As I mentioned a month ago, before the start of the voting period, I have some concerns around the high quorum required for this RetroPGF Round. While it helps prevent collusion among badgeholders, it might be doing more harm than good by making it very challenging for projects with small to medium-sized contributions to the Optimism Collective to get retroactive funding. The large number of applications complicates this even further.
Jonas previously mentioned here in the Forum that “the goal should be for all applications to meet the quorum”, but that seems pretty hard to achieve with one week left until the end of the voting period.
To illustrate this point, I spent some time today making a visual overview of how many RetroPGF 2 recipients already reached the quorum in RetroPGF 3:
While the top recipients of RetroPGF 2 have no issues getting above or near the quorum, it gets progressively more difficult as we approach the average recipient of the last Round.
But ensuring that RetroPGF remains accessible for smaller projects that have a positive impact on the Optimism Collective is extremely important for this experiment to succeed. At the end of the day RetroPGF is not just altruism, it’s also a critical growth strategy and key differentiator to other blockchains.
Right, we want developers and others to start building projects that benefit the Collective knowing that they’ll get retroactively funded for the positive impact they have had. Without a high degree of certainty that RetroPGF Rounds take place regularly and that past impact is fairly rewarded (be it 5K OP for a small contribution or 100K OP for a large contribution), we can’t expect talented individuals to commit tens or hundreds of hours on working for the benefit of the Optimism Collective.
I also want to point out that I had been hoping to see someone creating a List of completed Ecosystem Project Ideas, as the OP Labs and Optimism Foundation team earlier this year published a number of project ideas in the Ecosystem Contributions board they believe would be “strong candidates for RetroPGF”.
Out of the 55 Ecosystem Project Ideas and Draft Project Ideas, I was able to identify 10 which were completed and also applied for this RetroPGF Round. I put together a Google Sheet here with some more information and would greatly appreciate if a badgeholder was to create an official List out of it.