1. Presentation
We are an officially recognized Tooling Governance Committee, responsible for assessing proposals related to tooling and infrastructure (wallets, bridges etc.).
To begin with, for this proposal we identified a possible conflict of interest between our team members:
- @cryptotesters involved in Hop protocol,
- @krzkaczor involved in L2BEAT,
These individuals were excluded from assessing this proposal.
2. About the project
Socket plans to be an “interoperability protocol”, which means that it allows the passing of messages (and therefore assets) between Optimism and other chains for different dApps and using different primitives to make it possible.
For now, their released products, Bungee, a bridge aggregator; is based on bridges and DEXes they route the best parameterized alternative with aspects such as latency, costs and security. Additionally, Refuel allows users to send gas for transactions to other chains, with the advantage of not receiving any fee or charge beyond the transaction cost.
External links:
Similar OP Governance proposals:
3. About the following
The proposal was presented in a previous cycle, and this committee emiting a No because high amount requested, receiving other recommendations and applying again. The new proposal just made changes in the amount request and duration.
4. About the proposal valuation
- Added value (good to bad): good. Through the Socket, users and dApps could potentially benefit from their crosschain services in the same way that DEX aggregators are often the basis within the interactions of multiple DeFi applications.
- Impact or expected usage (high to low): medium. For now its bridge aggregator is seen as a plugin and suitable for less experienced users. However, the presence of multiple bridges with grants awarded focused on a better experience for users could overshadow the current target of its main application. On the other hand, the usability of future Socket tools in dApps is undetermined, which will depend on which ones and their user base (as they suggest some good ideas).
- Current Status [Development stage/Open Source?] (early to ready): almost ready. For now, they have two functional products focused on bridging assets and several integrations, but developers are encouraged to use the Socket bases for new use cases.
- Expenditure plan and distribution (appropriate to inappropriate): standard. Subsidies are seen as a standard in terms of encouraging the use of bridges (60%). One remaining for development, this bucket would be destined for future ideas and third party teams working around Socket, there is no way to estimate the success of it and it is at the complete discretion of the Socket team.
- Amount requested (high to low): standard. At the moment there is a considerable number of bridges and the like beginning to make use of the OPs granted by the governance (by example, implementing some sort of builder grants and user subsidies). For this reason we requested a reduction of amount of this proposal in a previous attempt. The team was responsive with these considerations and cut by a half.
5. FINAL RECOMMENDATION: Yes
The proposal seems reasonable. After they have addressed our request about reducing the amount, all the rest of valuations remain as they were determined in the recommendation of the previous cycle.