[REVIEW] [GF: Phase 1 Proposal] Symphony Finance

Breaking up larger Asks in smaller parts, working with clear deliverables and milestone payments has been proven again and again to achieve better results and works especially well in an adversarial, experimental environment.

You definitely have a point with funding the right initiatives but r/r for Optimism differs from venture funding.

If we were not „bound“ to Optimism governance guidelines, we’d also advocate an extremely focused grant funding approach, for example on truly unique projects & top teams with tremendous network effects.

Thanks for the quick response. Will get something substantive back.

An acquihire is an interesting proposition tbh! I do think this team seems really impressive.

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This is consistent with what I’m saying – unlike VC you’re not swinging for home runs as OP governance. You’re looking for stuff that’s clearly promising for an ecosystem and for which a grant is clearly catalytic. I’m saying that this proposal as presented offers neither.

I’m not sure what this is in response to or why you’re quoting me on Overnight’s proposal. Their product has shown exceptional PMF (i.e., it’s a product that should be accelerated), and what I was proposing was a clearer delineation of what was to be built. That’s not relevant to this discussion.

If your point is that it’s good to stage asks and match them to intended outcomes, yes. That’s exactly what we’ve done with Velodrome, for instance – we made a 6 month ask and are making another one now – with intended outcomes – and we’ve come back with an abundance of data. Tarot’s revised one did similarly, as have a number of other proposals. I think we’re getting better at this. But making a large ask that does nothing for governance smaller (which is what you suggested above) isn’t beneficial for anybody. What you need to do is make the path to growth credible.

EDIT: This was written before I’ve fully read Kakashi’s last post, so there well could be info I’ve missed that might make me completely reverse my position.

A. Optimism needs to build a full ecosystem. Onboarding top devs, projects, users (this proposal can help) is among the goals - even if not incredibly catalytic but with solid CACs etc.

B. Short-Term Experiments, milestone payments can limit risks, kick off a fruitful long-term partnership and enable us to evaluate and cut funding or doubledown on initiatives that prove themselves.

Please message me if you want to further discuss r/r or Op ecosystem building as discussion is going slightly off and we should fully focus on Symphony in this thread :slightly_smiling_face:

Hey delegates, It would be great if you can read and approve our proposal.
@mastermojo @Exosphere @krzkaczor @linda @quix @katie @OPUser @solarcurve

Thanks for the kind words.

I am an Optimism delegate [Delegate Commitments - #18 by katie] with sufficient voting power and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

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As an Optimism delegate [Delegate Commitments - #29 by Exosphere ] with sufficient voting power I move that this proposal be transitioned to the voting stage.

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We are an additional Optimism delegate with sufficient voting power (1.13% of the vote), and we believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote. Delegate Commitments - #69 by fig

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@katie @Exosphere @fig We are deeply grateful for your support and thank you for helping Symphony progress to the next phase.

We are also grateful to all the delegates who have taken the time to review our proposal and provided some great feedback.

Looking forward to your support in later phases :heart:

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Moving this proposal to REVIEW status ahead of Voting Cycle #8, Week 2, as per OPerating Manual v0.2.0 2.

Summary of feedback and changes to the proposal

The feedback received on the proposal has been very constructive and has helped us to create a proposal that will incentivize Symphony’s usage on OP and drive the ecosystem’s growth. The changes can be summarized as follows:

  • The team has added a detailed short-term & long-term roadmap for Symphony as per community feedback.

  • After a long discussion & community feedback, the distribution plans have been revised. We have allocated more tokens(55%) for User incentives and decreased marketing allocation to 15%.

  • The proposal has been updated with details regarding our marketing programs and provided detailed justification on how we plan on using those funds.

  • The team has responded to questions regarding the level of Optimism focus in our marketing and community education.

  • The team has provided information regarding Symphony’s yield generation process, maintenance & integration costs.

  • The team has provided different subgraphs on user data and analytics per different queries.

  • The proposal has been updated with information regarding airdrops and gas rebates for user incentives.

  • The team has provided comparative charts for volume, transaction counts, and transaction costs with respect to other DEXs on Polygon.

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Defi Committee A Recommendation

Voting recommendation: No

Rationale: 35% is allocated to retroactive air drops which have proven to be ineffective as shown in the governance grant performance presentation. 30% is allocated for development and maintenance and it’s unclear if these tokens will be sold which would violate the no sale rule.

Next Steps: We would like to see the retroactive airdrop removed and clarify whether the intention is to sell the 30% allocated for development and maintenance.

Note: Linda and Bobby recused themselves due to conflicts of interest.

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Thanks to the committee for taking the time to review our proposal. We don’t have any intention of selling the tokens allocated for development and maintenance. We will keep it in our treasury for a long time. It will help us diversify our treasury. We are also happy to keep a lockup of a minimum of 6 months on funds allocated for development. In an emergency, we may use these funds to compensate the developers, but we will do so directly in the $OP token (without selling to any other token).

The 35% tokens are allocated to incentivize the actual usage. We will allocate a very small percentage in the early stages for retroactive airdrop, and if the strategy doesn’t work, we’ll change our strategy. For eg: we can start LM. The limit order will earn an extra APY in $OP tokens on top of the real yield (from protocols like Aave). The yield can only be earned if the limit/stoploss order executes. This way we will be able to stop mercenary actors from gaming the system.

Please let us know if you have any other questions. We would love to answer them.

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I am voting against this proposal following the committee recommendation. The retroactive airdrop is a deal breaker for me.

Voted: Against

The discussion here was very constructive. Committee A showed two important points to correct and our community also accompanied. I personally value the added value of Symphony for a particular sector of the DeFi ecosystem, so the main goal is to encourage volume, trading competitions can be a good approach while the marketing strategy is still in place; in my understanding trading on-chain needs more push (while farming activities doesn’t because the APY does it by itself). We will be waiting for a better focused proposal, Symphony has been used by various members of our community for some time now.

Snapshot vote - not passed

I’m not often active on op, but I activated this account for this project.
It’s a great program and with its stop-loss feature, it’s saved me a lot of losses!