[REVIEW] [GF: Phase 1 Proposal] DefiLlama

ARCHIVED & OLD Missions Governance Fund: Phase 1
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Project name: DefiLlama

Author name and contact info (please provide a reliable point of contact for the project): 0xngmi (@Oxngmi on telegram, @0xngmi on twitter)

I understand that I will be required to provide additional KYC information to the Optimism Foundation to receive this grant: Yes

L2 recipient address: 0x08a3c2A819E3de7ACa384c798269B3Ce1CD0e437 (can be verified in defillama.com through our donate button or through this tweet)

Which Voting Cycle are you applying for?: Cycle 7

Grant category: Tooling

Is this proposal applicable to a specific committee? Yes, tooling

Project description (please explain how your project works):

  • DefiLlama: Tracks protocol metrics such as TVL, volume and stablecoin usage

  • LlamaPay: Payment streams that distribute payments by second

Project links:

Competitors, peers, or similar projects (please link):

For defillama the closest competitors would be defipulse and tokenterminal

For llamapay it would be superfluid

Is/will this project be open sourced? Yes, it’s all open source on DefiLlama · GitHub

Optimism native?: No

Date of deployment/expected deployment on Optimism:

  • DefiLlama added support for optimism the 14th of July 2021, days after optimism’s public launch. We were one of the first data dashboards to support optimism.

  • LlamaPay was deployed on optimism the 29th of april 2022, on launch

Ecosystem Value Proposition:

DefiLlama has been operating as a public good for the whole crypto space for over a year, maintaining metrics for >1.9k protocols and other products such as https://chainlist.org/, all while having received no investment, never charging users for anything nor having ads. Defillama has no revenue at all and offers all our products for free, covering current costs from only donations and self-funding.

On top of that, DefiLlama is a completely open source project, from all our code (we open source everything: frontend, backend, adapters, bots…) down to all our data, for which we offer full database exports so everyone can use it freely.

This fits quite well with optimism’s goal of funding public goods, as this grant would allow us at defillama to keep providing services that benefit the whole ecosystem.

All these services are commonly used by optimism users and help provide transparent metrics for the defi ecosystem on it, all while acting as a directory of defi apps on optimism. We believe that this will help optimism’s growth long term, as well as grow the overall blockchain ecosystem.

A great example is how the Optimism foundation used our data for their Phase 0 Governance Fund distribution, which was possible thanks to:

  • DefiLlama providing free exports of all our data so it could be easily analyzed
  • DefiLlama being completely open source, which allowed anyone that disagreed with out data to check exactly how it was calculated

A much more concrete explanation of the benefits to optimism is provided in the next section.

Number of OP tokens requested: 300k

This amount of tokens represents the sum of the request for defillama analytics (170k) and llamapay (130k). Reasoning for both is explained below.

To determine grant amount i’ve looked at previous grants awarded:

  • Rotki: 190k OP awarded to cover salaries for optimism integration into their product

  • Candide Wallet: 190k OP awarded also to cover salaries

  • Superfluid: 150k OP awarded

Now let’s consider the impact defillama has had on optimism compared to rotki and candide:

  • The Optimism foundation relied on DeFi Llama Analytics data for their initial Phase 0 Governance Fund distribution

  • Users regularly check defillama to find projects on optimism and check on the state of the chain, acting a s directory where users can find out what protocols are live on optimism

  • Our APY dashboard tracks optimism projects and it has brought users to optimism that wouldn’t have known about the yield there otherwise

  • Our volume dashboard is frequently quoted by optimism-native protocols such as velodrome to compare metrics against other projects

  • DefiLlama integrated optimism right after it launched, and have maintained metrics for optimism protocols since then, with no incentives at all

  • Our price API covers optimism tokens and is being used by multiple companies for their optimism integrations (eg: a tax company is using it to calculate taxes on optimism activities)

Given these, I think most people would consider that defillama had a higher impact than them, so I think it’s fair to request a grant amount of 170k OP (20k lower) for defillama analytics.

Something important to note is that the first two projects requested grants in order to cover costs of integrating optimism, but unlike them, defillama has already integrated optimism in all of our products since a year ago. For this reason the grant here would be given to continue our general work rather than integrating optimism (since we already did 1 year ago).

I can understand that this might make funding defillama less interesting, since optimism support on our product is already live and not contingent on this grant, thus it may seem like theres no reason to award it.

However, choosing to fund projects that propose integrating the chain but not funding projects that have already done so incentivizes projects not to add support unless they receive a grant, since doing so prevents them from receiving a grant, all while punishing projects that already integrated optimism before of their own accord. This type of incentive goes against what optimism is trying to achieve with this grant program, so retroactive incentives make a lot of sense to avoid this.

Regarding llamapay, here’s a quick comparison against superfluid:

  • Llamapay is completely open source, while superfluid’s not (eg: neither their app frontend nor their liquidations bots are opensource)

  • Llamapay has no vcs, it’s purely funded through donations and self-funding. Superfluid raised 10M.

  • Llamapay was deployed on optimism on launch, while superfluid took much longer since their launch.

  • Currently llamapay’s TVL on optimism is ~55k while superfluid’s is ~36k.

  • Llamapay is being used by optimism-native projects such as velodrome

For these reasons I think it could make sense to request a similar or higher OP allocation than superfluid but since we are mixing this with the defillama request we’ll just lower it to 130k (20k lower).

Did the project apply for or receive OP tokens through the Foundation Partner Fund?: No

How much will your project match in co-incentives? (not required but recommended, when applicable): We don’t have a token

Proposal for token distribution: The full allocation will go to cover operational costs, allowing us to continue delivering highly maintained/updated data.

9 Likes
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I am a big fan of Defi Llama, and what they have done for the Defi Space. Glad to have you guys here, and I support your proposal.

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Great product, but I think this would open up a slippery slope of retroactively rewarding protocols via the grant program. As you mentioned, DeFiLlama has already done the hard work, so this is more suited to the retroactive fund.

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This might be an excellent example of RPGF proposal. You already had done the work and now you get reward. Impact = profit.

On proposal:-

Which Voting Cycle are you applying for?: Cycle 6

This should be 7.

Ideally, this should be two proposals, one has nothing to do with another. You are comparing with superfluid but forgot to mention the token distribution, value proposition and project metrics.

Also, this proposal starts well but more I read it seems you are submitting the proposal because a similar project has received a funding.

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it’s just easier for me to do a single proposal than do 2 of them, and since funding will go to the same entity it made sense

It’s just that I found it quite hard to argue for why we should get a specific amount, since all protocols use different metrics we don’t have, and we don’t have a specific goal such as “integrating optimism” that has a cost associated with it, since again we’ve already done the work, so we can’t use the same logic that other proposals used, and using comparisons against other proposals seemed like a good idea.

Are these live?

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DefiLlama is very useful. Yes for this proposal

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  1. Agree, either both get approved or none.
  2. This also make sense, but I mean you dont need to mention them through out the proposal, its a proposal not a comparison report, it gives you a negative image. You have a huge market presence and widely used, DeFiLama does not need comparison to prove its worth.
  3. Not yet. RPGF will become active with launch of Optimism Citizen house. There is not officially date announced.
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I quite understand why DefiLlama is making a point here. I don’t see it as comparing since they really don’t need to be compared. They could change the proposal to fit the narrative saying they already made plenty of integration but they “need” funds to keep rolling integrations nevertheless that’s not really how they work since integrations will continue to be made with or without this funds.

I don’t think they should wait more time for funds. They don’t need to prove anything, we all know and use DefiLlama and it’s about time to vote on this, even if it would be better for RPGF.

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Glad to see you here.

Two things, I am not saying this proposal should not be allowed or be part of voting. Proposal is requesting funding from gov fund so by guidelines its should be.

Second, my believe is that public good funding should be done by citizen house, one soul = one vote. You have seen how voting power of a delegate fluctuate every cycle which mean something that could be seen public good in this cycle might not get approval in next cycle because of voting power change.

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I don’t think it’s a slippery slope at all, I think that’s the point of the comparison made in the proposal. The two projects he mentions, both used the funding similarly, only they did it before delivering anything. In the case of DeFi Llama we can probably expect a ton of more features added as a result of this funding.

It’s a win for Optimism and for DeFi Llama, I’m fully in support!

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I agree they deserve some compensation for their hard work and its a win for both. I say slippery slope because it might encourage other protocols to apply for retroactive grants when RGPF should be tackling that.

I am not against the proposal and appreciate that they compared it to other grants to decide on a token amount. However, some further insight into the breakdown of the team and the expected operational costs would provide some transparency on how long the grant will last. Ideally, we are going to follow up with grants in the future, so it’d be ideal to know how long this grant is supporting them and what has come out of it too.

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I am an Optimism delegate [Delegate Commitments - #136 by jackanorak ] and satisfied llamapay customer with sufficient voting power and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

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Just wanted to point out that if most people feel that it would be better to reword my original post to exclude the comparisons to previous grants I’d be happy to do so, only issue would be that the amount might lack some justification.

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i agree that context helps tbh - there’s not a lot of precedent for what you’re proposing so some extra justification is probably needed one way or another

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I am an Optimism delegate [Delegate Commitments - #65 by mastermojo ] with sufficient voting power, and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote

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one cannot deny how useful is DefiLlama to Defi Community. and commitment of @0xngmi is astonishing.
so yes for sure…

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In support of funding the team of DeFiLlama for their great work and support of Optimism.

As mentioned by others, the current proposal seems more suitable for retroactive funding once this is launched. As you add more and more DeFi services & tools, there’s definitely also room to submit another proposal that focuses more on spurring growth of Llama and the Op ecosystem :slight_smile:

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Regarding the amounts requested @0xngmi can you provide $ values? Since it’s salaries that you need covered and since (as far as I understand they have already been paid – you should know exact amounts)?

The other grants requested OP was in $ amounts which later got converted to OP amounts at the time of the proposal.

As for the RPGF versus using this grant round I don’t know. It depends on what the OP foundation wants to do. If it’s okay with it and it’s up to community then it could just go to the commitee for the next voting round and also go to a vote.

But indeed the point of a grant is to incentivize something being built/done and not to reward for past work. That said I love the work you did/are doing and RPGF is still not open so we can’t even offer you an alternative but just tell you to wait if the proposal was to be rejected for this reason.

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Small remark but I’d like to clarify that we will use this money to continue improving defillama and build products, it’s not purely retroactive funding where we are paid for previous costs. Instead, we are asking for money to keep improving defillama and launch new products that benefit everyone.

The way I see it, the only difference against other grants is that we cannot provide something like a “integrate optimism” milestone since we have already integrated Optimism into every aspect of our products, and providing milestones for new products wouldn’t be optimal since we keep a very close loop on products and keep our product lifecycle extremely flexible (so we don’t have a clear outline of everything we’ll be building over the coming months).

Because of how vague that is I thought the best way to just provide a reasoning for expenses based on previous grants (also helps since OP is quite volatile while amounts previously awarded are fixed).

This is important because retroactive funding carries a very different set of expectations (you are getting paid for previous work, so you can do whatever you want with the money received), whereas here we are instead committing to work on more crypto analytics and spend all money building the product. I can understand where the confusion is coming from since in this proposal I’m heavy leveraging our previous work to argue for receiving this funding, but its actually like “Look at all we’ve built, please fund us to build all these new cool things” rather than “We’ve built all this, please pay us retroactively”.

Regarding RPGF, for us it would be much better if we could proceed to voting, and in case the community rejects it we’ll just accept it and wait for RPGF rounds.