ways. This will improve the development experience as well as the user experience for countless dApps to come. Connected metaverses has been a promise of web3 that has yet to be realized, and this is a component that can move that forward in a big way.
Amount
The amount received is contingent upon us actually delivering what we say we will. This is based on early feedback we received and is specifically to address the worry of these funds being misallocated or our team being unable to deliver what we promise.
OP distribution
We believe the biggest value we can presently deliver is in actually building this infrastructure, since it doesn’t yet exist, which is why 90% of the distribution is allocated to core team and services. However, this doesn’t mean we don’t plan to give back in a big way to our community (see co-incentives below).
Co-incentives:
These are absolutely applicable. The Optimism foundation recommends matching as follows:
the Optimism Foundation recommends that each project submitting a Governance Fund proposal include a commitment to match OP token incentives with their own project incentives (when the project has the capital and capacity to do so).
We 100% plan on delivering at least 2X the value of what we receive in this grant back to the community, as soon as the project has the capital and capacity to do so, namely after this initial phase of development is complete. One of the primary ways we will contribute this is through by paying user fees (such as gas) to travel through hubs (dApps) along the railway.
It sounds really nice, but also sounds ambitious. It would be good to see this team’s ability to deliver at some level, with something like an existing demo for example.
Hello @studiomax, from the Optimism community we appreciate all the intentions to build on it, I think most can agree on that. However, the project you describe is in very early stages, what about continuing to work and then applying to some retroactive public good funding? Or request less funding to keep targeting RPGF.
Additionally, 0x will receive funds (from Phase 0 check here) and will be dedicated to grants, in part for NFT and gaming. This, can represent an opportunity for you? Just giving some feasible ideas, let us know what do you think.
I’m voting Yes. Happy for Optimism to take the risk with funding development of new concepts, although I’ll remain skeptical about your ability to execute on a relatively ambitious and well-defined plan till your goals as listed above are delivered.
Voted: Yes. Optimistic project but we need to encourage and support such projects.
Pro:
Will be open source
Early in development phase
Open Source
Asked for 400K, which is little high but willing to lock the fund for 6 month and only need other half after showing significant progress.
Incentive matched
Cons:
Full dev budget
Not live on OP Chain
Suggestion:- A POC would help. As you will be using this budget for dev, I will highly recommend you make a ledger of your spending, ideally on-chain verifiable.
If you some input here, I would really appreciate that.
Thank you for your nice response. Excuse us for the short initial feedback.
Overall, value-add in the near-to-medium term is limited in our view. There are better ways for startup funding. This round of funding is meant to increase growth and adoption of Optimism and we don’t see that. We wrote “Co-incentives are not applicable” as we saw your promise but know that there won’t be an actual possibility of adding tokens or cash for your project.
Hope you understand our reasoning and that you stick around, keep building and apply for another round once you got a bit more to showcase &or traction. Best of luck!
