The Retroactive Public Goods Funding (Retro Funding) application review process is applied to decide which applicants are eligible to participate in retro rounds and is used to enforce application rules and eligibility criteria. For a full overview of the application review process see Retro Funding: Application Review Process
Application Review Process Overview
Any badgeholder can volunteer to take part in the review process. The Badgeholder Reviewers will assess whether applications violate the application rules.
Applications that are not meeting the rounds eligibility criteria will be automatically rejected.
Each application will be reviewed by 2 Reviewers. For the application to be pass, both reviewers have to accept it. If 1/2 reviewers reject the application, the application goes to a full review with 3 additional reviewers.
An application is rejected if 3/5 reviewers reject the application. Reviewers will need to note the reason for rejection for each application.
If applicants believe their application has been wrongfully excluded, and is not in violation of the Application Rules, they can file an appeal. Appeals are reviewed by 5 Badgeholder Reviewers, who have not reviewed the application before (step 3.).
Badgeholder Reviewers are not allowed to vote on applications from their primary project.“Primary” is defined as a project to which you dedicate >25% of working hours or derive >25% of your compensation.
How to participate
Any badgeholder can volunteer to participate in the application review process
To join as a Reviewer, a badgeholder must submit this form by Friday, June 7th
The review process will take place from June 10th until June 20th. To effectively participate in this process, a reviewer should expect to spend at least 6 hours on reviews.
Reviewers will be rewarded for their participation in the application review process as part of Retro Governance Participation Rewards
Those who fill in the form will be contacted on Monday, June 10th
We will have a Reviewer sync call on Monday, June 10th - 18:00 UTC
Retro Funding 4 Application Rules
If projects fail to comply with the application rules, they will be excluded from participating in the retro round.
False statements & deception - false claims about your contributions, past impact or funding & grants are not allowed.
Hateful Content - No racist, sexist, or otherwise hateful speech, no discrimination as defined by the rules of engagement
Deceiving badgeholders - Malicious content that could cause harm or unintended consequences to users.
Fraud & Impersonation - Claiming to be a brand or person you are not. The Grant owner must be directly affiliated with the project; the funds must go to the project.
Advertising - Using Retro Funding application to showcase something you are selling like a token sale or NFT drop
Outside of Retro round scope or not meeting eligibility criteria - Contributions that do not have a clear relationship to the scope of the retro round, or do not meet eligibility criteria
Spam - Applications containing spam, such as irrelevant answers, plagiarized content, broken or unrelated impact metrics and contribution links. Applications in languages other than English*.
This will help simplify the process as English is the working language of the majority of Badgeholders. Please ensure you translate any content that’s part of the application.
Duplicate applications - Multiple applications from the same individual, project or group which apply for the same impact.
Members of contribution paths (Council Members, Ambassadors, NumbaNERDs, SupNERDs, TechNERDs, Translators) or Councils can’t submit individual applications for their work within the relevant workstream, as each workstream will apply as a project.
Retro Funding 4 Eligibility Criteria
Builders are eligible who have:
Deployed their onchain contracts on one or multiple of the following OP chains: OP Mainnet, Base, Zora, Mode, Fraxtal and Metal, and meet the following criteria:
Onchain contracts have interactions from 420 unique addresses during Jan 1st - May 1st 2024
Onchain contracts had their first transaction before April 1st 2024
Onchain contract had more than 10 days of activity during Jan 1st - May 1st 2024
Verified their onchain contracts in the Retro Funding sign up process
Made their contract code available in a public Github repo, for which ownership has been verified in the Retro Funding sign up process
Confirmed that they will comply with Optimism Foundation KYC requirements and are not residing in a sanctioned country
Submitted a Retro Funding application before June 6th, 2024 and comply with application rules
Outcome Overview
Total Applications reviewed: 260
Initial Review Approved: 216
Initial Review Rejected: 44
Appeals: 20
Appeals Approved: 13
Appeals Rejected: 7
Total Applications Approved: 229
Total Applications Rejected: 31
You can find the final results of all reviews in this spreadsheet.
We will have a Reviewer sync call on Monday, June 10th - 18:00 UTC
Please can the time of the reviewers call on the 10th be clarified? The e-mail we received says 06:00 UTC - I’m selfishly crossing my fingers that this post is correct rather than the e-mail!
This post is to inform applicants who have been rejected within the Application Review Process.
If projects believe their rejection to be a mistake, they can hand in an appeal by Friday, 21st of June 19:00 UTC. Before handing in an appeal, please get familiar with the reason your application has been rejected. You can find the table with more information on rejection reasons here or further down in the post.
To hand in an appeal please submit this form (https://deform.optimism.io/r4-appeal)
If you have any questions, please ask them in the #retrofunding-discussion channel in Discord.
All applicants, which have provided an email, have been informed via email of this.
12 of the rejected applicants have not provided an email address in their applications, those will not receive an email. 23 applications have not been reviewed yet, notifications of rejection for these remaining applications will follow.
This post is to inform applicants who have been rejected within the Application Review Process.
If projects believe their rejection to be a mistake, they can hand in an appeal by Monday, 24th of June 18:00 UTC. Before handing in an appeal, please get familiar with the reason your application has been rejected. You can find the table with more information on rejection reasons here or further down in the post.
To hand in an appeal please submit this form (https://deform.optimism.io/r4-appeal )
If you have any questions, please ask them in the #retrofunding-discussion channel in Discord.
All applicants, which have provided an email, have been informed via email or, if not email has been provided, I reached out via Farcaster DMs.
Here’s a table of the second batch of rejections
Thanks to everyone who participated in this crucial part of Retro Funding!
I served as the Lead Reviewer during this process and want to share feedback from the Reviewers:
Project Code Checks: There was confusion about whether Reviewers needed to manually check the project’s code. Initially, it was stated that OSO would handle this, but later it seemed non-essential. Clearer guidance on this would have been helpful.
Review Process Standardization: We needed a more defined spec for reviewing applications. Being clearer and more efficient would reduce unnecessary work for Reviewers.
Charmverse Issues: We used Charmverse for the review process. Some badgeholders faced issues with login/usernames/wallets and couldn’t filter projects optimally. While the Charmverse team quickly addressed bugs, there’s room for improvement.
Clear Due Dates/Timelines: The review process was divided into “batches,” but this wasn’t clearly communicated, causing confusion about deadlines.
We have areas to improve, and we will. I’m proud of our work, which was better than last time!
All feedback is welcome:)
I’m writing about Dappgate. We don’t understand what we cheated on? We are not cheating anyone, most of these users received airdrops from many projects.
Hey @dmars300@Jonas, this is 0xlxy from Sofamon. We submitted the retro funding on 2024-05-24 at 22:36 PM, and it was successfully attested on-chain: Attestation (RETRO FUNDING PROJECT METADATA SNAPSHOT) - 0xcf4d...e7fcf. However, I don’t see our project Sofamon included in the retrofunding review process, and I believe this is a mistake. Can you please check?
even after it was clarified that having a new repo is not a red flag, i saw a couple of rejections. -
suggestion is to update the parent guidelines docs to reflect such changes, my assumption is that its easy to miss a conversation on discord. The same goes for Retro Funding 4: Eligibility not met as i referred to this list couple of times.
Please provide your reasoning for rejecting/accepting an application, blankly overriding a decision supported by evidence is morally wrong. By not inviting discussion, we are taking two step backwards. I am not sure how can we enforce it though.
