In Season 3, there will be a Grants Council with a Builder’s Grants Sub-committee.
Builders Sub-Committee:
Focus: maximizing the number of developers building on Optimism
Non-focus: retroactive funding
Possible RPFs: prospective builder grants for new projects, hackathons, technical content
Format: proposers receive grants, suggested to be <50k OP, which are locked for a period of 1-year. If access to upfront capital is a blocker for applicants, Optimism may put them in touch with alternative resources to support teams in this position.
Budget: 850k OP / Season
Reviewers: 3 (see below)
Consensus: 2/3 vote required to fund a grant
Please leave your suggestions for the types of grant proposals you’d like to see submitted to the Builders sub-committee in Season 3 and/or any suggested proposal guidelines for these types of grants .
The Council should use this as an input into any Requests for Grants and/or guidelines they put in Season 3.
As a non-developer who only tinkers I’m not sure if I’ve missed the mark here, but:
I’ve found the greatest developer community growth occurs when there are most available resources to learn. That is, people flock where they find permanent, evergreen educational resources.
For example, when I personally started looking into picking up a few blockchain skills I (unsurprisingly?) began with Googling quite a bit. What I found is that Ethereum was the only blockchain skills I could really pick up quite quickly. Not because the tech was the best, or because this education was the lowest cost or most effective, etc. It was because trying to learn anything beyond Solidity and its associated skills was very, very difficult because of the simple fact that they couldn’t be located. There was just nothing out there. It seemed like ‘everyone’ was learning and building with Solidity and Ethereum.
So if the focus is maximising the number of developers building on Optimism, then wouldn’t vast amounts of educational content and permanent, online communities be a straightforward solution? Content with a low barrier to entry, that is globally accessible, that offers a quick way for existing developers to transfer their existing skills across to Optimism’s technology?
Overall, when choosing successful grants, let’s try and make ‘everyone’ think that Optimism is the Layer 2 ‘everyone’ already uses. I think this requires mass distribution over anything too niche or discrete.
A common issue with these initiatives is that they attract only-developer teams, which is fine for infrastructure but often leads to a lack of product-market fit on other ventures, especially those at the application layer.
Hacker teams to incentivize projects security (Hats Finance, Inmmunefi)
GitHub, Twitter, Online developer history integration for developer on-chain attestation and anti sybl attacks systems.
All kinds of experiments involving developers to get their hands in the mud and build something
Research teams at the protocol level
For developer competitions and games, a few ideas:
I would love to see EIP implementations tryouts. Like grab EIP 4844 and see who can implement it better in a given time. This could save some time from real EIP teams and even bring some new ideas to them.
I agree with you. EthernautDAO it’s a chain-agnostic senior developer organization looking to tackle this problem. https://mint.ethernautdao.io/
We have a curated list of educational content here:
We do have a lack of marketing given we are a nonprofit. I also know DevDAO, BanklessDAO has a whole developer sector, Web3 dev collective, and of course Ethereum Foundation docs.
Time bound - submit a proposal and you have X amount of day/month to show at least a POC. This could be online/offline
Offline are the one where we build connection, at least to me, but location would be a deciding factor here.
DeFi is here to stay but, imo, next narrative is not around DeFi , it’s gonna be focused on Identity, LSDs(lido overtaking maker in tvl locked is one evidence)and protocol building around LSDs like Eigenlayer. Would love to see some innovation around this on Optimism.
Native privacy protocol
On-chain gaming and meta-verse
Non/Technical content related to bedrock, optimistic stack , attestation and so on… either we dont have enough or we are not promoting them properly.
Governance tooling, similar to what we saw with Agora, Boardroom and Karma. There are still a lot of governance challenges from a voters perspective that can be tackled.
DAO Tooling too.
Nice list, @Gonna.eth - especially like the EIP Implementation tryouts.
In general, I think a good way to structure these RfGs is with the following in mind: we don’t want ‘categories’. We want specific additions that will directly unblock the experience for builders and users in a way that’s unmatched by other ecosystems – that is, in a way that gives Optimism a competitive advantage over other EVM ecosystems. There is some powerful stuff happening under the hood on Optimism, but we’re at a stage where increasing accessibility to the new features rolling out and having a product-oriented focus will pay off significantly down the line.
This may be an evolving post, but below are examples of things that could work well for Optimism. Some are concrete and tightly defined, some came through dev feedback, and some are possibly crazy and undoable ideas but hopefully might spark some thinking.
Contests
I think it’s worth canvassing the protocols that exist now and see what sorts of things will make their lives easier. I think of Perp Protocol, which recently supported a lone dev in building out a swap layer that uses other protocols for liquidity.
These types of multi-protocol integrations could be very interesting. One could hold a competition seeking implementations that maximize composability between protocols, and devs could show their work to demonstrate how others could follow.
In addition, the absence of a robust bizdev team means there might be an opportunity for the community to help forge some larger partnerships. Imagine a partnership with Visa the way Starknet has made. We could offer bounties to individuals or teams facilitating some connections.
Devtools
Agnostic pricing APIs. Working with existing pricing APIs is a big dev drag in defi, as they often are incomplete and buggy. Illiquid assets are very difficult to track.
Cron jobs for view functions / historical data. The engineer who floated this idea to me had this to say: “Right now if e.g. a derivatives dex wants to be able to have users trustlessly figure out what their current open positions are, they generally need to build an entire complex subgraph pulling data from many contracts. But often these teams have to cut corners and don’t build out subgraphs or historical data solutions. A non-Dune/Graph solution could help.”
Anything involving the use of OP Stack (I’m intentionally vague here because we need people to start working on it to pave a way for others)
MEV tooling for mainnet, .e.g., batch user transactions on OP and execute them together on Mainnet
Flashbots SUAVE chain on Bedrock
More derivatives and structured products; interest rate derivatives (a la swivel/ipor), volatility derivatives (volmex), forex derivatives
Ways to get more yield out of liquid staking (so all that liquid staked value comes to OP), e.g. leveraged staking, synthetic leveraged tokens. I think this could make an enormous difference in capital flows.
NFTs
Onchain pricing / oracles for NFTs. Pretty much all pricing on NFTs uses some sort of centralized service. This is probably one of many examples of NFT infrastructure still being in its early stages, and we could pioneer a great deal of things. I know for a fact that there’s been a lot of underappreciated innovation in this space by individual developers, and there’s a lot of opportunity in bringing them here.
Looking at the last part here about NFTs and realized that Optimism is so early when it comes to this.
We have hired on an expert UI/UX developer who helped to create Bankless DAO in order to build a proper platform for NFT artists and collectors focusing on Public Goods. He will be helping us to tackle many of the issues we see here on Optimism that still have yet to be solved over the course of 2023.
When I look at the Optimism network I see a very nascent and premature NFT / Gaming sector with a ton of potential.
Our goal here at Fractal Visions is to create a foundation type of framework within our own ecosystem to help support artists and educate them 1 on 1 when choosing deployment on Optimism based on prior knowledge about blockchain.
The technology that this network provides is a great example of how blockchain technology works in a positive manner with existing systems currently in place in the world around us. Fractal Visions is adopting the values of the Optimism DAO, integrating the Public Goods ethos into the creative hub ecosystem, and provides educational content or 1 on 1 personal assistance and mentoring to help guide the way.
We will continue to create a carbon copy of these types of morals based around creating a better world together and reiterate the intentions to educate others specifically about Public Goods!
