Retro Funding 5: Badgeholder Manual

Retro Funding Missions 🔴
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  • Voting period: Sept 30th - Oct 14th 18:00 UTC
  • Participation: Selected badgeholders and guest voters are expected to allocate 10 hours to participate in round 5.
  • Reward Amount: Maximum per project: 12.5% of total round allocation; min per project: 1,000 OP
  • Impact Period: October 1st, 2023 - August 1st, 2024
  • Voting Transparency: Votes on round allocation and category budget will be public, votes on individual projects will be private, Conflict of Interest disclosures will be public.

Retro Funding 5: OP Stack

Retroactive Public Goods Funding (Retro Funding) is the mechanism by which the Optimism Collective ensures that its contributors are fairly rewarded for their impact. We imagine a future in which Optimism core development, governance contributions, developer tooling, onchain applications, and more, are sustainably rewarded for the impact they provide to the Optimism Collective.

Retro Funding 5 rewards contributors to the OP Stack, including core Ethereum infrastructure that supports or underpins the OP Stack, advancements in OP Stack research and development, and tooling which supports its accessibility and usability. Impact generated between October 2023 - August 2024 will be rewarded. You can find the full details of the round’s design and its components here.

Voting

:ballot_box: You can find the voting app here

The thesis behind this Retro Funding voting design is that sorting voters into smaller groups dedicated to evaluating a specific set of applications will lead to an improved voter experience and allocation of rewards, compared to past rounds.

Voting on Budget

As a voter in Retro Funding 5, you are tasked with deciding the overall token allocation for the round, as well as determining how rewards should be allocated across the three scope categories.

  1. Round allocation: You will vote on the total amount of OP to be allocated for the round, within the Foundation’s set range of 2M to 8M OP. Choose an amount that you believe fairly reflects the impact of the projects in this round. The final round allocation will be determined by taking the median of all votes.
  2. Category allocation: You will also vote on the percentage of OP that should be allocated to each of the three categories. This allocation should represent the impact of projects within each category. The final category allocation will be determined by taking the median of all votes and normalizing results.

You can change your votes at any point before submitting your ballot. Your votes on round allocation and category allocation will be public.

Voting on Projects

You have been randomly assigned to evaluate projects within one of the three categories. You can check the category you’ve been assigned on the ballot page.

  1. Rate projects: To unlock your ballot, you must first rate each project on a scale from low impact to high impact.
  2. Declare Conflicts of Interests: If you have a Conflict of Interest with any project, you are required to declare it. You will then be excluded from voting on that specific project. A Conflict of Interest is defined as an organization where you expect any portion of funds to flow to yourself or any projects from which you derive income. More information can be found in the Self-dealing policy.
  3. Rank Projects: After rating, you’ll see a preliminary ranking of projects based on their impact. You can adjust this ranking to ensure it accurately reflects your preferences.
  4. Allocate rewards: You can then allocate a percentage of rewards to each project, either by selecting one of the suggested allocation methods or by creating a custom allocation. Note that your reward allocation will remain private.

You can find a walkthrough of voting functionality here
The final project allocation will be determined by taking the median to all votes and normalizing results.

Useful Tools

  1. Pairwise: Pairwise is a fun voting option to gamify and simplify the decision making process, allowing Badgeholders to create their ballot by comparing projects.
  2. Impact Garden: Impact Garden is a protocol designed to generate reputation based onchain impact data to improve funding allocation for public goods.
  3. DeVouch: Signal your support for legitimate projects applying for Retro Funding rounds or flag suspicious ones using on-chain attestations.
  4. RF5 Voting simulator: Spreadsheet to support you in deciding on round and category allocation
  5. Retrolist.app & Retropgfhub.com: Browse all projects which applied to the round

Impact = Profit

Retro Funding’s purpose is to reward projects for the impact they have created for the Optimism Collective. Following the axiom of “impact = profit”, the Collective believes in fairly rewarding each contributor for the impact they have provided. In no way does Retro Funding reward expected future work or impact of projects, it’s only concerned with retroactively rewarding the impact that has already been created.

Within this round, you will find information on the Optimism grants projects have received since January 2023 and investment, defined as “funding provided by individuals or investment firms in exchange for equity ownership”, since Jan 2020. In addition, there’s information on the pricing model of a project to gain insights into their business model. The Foundation believes that venture funding should not be a factor when evaluating a project’s impact. In fact, the original vision of Retroactive Public Goods Funding encourages the development of a venture capital market specifically for public goods. You can read more about this topic here.

Voter Selection Experiment

In Round 5, we tested a selection mechanism that used GitHub contribution graphs to attempt to identify individuals with a high ‘proximity’ to the OP Stack. We wanted to understand if this selection method is effective at identifying individuals with OP Stack competency, and whether this leads to a difference in voting outcomes.

Part of the experiment analysis will look at the voting patterns across groups with high proximity to the OP Stack and those with lower proximity to the OP Stack. As such, its important that you don’t talk to other voters outside of the Telegram groups you were added to. This especially applies to Guest Voters - since Guest Voters were selected to have high OP Stack proximity, its important that Guest Voters don’t influence the votes of Citizens with less understanding of the OP Stack.

Self-dealing & Bribery policy

  • Voters should not vote for organizations where they expect any portion of funds to flow to them or any projects from which they derive income. Voters will need to disclose their conflict of interest during their review of projects in the voting process. For each project they review, badgeholders will see the option to disclose a Conflict of Interest. Projects for which a badgeholder has disclosed a Conflict of Interest will be removed from the badgeholders ballot. Any voter can vote on the Round allocation and category allocation, independent of conflicts of interests relating to individual projects. Conflict of Interest disclosures will be public. See the Retro Funding: Self-Dealing Policy for more details.
  • Voters should refrain from engaging in bribery. Please review the Retro Funding 5: Bribery Policy

FAQ

[We will add Q&As here as they come up :slight_smile: ]

Made with :heart: by Gitcoin, Agora, OS Observer and Optimism Foundation.

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