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 an organization aimed at helping developers transition from web2 to web3. 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 is a nice touch as well.
EthernautDAO also works closely with Synthetix, which is an aligned ecosystem partner.
3- About the following
This proposal was updated for cycle-8 and now asks for 120,000, an 80% reduction from their initial request and larger than the reduction we recommended.
We believe Ethernaut has also addressed a lot of the core concerns stated in the original proposal that led to it being blocked in cycle-6.
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 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 needs to be maintained. We believe EthernautDAO is able to put in the effort required to continue scaling their impact over time.
- Current Status [Development stage/Open Source?] (early to ready): ready. The project is active now and in use by Synthetix.
- Expenditure plan and distribution (appropriate to inappropriate): appropriate We think the current distribution of tokens is good on a per developer basis. Ethernaut has provided solid background on throughput and expected growth. Our previous recommendation mentioned some doubts such as content quality, but we believe with the amount requested the experiment is contained enough to remove such concerns.
- Amount requested (high to low): low. The amount and time frame were reduced to 120k in response to our previous recommendation, we believe that it is now manageable to see results for the next six months and impact on the use of funds.
5. KPIs and impact tracking
We’d love to see continued updates on 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. We would recommend that Ethernaut be explicit in how it is prioritizing where to place developers, and that it provides consistent opportunities for the community to give feedback on this prioritization.
We encourage the community stay in touch with the team if this proposal passes.
6- FINAL RECOMMENDATION: Yes
We are happy with the authors for reducing the amount requested and time period. We appreciate their prompt replies to governance and formally invite them to reapply for more funds should they find success in their stated objectives during this first trial grant period.