Badgeholders are not required to disclose how theyāve voted but may share their voting rationale here if they choose.
34 Likes
I will be focusing on projects/people:
- Education or public goods funding
- No/limited commercial funding (no VCs, no tokens)
- Directly related to Ethereum L2s, bonus if Optimism-specific
- Votes will be allocated by past impact (subjective judgment)
These are areas that a) I understand well and b) can benefit most from RPGF.
22 Likes
I will allocate a certain percentage of my vote to each category, to simplify voting, I have divided each category into impact subcategories, so I will allocate a certain percentage of my vote to each subcategory, and as I mentioned my strategy previously, āA Public Goods Ecosystem will create value and grow when those who seek inspiration find it in impact and those who seek motivation find it in profit.ā
But since I cannot allocate my vote to all nominees (189 nominees + 5 collections), I will allocate part of my vote to a few or at least one nominee with maximum impact in each subcategory, who can be an example of motivation and inspiration for other nominees in the same subcategory, who received a smaller allocation or no allocation.
Most interestingly, if I set the subcategories as vertical structures it is simple to establish the correlation of impact between the subcategories in horizontal lines (or vice versa)).
14 Likes
My criteria is (1) impact (of course), (2) potential impact (is the idea sound), (3) current funding status.
I weigh these things in order 3, 2, 1.
If a project has raised money (through either token or VC), most likely I wonāt be voting for that project.
If a project has a great idea but is just starting to see impact, I will vote for them with the thinking that supporting a great idea is a good thing. And hopefully the support will help that team to execute on the idea in the future. (Yes, I know this is supposed to be retro-active, but see belowā¦)
If a project has already had impact, I think thatās excellent and deserves support, but many times early impactful things fade in the long run. Use Yahoo as an example. It had a huge impact in the early Internet, but it faded to insignificance. Iām not sure past impact is a good measure. Also, thereās a winner-take-all aspect to all of this. Everyone votes for āwell known projectsā and then āwell known projectsā become more well known because they have a marketing budget, spiral, spiralā¦
For these reasons, I think Iām going to do something similar to this.
-
Identify project that I wonāt be voting for due to already existing funding through VCs or token raises. Allocate 0% to those projects.
-
Identify the 10-20 projects that either have great future potention and growing impact or past impact and a really good idea. Allocation about 50% of my vote to those project split up in a way that makes sense.
-
Use the remaining 50% of my vote to vote evenly across the remaining projects in the belief that even 1% of my vote (or whatever it works out to) is a significant amount of money, and especially for small projects, any amount of money keeps them going and is a huge encouragement.
17 Likes
Not sure if I can post here since I am a project owner. Please delete this msg if not appropriate.
I think it is very important to give projects a stage to showcase and demo their products to badge holders. Otherwise, it is very difficult to evaluate projects based on a few lines in the profile page.
Regarding the impact of projects, one source to look at is gitcoin voting results. Since Gitcoin uses passport to verify donor IDs, the voting results should be fairly accurate to measure project impacts among retail web3 users. Latest results for alpha round is here
For example, our project Chaineye received 2530 donations and ranked 16th in terms of match amount among all open source projects. Such numbers could be used to measure project impacts.
5 Likes
I plan to prioritize funding projects that improve the new user experience in the ecosystem. Specifically, I will focus on two areas:
-
Adoption: Projects that aim to make blockchain and Optimism more user-friendly and accessible, with a focus on safety and ease of use. This can help drive adoption and attract more users to the ecosystem.
for example, a project that prevents users from being scammed -
Education: Projects that focus on creating educational resources and communications to raise awareness about optimism.
11 Likes
I just published āRandom Thoughts on 10 Random Optimism Retro PGF Projectsā https://link.medium.com/UXIhuVbsfyb
8 Likes
Iāve published my thought process here as I go through the projects for allocation.
6 Likes
This process has been a wonderful crash course for me in the amazing talent of the optimistic collective. Having limited
- information and prior knowledge of the majority of nominated projects
- limited time to fairly assess, to the (pedantic) degree I typically would
I have elected to vote for all nominees based on only the information provided in the project discovery profiles while also accounting for my personal user experience.
What this means is that my allocation is in many cases below the OP value I would allocate using a less standardised [randomised] approach yet a clear process allowed me to
- minimise bias through broad funding distribution
- assess & fund value creation on terms that I best understand
- support smaller teams, community growth & diversity
No doubt there are many other forms of value being created however this scoring profile reflects elements of value creation that I am confident to assess
| Purpose | Percentage | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure | 0.00600 | Base score, all teams |
| Education | 0.00300 | Base score, all teams |
| Tooling | 0.00300 | Based score, all teams |
| Value | Percentage | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| User | 0.00075 | Support my web3 journey |
| OP | 0.00075 | Optimism specific focus |
| ETH | 0.00050 | ETH specific focus |
| Team | 0.00050 | Smaller teams < 16 >1 |
| Build | 0.00050 | Supports builders |
| Other | 0.00050 | Discretionary allocation |
| Community | 0.00030 | Expands Collective Community |
| Diversity | 0.00030 | Expands Collective Diversity |
| Governance | 0.00030 | Governance Application |
Voting Outcome
Based on this voting rationale I was able to allocate 0.97330. The remaining 0.02670 was split three ways to the top-scoring project in each category by adding 0.00890 to āOtherā allocation. My top-scoring projects and unadjusted averages for each category are as follows
Education
Note I have abstained from voting for TE Academy
| Project | % Score |
|---|---|
| Kernel (Adjusted) | 0.0163 |
| ETHGlobal | 0.00570 |
| 0xPARC | 0.00530 |
| Week in Ethereum News | 0.00530 |
| RadicalXChange | 0.00510 |
| Optimism Ambassador collection | 0.00490 |
| Optimism en EspaƱol | 0.00490 |
| OptimismArabia | 0.00490 |
| Support NERDs collection | 0.00490 |
| Translators collection | 0.00490 |
| Unadjusted | Score |
|---|---|
| Mean | 0.00380 |
| Median | 0.00380 |
| Mode | 0.00300 |
| Range | 0.00290 |
Infrastructure
| Project | % Score |
|---|---|
| Solidity (Adjusted) | 0.01900 |
| Blobscan | 0.00830 |
| Erigon | 0.00830 |
| Infinitism (ERC-4337) - Account Abstraction | 0.00830 |
| MerkleTreeJS | 0.00830 |
| Safe (previously Gnosis Safe) | 0.00830 |
| Vyper | 0.00830 |
| Unadjusted | Score |
|---|---|
| Mean | 0.00770 |
| Median | 0.00780 |
| Mode | 0.00780 |
| Range | 0.00280 |
Tooling & Utilities
| Project | % Score |
|---|---|
| Commons Stack (Adjusted) | 0.01710 |
| Agora | 0.00610 |
| Gitcoin | 0.00590 |
| TypeChain | 0.00580 |
| Snapshot | 0.00570 |
| Otterspace | 0.00560 |
| Hop Protocol | 0.00560 |
| Pairwise | 0.00540 |
| Quark ID | 0.00540 |
| Attestation Station Interface | 0.00530 |
| Slither | 0.00530 |
| Smock | 0.00530 |
| Unadjusted | Score |
|---|---|
| Mean | 0.00450 |
| Median | 0.00450 |
| Mode | 0.00450 |
| Range | 0.00370 |
Given the approach Iāve taken, my thoughts are that if we include more binary questions and required more specified (quantitative) answers then much of the work to quantify funding allocation could be automated
Binary
- Is your project primarily Optimism focused Y/N
- Is your project primarily Ethereum-focused Y/N
Specified
- what resources were committed to work completed in the current funding period (quantify all that apply)
- what sources of funding do you currently have access to (quantify those that apply)
- what level of funding do you see as a fair reward for the impact delivered (select funding range)
15 Likes
Iād like to share with you an article I recently wrote. As you all know, RetroPGF is currently in its voting phase, with the final results expected to be announced on 3/24.
Although there are only 90 badge holders in this round of RetroPGF, everyone can actually see the application information for all projects. As a Web3 media in Chinese, I wrote an article inviting readers to become unofficial badge holders and host a mock vote, helping them get to know the 195 proposals participating in RetroPGF.
In addition, I included my evaluation criteria at the end of the article. This article not only sparked discussions among Chinese readers, but we also used AI to translate it into English and made it publicly available to English readers as a reference. I hope that through this approach, RetroPGFās voting can become a process that everyone can participate in together, rather than just being the task of the badge holders.
Englishļ¼RetroPGF Simulated Voting: 13 Selected Impactful Projects Eligible for 10M OP
Chineseļ¼RetroPGF ęØ”ę¬ęē„Øļ¼ē²¾éø 13 é
åÆē²å¾ 8 åč£å©ēå½±éæåå°ę” - by čرęę© - åå”å¢
6 Likes
thanks for sharing! It gives a good perspective on your standards and how you approach it. a good way to learn from your XP!
I have many thoughts about bringing quantification to governance, and overall itās necessary for any starting point. in this case, the clear voting weights are very useful + fair + sensible.
The voting criteria process can always be changed and extensively discussed, but when you reach a calculation aligned with the values behind, itās easy to last and be reliable. I recognize the Token Engineering in your process!
4 Likes
Nice work on the article, you raise several importants points. i laughed at your assessment of the process as.āā¦probably the most labor-intensive content in the history of Blockchain projectsā¦ā I hope as we conitue to iterate the voting citizenship will continue to expand and Im excited to see the learning from RFPG2 and the next evolution. Keep up the great work and your community leadership fwiw you have my vote because I value community and diversity as strengthing the ecosystem.
7 Likes
Love this. We actually need to focus on development and making sure our future only gets the best of us to keep improving
1 Like
Hi governance and community members.
Voting ended a few days ago and I donāt want to pass up the opportunity to share here what we did at SEEDLatam, as me as bagdeholder, delegate representative for the community.
As you may know, our delegation is iterative and in different instances, the community has some say over our votes for Optimism governance, and this time was no different. In RPGF 2, we allow the community to help us decide which projects to fund.
The scope
For this round, we focus on funding a high number of projects horizontally, that is, without a particular preference for any topic. Additionally, in addition to the importance of the impact, for this round we focused on projects that could benefit more significantly from funding, compared to those with a token launched or previous private financing; also eliminating potential conflicts of interest.
We conducted our own community RPFG voting: we believe that collective intelligence can be harnessed in a controlled environment and we extended our decision-making power to our community, raising the awareness of Public Goods Funding and incentivizing to the people to participate. In this round, we grant 20% of the voting power to our members previously interested in the Optimism governance to vote on their projects that they consider worthy of financing. Our thesis is that even if the badgeholder reviewed all the projects, each unintentional bias could be relatively reduced by members of the community with different appreciations of the applying projects, where the experience of each one in the Ethereum ecosystem would mark which project has impacted positively.
The process
We launched our snapshot page https://snapshot.org/#/seedlatam.eth/ and opened three polls, one for each category, using the weighted voting system,the same used for RPGF2.
We used the 1 address 1 vote strategy, guaranteeing to be sybil-resistant, in which each address holding at least 1 POAP of our governance calls was enabled to vote. In this way, our experiment prevented any possibility of inappropriate behavior in our results, while handing this decision power to our community members with some context of how Optimism governance works, having been on at least one of our governance calls (and then POAP claimed).
The results were faithfully respected, meaning this time 20% of the badgeholderās voting power, of which 80% were later selected by this delegation considering variables such as size of impact, need for funding and quality/uniqueness; a plus if itās dedicated to OP. We had a small particular focus on the collections, since these heterogeneous groups are the type of nominations that most closely match the collaborative spirit for public goods.
The results
24 community members participated among 107 eligible. 87% of community members participated in all polls. Each voter in our community selected between 1 and 12 nominees per category.
A total of 121 projects were voted on. The weighting was enormously distributed among those selected. The projects received between 0.03 and 3.87% of the voting power.
As a consequence, it is to be expected that our decision will not influence the total ranking of the top voted, and it will do so for the projects that will receive fewer votes by the rest of the badgeholders.
Our full results can be found below: Copia de Voting scratchpad Seed latam JOXES - Google Sheets
12 Likes
I shared my rationale and approach here ā learned a lot and had fun while doing this. Excited to keep iterating on the process and learning.
3 Likes
Hi everyone <3
I could not upload my explanation to this thread earlier, so I apologize and here it is now.
Nomination as a badgeholder.
The nomination as a ābadgeholderā came to me through delegate 0xJoxes from SEED Latam. On January 13th, I accepted to be a badgeholder. About me, I am currently the Community Leader of SEED Latam since 2021, but I also recently joined ETH Kipu as a general coordinator and head of the Public Goods commission.
What is ETH Kipu? A meta-community conceived as a public good that brings together all the regional Ethereum communities of Latin America. Our mission is to educate the Latin American community about the Ethereum ecosystem in Spanish, English, and Portuguese using sustainable formats.
After a few days of accepting to be a badgeholder, I thought that my vote could have more legitimacy and objectivity if it carried the criterion of the Public Goods area of ETH Kipu, instead of being carried out as an individual. That is why I will refer to āour voteā instead of āmy voteā from now on.
I brought this proposal to my commission, and it was positively received. Given the titanic task and the deadlines, my vote was agreed upon with part of the Public Goods team at ETH Kipu - instead of the entire commission - where I was accompanied by Cris Garner and Lucy Aguilar. Both have previous experiences in quadratic funding rounds and were pioneers in organizing a round in Honduras, which became the first Latin American country to organize a QF round for public goods. You can read the summary of that round here.
Personally, I volunteered in the quadratic funding round of ETH Colombia (with Cris Garner as well) where we worked hand in hand with the clr.fund team and the Ethereum Foundation team. I also led the quadratic funding round in 2022 as part of ETH Latam Buenos Aires, and you can read the round report here.
The process
Crisās vision was fundamental in understanding the technical proposal of each project since I donāt have a technical profile, and that limits me when evaluating infrastructure and tool applications. Cris is a Solidity developer and has extensive experience working on Web3 protocols.
Lucyās work was key in ordering all our thoughts since she made a scoring scale so that we could assign percentages to each project and vote. She has extensive experience working in state areas of Honduras in assigning education scholarships.
And both have worked for years to make Ethereum Honduras a community with a strong sense of ethos and a real awareness of Public Goods when this notion was not mainstream.
I can proudly say that we carefully reviewed all 195 applications. It was important for us to make a decision with an overall vision and not ignore any of the applications. We voted for 95 projects, while the average vote of other badgeholders was 40 projects. I do not mention this from a moral superiority, but I include it as a quantitative fact. I think that my performance as an individual badgeholder would have been much lower if I didnāt have Cris and Lucyās input. I am very grateful that they joined such a task and based on our experience, I hope to incorporate more criteria for future rounds.
Our 95 votes.
How did we vote? We decided to base our vote on our experience in previous rounds, the badgeholders manual, and the scope indications of the round in the governance forum of Optimism. We tried to vote for regional communities around the world, as building from the periphery is generally more difficult than in major hubs of global innovation. We were surprised by the number of individual projects that applied, and we supported them. It was gratifying to know that people in Asia and the Middle East are creating communities and tools to help their regions. Our vote was also a long-distance salute from Latam to communities and individuals who are contributing their effort from every corner of the globe to the Optimistic Collective.
The review process took several days, and at times, we thought we were not going to make it, but 24 hours before the voting deadline, we did. Later, I voted according to the committeeās decision. You can see our votes in this link.
Numbers in Latam
Some projects have anonymous members or prefer not to disclose from which region they are building. But we have been able to identify more than a dozen projects from Latam that received funding. In total, they add up to more than 250k $OP tokens for the region. We hope that this amount will translate into greater diffusion of the Optimistic ecosystem. For my part, although I did not manage to make my disclaimer on the forum due to time constraints, I did not vote for SEED Latam as stipulated in the code of conduct.
Conclusions.
I will send my feedback in the corresponding form. But we didnāt want to miss saying that it would have been great to have a pre-filter for nominations. Many of the projects submitted, both from Latam and in general, had not previously contributed to the OP Stack in any of the categories. To be consistent with this, we did NOT apply from ETH Kipu/ETH Latam because although we have had Optimism panels at in-person events with hundreds of attendees (through Optimism EspaƱol with @AxlVaz, @NicoProducto, @Joxes and many more), we did not consider it sufficient as an objective contribution. However, in the results, many projects that had no previous contribution to the OP Stack or that āinflatedā their nominations with not entirely true data received funding.
On a personal note: I donāt like to talk in terms of āfairā or āunfairā but I would like this to set a precedent that some teams chose to be intellectually honest and strictly respect the rules of the nomination to not drain OP from the total funding that could well go to teams that have been working on the OP Stack for a long time and in a real way.
That is why we only voted for those who HAD contributed. Anyway, we are happy that there is increasingly more enthusiasm and awareness in our region for the paradigm of public goods. From our side, we are fully available to work on criteria for the allocation of OP tokens and help projects manage their funds in the most efficient way.
We believe that the more voices there are, the more realities will be represented in web3. The ideation, creation, financing, and execution of public goods in Latam requires the commitment and promotion of all of us. So if you are from Latin America and want to join the discussion, we are waiting for you in our public goods channel on Discord. May the next RPGF find us better and more prepared. 
Click to join 
You can read all of this in Spanish here.
Muchas gracias 
10 Likes
Cheers for sharing your thoughts!
1 Like
I voted for Bedrock. In its favor. Despite all the votes against it. The bedrock aimed to introduce new upgrades with improvements in modularity and simplicity, with better security. For me, it deserved my vote for it.
Thanks for this pie chart. One question that I wanted to ask is how you make sure that one person does not own multiple addresses or that a proposal owner gathers dozens of Optimism voters to vote in favor of the proposal, in exchange for privileges or crypto fund?
1 Like
Thanks for the question. We have tracked this information from the start and reducing these sybil attacks in our system, taking advantage of the fact that we continue on a small scale in relative terms. However, considering that your concerns are valid, it does indeed explain why we decided to allocate only 20% of our voting power as an experiment and further analyze what behaviors we encountered. Happy to say that all worked no strange behaviors, we received various feedbacks, and planning a better modality for a next occasion.
5 Likes