1. Presentation
We are an officially recognized Tooling Governance Committee, responsible for assessing proposals related to tooling and infrastructure (wallets, bridges etc.).
2- About the project
Mochi is a staked-coordination game for DAOs and remote teams. Modeled off of agile software development, Mochi is a protocol in which members of a DAO or decentralized team set goals relative to the organization, form teams, stake ether, and share insights to achieve their goals.
Mochi enables permission-less contribution by having contributors stake against their performance. Every Monday-Friday, Mochi players respond to the Discord bot and receive tokens as incentive for sharing progress on their goal & planning ahead—while losing ether when failing to respond for the day (i.e. a slash). Players spend tokens on in-game items found in the Mochi Shop. Slashed ETH goes to a community pool, where the group can vote on how the funds are spent.
Mochi is a simple protocol to encourage autonomy, accountability, self-reflection, goal-setting, building habits, working in public, and most of all, sticking together.
3- About the following
The proposal was published on September 8th asking for 100k OP tokens. There hasn’t been a ton of active discussion on the forum as yet, likely because there are such a large number of proposals to process.
As a Tooling committee, the project was recently catalogued as “Tooling” in the Grant category, and so we’ve taken on the responsibility of issuing a recommendation.
4- About the proposal valuation
- Added value (good to bad): good. In our view Mochi provides an opportunity to keep developers and other stakeholders in the Optimism engaged over time. It could also provide a way for different teams building on Optimism to track their objectives together and stay accountable to the broader community.
- Impact or expected usage (high to low): medium. Adoption is still relatively low, but has been picking up significantly with the growth of the DAO ecosystem on Ethereum over the past 6-18 months.
- Current Status [Development stage/Open Source?] (early to ready): ready. The project is active now and in use by a number of DAOs on Ethereum.
- Expenditure plan and distribution (appropriate to inappropriate): reasonable for amount. We would love to better understand who incentives are being given to, and to ideally figure out ways to partition which Mochi journeys are eligible such that, similar to projects like Ethernaut, the average distribution per user is weighted according to some ‘success’ metric for a user in the Optimism ecosystem (i.e. a developer joining a project full time as a qualified builder).
- Amount requested (high to low): medium. We don’t think this is “low” but in our view it’s a reasonable amount to bet on an emerging project, and isn’t high relative to the ambitions of the team given their track record.
5. KPIs and impact tracking
We think the partner + player reward metrics set seem measurable and achievable, and would love to see Mochi using their own tooling to check in and showcase progress as they ramp up within the Optimism ecosystem.
6- FINAL RECOMMENDATION: Yes
We are inclined to give an initial stipend given our understanding of the team’s history and previous work.