Hello Friend - The issue is two new accounts who popped up with the same name around the same time that have no real engagement elsewhere coming into this proposal and saying negative things is just too coincidental. It makes it difficult for the community to take seriously the things they say. I recommend spending time adding value to other proposals so you can build trust in the community over time. Then people will be more open when you post your thoughts here. For now it does not feel constructive.
This topic is temporarily closed for at least 4 hours due to a large number of community flags.
Is there a way to trim this request? Your own metrics listed here could be used to argue Velodrome has hit “escape velocity” and does not need further grants. When speaking of millions of dollars’ worth of OP, perhaps it’s better to offer a proposal to sell VELO to governance rather than asking for a grant? Or break it into pieces so each area of large expense can be evaluated separately.
This is just a really big price tag, and I think you’d have better luck either reducing it, or breaking it into pieces that are more digestible – since you have at least 3 parts that could easily be broken out.
Alternatively, you could set it up so it’s delivered in monthly tranches after a required report, so governance has an opportunity to monitor the grant. The days of delivering large lump sum grants were not kind, so a sophisticated applicant like Velodrome can probably caress this into a package that sets a great example 
Good to see this thread is open now.
This is not specifically to you @FilterBySpam as I see many new account focused on selected proposal but your sarcasm is defintly not adding value of this thread. Please read our code of conduct and contribute here to push this gov in right direction.
@tao I DM’d you and also requested on discord thread but did not hear any feedback. Could you provide a dashboard where I can find all the addresses from past epoch too.
I appreciate the thoughtful response, ser!
I guess in some sense, we already see the ask as being trimmed relative to every quantitive measure of grants distributed so far as well as the demonstrated 2x-3x ROI / ecosystem growth we’ve demonstrated the initial grant was able to help us deliver. Our request is also unique in that we’re pairing it with a commitment to match 1.6x the grant size ($6.5m) in incentives as well as requirement other projects to match 4x-9x the amounts to access the rewards.
In other words, I think the ask only looks big in a vacuum. The ask is actually quite low relative to the matching investment, demonstrated 2x-3x ROI, and baselines from other grants distributed.
The goal of the grants are “to incentivize sustainable growth of projects and communities in the Optimism ecosystem.” The use of them on Velodrome creates a multiplier effect for all ecosystem participants as demonstrated by our onboarding of over 30 new protocols to the ecosystem as well as dropping the costs of liquidity across the ecosystem by 30%-70%. It’s less a question of “has Velodrome reached escape velocity” and more a question of “has the ecosystem reached escape velocity”… and if not, is extending incentives on Velodrome one of the most effective ways to get us there? I hope we’ve demonstrated that.
This is an interesting idea that may very well be worth exploring, but I don’t see how it would lead to the same kind of growth multiple for the ecosystem we’ve shown incentives can drive.
This I believe we would be quite open to! My only note would be that we perhaps do it in three month increments to ensure we’re able to gather enough data and control for all the other variables that I’m sure will come our way over a few crazy months in crypto.
I think one of the big differentiators here over the original large lump sum grants is that we now have a demonstrated track record as well as results on the programs we’re asking to extend. In many ways, we hope our initiatives being extended will be inspiration for the other big reciepants to start documenting their own efficacy so they have the same chance when it comes time.
What do you think?
Yessir, you can simply adjust the parameters in this query Velodrome $OP Airdrop to pull any epoch you’d like. Our first lock bonus distribution was July 14, 2022.
I wanted to proactively solicit the feedback of more the DeFi Committees so we might have a chance to incorporate any feedback ahead of the committee review period knowing this is the last cycle of this season. 
@fig, @Bobbay_StableLab @linda @Katie @mastermojo @MattL @MoneyManDoug @MinimalGravitas @Joxes @Gonna.eth ScaleWeb3.
I believe my post was somewhat buried due to the proposal having issues with being closed.
Still very interested knowing an approximate value of average revenue Velodrome has earned in comparison of the value of the OP tokens used during the first grant. I understand the tokens were used in multiple different ways, but it would still give a rough estimate to figuring out how sustainable the model is.
- I want to understand your reply to Netrim’s comment, you are saying that bribing is effective which save money and hence could be consider as builders grant. right ?
If that’s the case, would you consider allocating funds specifically to builders grant.
- Would it be possible to see this data on monthly basis too ?
So far I am very skeptical of data presented here, I believe incentives are still going on which might be giving us artificial numbers, also would like to see the uses of veVelo lock(unfortunately, I am not comfortable with Dune query so I will ask around on dicord for help).
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If I remember correctly, only few protocol were able to sustain liquidity, I think Beefy is one of them, which is why I dont believe that spending again on LP reward would be a good use of fund.
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Few pairs I see on the list has their own incentives as pointed out by Netrim.
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One thing I would like to see is reward ratio, how much $OP was spend monthly with respect to revenue generated on the platform.
I am really curious on this, how did you reach to this conclusion? do you have any literature or peer-reviewed journal to support your statement.
Good to see the pro-activeness here in gathering early feedback.
Yes, we are saying we have dropped liquidity costs by 30%-70% for the 30+ protocols building on top of us. A functional grant to those builders.
Let’s put it this way, you could either cut costs for all projects in a consistent, fair, and permissionless way and allow them to choose how to reinvest those funds (or) you could create yet another grant layer (redundant to this one) that gives us a bunch of power to pick and choose what projects should get funding.
Why would anyone choose the latter?
Additionally, our program has overwhelming data supporting it’s efficacy with over 30 net new projects onboarded to Optimism and building on top of Velodrome (most of which who have not gotten grants from the foundation). Can you point me to a single data point that any project that included builder grants in their proposals are having comparable impact?
You want our team focused on the business development that is driving massive growth, not duplicating the work of governance.
With due respect ser, we’ve laid out an unbelievable amount of data / evidence and had 20 protocols co-sign it. If you are going try imply that there is something off with the data, at least do us the dignity of investigating it before you cast aspersions.
Can you clarify this? I’m not following.
Nowhere in our proposal are we using OP to directly incentivize LPs.
Again, can you clarify?
I’ll let @tao weigh in here, but will reiterate that about 2.5M OP was allocated over a period where Velodrome produced:
• $6M+ VELO liquidity incentives
• $1M+ in protocol revenue
• $5M+ liquidity of OP token pairs
• $10M+ value locked as veVELO
• 30-70% reduction in liquidity incentive costs
There is no way to frame the existing grant as anything other than returning multiples on the underlying investment.
Peer reviewed journals? Are you pulling our leg here, ser?
It is a public good because it is essential infrastructure that returns 100% of the revenue generated by it back to the ecosystem. Control of the protocol was distributed to not only the Foundation, but every top protocol in the ecosystem (representing millions in value). It has no outside investors or stakeholders, leaks no value to other chains, and serves as Optimism’s only currently active native liquidity solution.
If you are looking for peer review of our public good status, kindly consider the 20+ protocols who have reviewed and cosigned our proposal or the Foundation who bootstrapped us as such.
Apologies for missing this.
@tao is pulling together more detailed numbers for you, but wanted to be clear on one point.
This analysis is based all projects that have received grants, with just a few included from the last cycle who are in the process of receiving grants. That means those incentives are controlled for in these numbers.
The rather shocking disparity here is truly rooted in Velodrome driving massive output across every KPI.
Hey Alex, thanks for a well written proposal with impressive data. It’s great to see what an impact Velo is having on the ecosystem. Only speaking on behalf of myself, not Defi Committee A, I would feel more comfortable seeing this proposal broken up into 2 or 3 separate proposals. I agree with @GFXlabs that there has been issues with accountability for use of grants thus far, and personally believe that approving proposals in smaller batches is a solution for this issue. The amount requested here is the most I’ve seen so far, and I would prefer to distribute the funds based on a shorter timeline and amount requested in order to ensure KPIs are met.
Hey Katie - Appreciate your thoughts! Can you give us a better idea of what 2-3 different proposals would look like practically in the context of this request? Are you thinking something like just breaking it into a 3 month ask or did you have another framework in mind?
Just want to be sure we’re understanding the request.
Exactly, I was thinking cut the timeline and amount requested in half and report back on progress, then submit the next round, similar to what you’ve done here 
It’s really great to see your metrics reporting and would like to see more of this going forward from other projects as well. This adds a component of accountability rather than granting massive funds up front.
I have used Velorome Finance app and really impressive with it. I totally agree with this proposal.
Thank you for this extensive proposal.
Below, we’ll dive into different aspects of the proposal but first we’d love to know
- what’s the Optimism Foundation‘s evaluation of the 1st grant? @lavande @bobby
- why do you ask the Op gov house for the 2nd grant? @jackanorak @tao @alexcutlerdoteth
1. Grant Goals
These goals are reasonable for Velo. For the overall DEX ecosystem on Optimism they should be
- Lowering barriers to entry
- Boosting ecosystem efficiency
- Building deep liquidity on key ecosystem pairs
( → $ in the right place to achieve xyz; openness & support for projects to join & contribute to Op)
Velodrome had an especially positive impact on the following 3 OP ecosystem goals:
- Velodrome has been a key player in onboarding new protocols through personal contact.
- Velodrome helped bootstrapping pools for projects with locking & strong co-bribing incentives.
- Establish liquidity for Op & some stablecoins (1inch examples → trades routed through Velo & Uni)
→ Why is it that larger trades are routed more through Uni v3?
Despite that, Velodrome achieved other project-specific goals:
- Large TVL growth
- veVelo locking from partners (+individuals)
- User attention & activity
Things that we criticially look at: Deep liquidity on key ecosystem pairs & ecosystem efficiency
- Uniswap has been more important for key ecosystem pairs so far without incentives. (Check routing from 1inch for USDC/ETH/WBTC, Op pair somewhat split between Velo & Uni v3)
- High amount of incentives & TVL compared to trade volume (market share)
2. The Ask
As mentioned by @GFXlabs @katie, the Ask is very large - especially given in a lump sum.
Locking Incentives: 1.5M Op (40K Op per week)
- This incentive can help with onboarding projects to Optimism (+)
- Requiring projects to invest into Velo instead of Op is not optimal in our opinion. We would look at this more postive if projects were to lock Op or an 80/20 position that helps with effective liquidity (±)
- You mention competiting incentives: Do you mean within or outside of Optimism?
- What kind of impact do you expect from full deployments of Curve and the upcoming start of incentives on Uniswap, Curve, Sushi + Velodrome on Velo bribing, efficiency, market share?
Boosting ecosystem efficiency with Bribe Matching: 1.5M Op (40K Op per week)
- This could further help with onboarding additional projects & bootstrapping liquidity on Optimism
- You state that liquidity cost from bribing is cheaper than direct incentives. Do you compare the same incentives on uni v2 or uni v3 as uni v3 might make up for the “extra cost of direct incentives”?
Building deep liquidity on key ecosystem pairs: 1M Op (30K Op per week)
- Higher liquidity in top pairs is important for Optimism (IF liquidity is utilized/effective)
- Would it not be a better idea to incentivize top pairs on Uni v3 and for example new projects on Velo considering ecosystem efficiency?
- Do you believe it makes sense to incentivize the same pairs on different DEXs?
- Despite “slow” market share growth of DEX aggregators on l2s, we strongly believe in abstraction over time & that users move towards wallets with built-in meta-aggregators in low-cost environments. Hence, we’d recommend a focus on protocol efficiency metrics (Slippage, trades (volume) routed, effective liquidity) over adoption KPIs (TVL, direct users, transactions).
3. General Ask Justification
Probably this doesn’t need to be stated. 4 Mio Op (110K OP per week!) is definitely a huge Ask. We appreciate the depth of the proposal and data provided, some of the “comparable metrics” are flawed though (apples & oranges) and should at most be used as small indicator in a comprehensive review. Obviously, we should not justify new Asks with previous grant amounts or Op granted/TVL but with value-added from the new proposal. Maybe, this helps anyways to stimulate a discussion which KPIs we should look at to evaluate all the different grants until today.
Potentially good KPIs (for long-term sustainable growth initiatives)
- Op granted per unique user onboarded
- Op granted per top project/team onboarded
- Op granted per new liquidity on Optimism
(+ retention, + effectivity, + network effects, + user activity, - user clusters, etc.)
4. Overall:
It’s great to see a native DEX on Optimism with a team that contributes significantly to project onboarding.
As many delegates such as @polynya @jackanorak have previously mentioned, it is really important that we finally have some serious evaluation of the first rounds of grants before doubling down on top initiatives. Despite that, we can only restate, that it would be very important for Optimism to have an ecosystem-wide liquidity, DeFi, NFT plan to incentivize the right partners or at least run short-term experiments that help Optimism come up with a competitive ecosystem strategy.
As mentioned above, we should very deeply look at incentivizing what’s best for the ecosystem (lowering entry barriers, improving efficiency & liquidity), and not waste incentives on conflicting incentive programs or pick pre-maturely favorites & lock-ins.
In that regard, thank you for the data provided. That helps already significantly in reviewing your new grant request. We believe a 2nd grant to Velo could be well-reasoned to further grow the Optimism ecosystem - esp. in regards to project onboarding & kickstarting liquidity for new projects on Optimism.
Looking forward especially to your takes re: key ecosystem pairs & competiting incentive campaigns!
And, we’d love to hear the evaluation from the Foundation too as mentioned in the beginning.
Specified it with @alexcutlerdoteth in Discord. Based on what I understood, the percentages provided under “Number of OP Tokens Requested: 4,000,000 OP” have been calculated by dividing the metrics by the total number of OP tokens other protocols have received. While this is more fair than comparing Velodrome metrics to pre-grant metrics of other projects (which I mistakenly understood before), then I would still be wary of using these metrics for justifying the size of the new grant since it’s based on total number of tokens received and does not actually account for how much of the grants have been used till now. This means Velodrome has inherently higher statistics compared to projects that have not used their OP grant yet or are using it up in a slower pace.
I understand Velodrome has put great effort into working with other protocols. In this proposal the grant would be also used for supporting other projects by “Lowering Barriers to Entry with Locking Incentives” and “Boosting Ecosystem Efficiency with Bribe Matching”. But doesn’t that somewhat force other projects to work with Velodrome to maximize their funds and thus create unfair conditions for Velodromes competitors? Wouldn’t it be more fair to instead direct those funds to other projects directly (based on their own grant proposals), so they would be free to choose with who and how to partner with?
The partner fund is not currently accepting grant requests and more details will be coming soon. But, regardless the plan was always to pursue grants through governance.
First, we should note that most pairs actually don’t trade through Uniswap at all. As @OPGovWatch pointed out above, Velodrome supports liquidity for 29 separate projects to Uniswaps 9. For most of the ecosystem, no trades route through UniV3 at all because it has no significant liquidity for their pairs.
Second, concentrated liquidity will certainly be more optimal for key pairs and it will always be an important portion of the ecosystem DEX landscape. That is why we’re exploring adding it to Velodrome. But, concentrated liquidity is not without it’s own issues. It is inaccessible to the retail LPs and there is plenty of research to suggest huge % of LPs lose money on Univ3.
It is not as capable as Velodrome is at providing fast, accessible liquidity/onboarding and it cannot be relied on alone to power an ecosystem.
Looking at snapshots of routing will never give you an accurate picture of routing in the aggregate. I’d recommend pulling comparative volume numbers for specific pairs over 30 to 90 day periods for that kind of analysis. That said, you are correct that the vast majority of UniV3s volume on Optimism is through just a few key pairs (also Perps variable pairs inflate volume numbers as well and need to be controlled for).
It is not accurate however to say that they are not incentivized. Projects are incentivizing heavily on UniV3. Just less efficiently.
It only looks very large if you look at it without applying any comparative analysis to other grants that have gone out (as high as 9M OP) relative to size and performance of the grantee protocols. That is why we took care to lay this out above. Indeed, it is actual significantly less in $ value terms that the original grant given to us by OP Labs.
You have to also take into consideration that the matching investment of incentives ($6m+) from Velodrome here is unprecedented and we’re the only project that has partner add their own matches on top of that to access the incentives, increasing the multiplier effect
It is critical for the effectiveness of these programs that Governance evaluate large asks in their broader context. I would ask that if we continue to call the ask “large” we get specific in relative to what.
I’m not sure I follow here. When projects lock VELO they gain the ability to direct emissions to build liquidity and their share of the 100% of protocol that is directed to lockers. The token has both functional and financial utility to the protocols, allowing them to create revenue positive liquidity programs. The procuring and locking of it also supports a virtuous cycle that benefits the ecosystem at large. It is what has helped to drop ecosystem liquidity costs by 30%-70%. Why isn’t this a behavior we’d want to incentivize?
OP tokens at this time only utility is governance. I’m not sure why Velodrome would be the best place to force the locking of $OP tokens. This seems like something better undertaken by governance. For example, perhaps in the future locking/staking it required for voting.
That said, we do care a lot about bringing more utility to the OP token. That is part of why the Optimism Foundation received the largest partner veNFT to support their ability to vote for incentives (in perpetuity) for OP pairs. It is why we’ve raised possible solutions like increasing the number of OP token pairs and making it possible to delegate your OP while in LPs.
Yes, competing incentives coming from other chains such as Arbitrum, Metis, etc. [quote=“ScaleWeb3, post:49, topic:3736”]
What kind of impact do you expect from full deployments of Curve and the upcoming start of incentives on Uniswap, Curve, Sushi + Velodrome on Velo bribing, efficiency, market share?
[/quote]
As I understand things, Curve has no plans for a full deployment on Optimism. Staking will remain on mainnet, governance will remain on mainnet, and fees will continue to be sent to mainnet indefinitely. It sounds as if native bribing may eventually come, but there are no immediate plans outside of the stopgap solution they’ve presented for the purposes of receiving a grant.
As for incentives on those other platforms, our hope would be that the combined power of them helps to attract more liquidity and volume from mainnet and alt L1s, growing the total amount of TVL, volume, and economic activity on Optimism as a whole.
The goal for all of us needs to be to reach that tipping point where Optimism can compete for the largest trades and liquidity providers, which creates a flywheel effect attracting even more activity to the network.
Bribe for emissions models such as Curve and Velodrome have been demonstrated to be more efficient than direct incentives on UniV2 or UniV3.
We have plenty of direct 1:1 examples comparing incentives on UniV3 vs Velodrome as @tao outlined above. It is why there are 20+ protocols incentivizing on Velodrome and like 3 on Uniswap. It is also why projects like Aelin shifted all of their incentives to Velodrome from Uniswap saving millions in the process.
Yes, it certainly could make sense to push every DEX to co-incentivize key ecosystem public good pairs as part their proposals. I actually advocated for this on Curve’s proposal, but it didn’t seem like there was any appetite for it there.
We stand up great on these metrics too, more data coming.
Good ser. Out of respect for us and the 20+ protocols who have co-signed the proposal, can you please demonstrate the flaw or suggest a better framework before implying ours is flawed in some way.
As stated above, the ask is not huge relative to objective measures or the matching investment. Additionally, no other proposal has ever been paired as simply with a proven 2x-3x return on the grant value or a promise to match 1.6x the underlying value in incentives.
It would behoove us not to think of it in terms of this will cost $3.8m. But rather, it will return at least $7.6m to $11.4m in value based on the demonstrated performance of the original grant.
I have a feeling that if governance doesn’t show a capacity to process large deeply evidenced grant requests at a similar level to OP Labs that the power to allocate them may be shifted away.
More to come.