[READY TO VOTE] Novel treasury bootstrapping solutions

Governance Fund Missions 🏹
1

Delegate Mission Request Summary:
This mission seeks proposals for novel treasury bootstrapping solutions. The aim is to discover and implement innovative fundraising mechanisms for projects across the Superchain to supplement reliance on traditional venture capital or token sale models. These solutions should facilitate diverse and sustainable financial support for emerging projects and further establish Optimism as the place for new projects to launch.

S5 Intent Intent 3: Improve the User Experience

Proposing Delegate: Jack Anorak

Proposal Tier: Fledgling

Baseline grant amount: Individual grants of 10-40k OP based on amount of work needed. Total budget, 80k OP
Should this Foundation Mission be fulfilled by one or multiple applicants: Multiple

Submit by: To be set by Grants Council

Selection by: To be set by Grants Council

Start date: If applicable

Completion date: August 1, 2024

Specification

How will this Delegate Mission Request help accomplish the above Intent?

Along with other Mission Requests and RFGs intended to make Optimism the best place to launch, one of the core needs of new projects is, simply put, funding. This can be difficult and in some cases fraught from a regulatory standpoint. This mission would once again break new boundaries by providing new projects with alternative fundraising avenues - not just grants, not just VC, not just foundation funds. There are many different ways for crypto to program money - here’s an opportunity for enterprising projects to find new modes of bootsrapping.

What is required to execute this Delegate Mission Request?

  • Proposals should offer practical, actionable solutions for fundraising that are feasible within the Optimism network.
  • These solutions might include, but are not limited to, decentralized finance models, community funding mechanisms, novel tokenomic standards, and crowdfunding platforms tailored to blockchain projects.
  • Proposals must demonstrate a clear understanding, ideally from user research, of the challenges faced by new projects in securing funding and how their solution addresses these challenges.
  • Must specify whether structured as Builder or Experiment (ie user incentive) grant

How should the Token House measure progress towards this Mission?

  • Evaluation of submitted proposals for feasibility, innovation, and potential impact on the ecosystem.-
  • Monitoring the development and implementation phases of selected proposals.
  • Tracking the adoption and success rates of these new fundraising mechanisms among new projects on the network.

How should badgeholders measure impact upon completion of this Mission?

  • Number and breadth of projects that successfully employ these new fundraising solutions.
  • Evaluating the long-term sustainability and growth of projects supported through these mechanisms.
  • Analyzing feedback from project teams and the broader community regarding the effectiveness and impact of these solutions

Have you engaged a Grant-as-a-service provider for this Mission Request?
No.
Has anyone other than the Proposing Delegate contributed to this Mission Request? If so, who, and what parts of this application did they contribute to?
No.

6 Likes
2

Bumping this to get more eyeballs - this is one of the ones I’ve proposed that i’m particularly interested in

1 Like
3

Tbh my main worry for this would that am skeptical that itll actually yield much. Its kinda like asking to create the concept of Uniswap for trading out of nowhere, innovation like this often is organic. That said maybe more resources to like create a known legal way to do this, checked by lawyers, standards for contracts with audit, could see being useful. Theres ideas have had wrt swapping an option on a protocol token for that token by a DAO, so that the DAO can use the option to claim upside generated only when the token goes up while holders now have voting rights in the DAO.

DAO buys a call on $1 / token backed by x threshold
Gives 1 token for 1 option
Token goes down holder claims back x
Token goes up DAO claims up to x

Shit like this is great until you hit the legal side. Theres so many options out there already, its not the limiter, its the legal. Rather than treasury maybe a more interesting approach would be streamed operations mechanisms, where say OP could stream x devs y assets to let them build tools which capture/create val for the work, which funnels back to itself to fund them rather than just build a treasury.

4

yeah the point here is to explore the design space from all angles, including those cognizant of legal constraints. the size of the opportunity here is too massive to ignore.

i can amend this to include treasury bootstrapping and management solutions though, would be nice to see some work on that end

5

Worth a shot if this can create a legal way to do these or atleast a standard I am an Optimism delegate [Agora - OP Voter] with sufficient voting power and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

6

I am an Optimism delegate with sufficient voting power and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

7

Hey @jackanorak – just wanted to flag this as a proposal that still needs delegate approvals in order to move to a vote. If you are no longer interested in pursuing this proposal – please disregard this message. In order to see the delegates assigned to your proposal those can be found here. The deadline to provide feedback and approvals for Mission Requests is February 7th at 19:00

Cheers!

8

I’ve got two approvals on this one - would love some other delegate eyeballs on it. Already I have projects talking to me about applying to it.

9

I find this initiative interesting and valuable so to have the formalities done: I am an Optimism delegate with sufficient voting power and I believe this proposal should move to a vote.

Having said that, I’d like you @jackanorak to maybe elaborate a bit on what would a mission proposal addressing this request have to include and what are the results of such a mission proposal you’d like to see?

If I understand your intent clearly (but correct me if I’m wrong), mission proposers should propose new ways to bootstrap funding for other projects. So they will propose actionable solutions (like frameworks) for fundraising that can be used by other projects and will facilitate those projects to use the solution proposed by them in order to raise funds.

At the end the result of such a mission proposal should be an experiment (at least one by each mission proposer) in which some set of projects would use that new fundraising solution to raise funds for themselves.

The costs involved in this grant (10-40K OP) are meant to be used by the proposer and not as a source of funding in that new fundraising solution that they propose, but could be use as an incentive for the end-users to provide funding, right? An example of not-that innovative proposal could be an ICO launchpad - the grant can be used either to build this launchpad or as an incentive for potential investors in this launchpad, or both, am I correct?

With that in mind I think it is necessary for any mission proposal to specify how are they going to use those funds so that we know whether we should classify their mission proposal as a builder grant or growth grant.

10

Bringing the amount of this one down to 80k for intentwide budget reasons. Please consider this one - we need to do better than just ICOs and VCs in bootstrapping treasury and we have infinite design space in crypto.

2 Likes
11

I am an Optimism Delegate with sufficient voting power and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote

I imagine there are sufficient open-source tools that have been trialed across DeFi over the last few years that, with proper support, could help support projects that work towards an alternative fundraising angle. Right on Optimism, we had Aelin (now shutdown), which allowed projects to raise directly from their community.

12

Yes, this is right. And we’d need mission proposals to specify. Made changes there.

1 Like
13

If you’ve modified the proposal after receiving some approvals, please tag the delegates who previously approved it to confirm their approval once again. Thank you!

14

is there a risk they’d not approve if all i’ve done is lower the ask?

15

ok tagging @Pr0 @MattGov.eth @kaereste @Joxes

1 Like
16

I am an Optimism Delegate with sufficient voting power and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote - 2x

17

Lastest changes seem good. My approval remains valid.

18

I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote. I suggest editing the title.

I agree that this is a really good opportunity for future builders and bringing more innovators into the space.

19

The Grants Council has opened early submissions as an Indication of Interest for this mission request here

For your application to be considered, the Mission request must pass the Token House vote on February 14th. Submissions will not be considered if a Mission Request is not approved on the 14th.

20

This request already had 4 approvals before I got around to it, but I just wanted to state that I am in full support of this request, it is one of my favorites out of all this season.