Greetings Optimists!
We’re continuously working with the Optimism data community to refine our Monthly Active User (MAU) metric for S7 Retro Funding. This month we’re launching support for World Verified Users (WVUs) by leveraging the log data in World’s address book contracts.
We’ve modeled the impact of the metric on the March cohort of Onchain Builders, and propose an update to the algorithm that would give WVUs the same weight as other MAUs. The update is ready to ship for the next measurement period (April).
This post provides additional context on the change as well as our impact analysis. We welcome feedback while we continue iterating on MAUs (and other metrics) with the Optimism data community.
Background
In February we proposed the Retro Funding S7: On-chain Builders evaluation algorithms. Citizens House selected the “Goldilocks” model, which equally weights four project-level metrics:
- TVL
- Transactions
- Gas fees
- Monthly active users (MAUs)
Since then, we’ve partnered with the community to improve MAU accuracy by:
- EOA tagging. Aggregating trusted labels beyond Farcaster (See: Issue #13).
- SCW factory labeling. Standardizing account-abstraction factories via the ERC-4337 Working Group and OLI Attestation Hub.
- World Verified Users (WVUs). Identifying Mini App transactions from 10M+ verified humans through World’s Sybil-resistant network.
WVU support is ready to ship in our April 2025 snapshot.
Why WVUs matter
World Network bakes Sybil-resistance in from day one and lets builders reach its user base via lightweight Mini Apps. Many Mini Apps applied in February. Despite heavy onchain activity, their addresses did not count toward MAUs (only Farcaster-linked addresses did), leaving these builders at a disadvantage.
Methodology
We reran the Goldilocks algorithm on 188 projects in last month’s snapshot under four MAU-weight scenarios:
| Scenario | Farcaster weight | WVU weight | All addresses weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Baseline | 100% | — | — |
| Sim 1 | — | 100% | — |
| Sim 2 | 50% | 50% | — |
| Sim 3 | 40% | 20% | 40% |
For each project, we computed ΔOP = reward_sim − reward_baseline, and flagged shifts ≥ 1 000 OP.
Results
Sim 2 yields the most balanced trade-off—roughly equal winners and losers, with smaller swings. The table below shows the number of projects with ΔOP ≥ 1 000 OP.
| Scenario | ↑ Winners | ↓ Losers |
|---|---|---|
| Sim 1 | 12 projects (6.4 %) | 37 projects (19.7 %) |
| Sim 2 | 21 projects (11.2 %) | 27 projects (14.4 %) |
| Sim 3 | 23 projects (12.2 %) | 28 projects (14.9 %) |
Recommendation
We recommended adopting Sim 2 (50 / 50 split between Farcaster and WVUs) in the April 2025 snapshot. This approach recognizes builders that are attracting verified human users to World Mini Apps and limits disruptive swings for most projects
If there is any additional feedback or questions about the approach, please let us know before 2025-05-12, when we prepare the next measurement snapshot. In the meantime, we will continue working on other improvements to MAUs and Retro Funding algorithms.
Full simulation outputs are available upon request; data and replication scripts live in the Retro-Funding repo branch.