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
EthernautDAO is essentially a bridge to help developers from web2 enter web3. The issue at hand is that while “there are millions of exceptionally skilled and experienced senior developers out there, senior Solidity developers remain scarce.”
This project, if successful, would help improve the quality of developers in the Optimism ecosystem. Its mentorship model is one that’s been proven effective in other contexts, and would ensure any developer is vetted carefully before they join a new project. The ‘educational stipend’ component
EthernautDAO also works closely with Synthetix, which is an aligned ecosystem partner.
3- About the following
The proposal was published on July 2nd asking for 1m OP tokens. The debate on the forum largely came down to the degree of value add the approach EthernautDAO was taking provided, amount requested, and whether funding should come from RPGF given that the project considered itself a “public good”.
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. Education in Web3 and access to tools is currently a recurring problem, and Ethernaut is clearly making strides in this direction. There’s clearly a good amount of value add by teaching more people solidity and placing them in relevant roles.
- Impact or expected usage (high to low): medium. One downside of the mentorship model is simply scale, it’s unclear how many developers can be put through this program and whether it will scale with the needs of the Optimism ecosystem vs. something like the quests approach being undertaken now. It also requires consistent attention from the team cohort over cohort, and while this has been true in the past it’s not necessarily an indication of full future commitment.
- Current Status [Development stage/Open Source?] (early to ready): ready. The project is active now and in use by Synthetix IIRC.
- Expenditure plan and distribution (appropriate to inappropriate): needs improvement. We think the current distribution of tokens is good on a per developer basis, but have questions about whether or not it’s realistic to expect that they can train over 100 new developers at a meaningful level of quality. I’d love to understand more about the current throughput and expected growth beyond the 30+ devs already trained. I’m also not super clear on how quality is measured in the educational stipend (360k) as compared with mentor payments (240k), where payment is directly tied to placement.
- Amount requested (high to low): medium. As above, we think the plan needs more detail before we can really claim that this budget is too high, it might very well be on point for their expected throughput.
5. KPIs and impact tracking
We’d love to see more detailed metrics around how each developer is trained and what measures of quality are being used (when is a developer ‘trained’), and what examples of educational content that have been effective thus far look like. I’d also love to understand how Ethernaut is prioritizing which projects to place developers at. Given that they’re working with Synthetix, it’d be good to have some guarantee of equal access to these devs from projects in Optimism ecosystem, especially if this scales up to become a major pathway for new developers.
We encourage the community stay in touch with the team if this proposal passes.
6- FINAL RECOMMENDATION: No (revision to 300k)
We are inclined to give Ethernaut an initial stipend of 300k or so to work with at ~$1 / token, with a recommendation that they reapply for the second half of funding after publishing a further progress report.
We apologize for the delays during this cycle. Our work was mostly done on time but we had delays with the final confirmation from each member to properly publish our recommendations with the proper consensus (this was due to devcon week, but we recognize this is not an excuse). We promise that this situation will not happen again and we will carry out the respective improvements of the process and we will share our learnings received during this cycle.
Thank you for patience.