Season 4 Feedback Thread

[Griff]

@jackanorak

To follow up on some earlier posts, I think there needs to be more direct labeling of 1. what is being proposed, and 2. who the members/scenes are to fully expose potential redundancies or lopsidedness in distribution. I don’t know that we necessarily want to limit, as we want to maintain lots of room for collaboration and it’s still a small world, but people should know where the OP is going.

There are a handful of players that have dominated the proposals and seemingly have gotten by because the names of the alliances are different.

Thx Jack for bringing up this issue so I can add transparency to it. I am the main thread between many projects on your list!

I have been telling every public goods focused project that will listen to me that they should be building on and & for Optimism. I even got on stage today in ETHBarcelona and said “30M OP in November. What are you building? Put it on Optimism”

ETHBarcelona Solar Stage Day 2

Go to the 7:41:12 mark

I have founded A LOT of public goods focused projects over the years all with the same Public Goods, Impact = Profit vibes but with different focuses… and of course, I advised ALL of them to apply to the various Intents, as I have advised every single builder in the public goods space to do. Optimism is the chain most aligned with Public Goods and has extensive grants programs.

I started/cofounded:

• Giveth in 2016
• Dappnode in 2017
• Commons Stack in 2019
• Token Engineering Commons in 2019
• Praise in 2020
• Trusted Seed in 2020
• General Magic in 2021
• Pairwise in 2022

All of these projects would consider themselves part of the “Giveth Galaxy” but they are all separate projects, except for Praise and Pairwise which are still being incubated by General Magic.

The main thing connecting all of them is that I am a founder. Other than that they all have separate teams with separate leadership… other than me… But honestly, my leadership is spread very thin, all I can do is advise and promote.

@jackanorak

Specifically, I see members/affiliates of Bankless DAO, Giveth, and General Magic (same leadership as Giveth) on 10 of the 30 proposals that went to a final vote this season, amounting to ~800k OP of the total 2.6mm OP up for distribution this round. This seems like a fairly large amount of funds going to the same few people over and over again

Here is the leadership breakdown and my participation with the different orgs:

• Giveth is very much a DAO with our own governance model (VERY similar to the Citizens House/ Token House model)
• General Magic is led by Marko, Ahmad, and I
• Commons Stack is led by Tam, Livia and I
• Token Engineering Commons is very much a DAO, but Gideon, Issac and Bear are the most influential (I actively advise with ~2 weekly calls)
• Trusted Seed is led by Max, and has a board that meets monthly (I actively advise with 1 weekly call)
• Dappnode is led by Edu and Lanski (I barely stay in the loop here, 1 serendipitous catch up every 2-3 months)

The hard part is, that General Magic is a for-hire consultant, and has contracts with over 20 different teams in the space to do work for them (everything from accounting to solidity development). GM is usually hired when teams have short term projects that need extra support, and many of these Optimism proposals really fit that use case.

Also to make things more complicated, GM is teamed up with Giveth to contract work to their developers. This was a bear market strategy for Giveth to reduce the work being done on Giveth’s core products and contract through General Magic to make it through the bear market. This strategy has been a success, as Giveth has not had to lay anyone off, (unlike several other public goods focused projects :-/). If you want to read more about the deal, it is all public in this forum post. I can understand how that makes things more complicated.

The other important thing to mention is that General Magic has a contract to support other teams to apply for grants IN GENERAL (you can read more about how this works here). This of course includes Optimism Grants. Projects that GM supported in applying to grants for Optimism are:

• DAOstar
• Unitap
• BrightID
• Metagame
• Fair Data Society
• Dappnode

GM doesn’t have a contract with Gravity DAO for grants, but Juanka is a long time community member and comes to some of our fundraising support calls along with other friends in the space.

The other Giveth Galaxy projects do not have a contract with GM for grant support, each of their teams applied independently.

General Magic was also contacted by the Giveth & Commons Stack teams to provide extra support for grants (though GM did not help them write the grant). And just to be real, I expect with such tight deadlines that several other projects will call on GM for emergency support to complete the milestones. And they should, I think GM is the only consulting team in the world that is focused solely on web3 Public Goods.

@Pr0

We could allow locked tokens to be wrapped, permitting grant recipients to open loans or credit lines with third-party lenders or market makers, using their locked tokens as collateral or even keep them unwrapped and just make it clear that practices involving private entities between each other based on these locked assets are not banned and parties are free to engage in any activities they wish with their assets, as long as they respect the lock. This way, they’d remain aligned with the project’s success, since they’d want their locked tokens’ value to increase. They’d have funds from the loan to cover their living expenses and would face two options: default on the loan and act in a mercenary-like manner or increase the value of their collateral, repay the loan upon token unlock, and ultimately make a profit.

This is probably the most important thing to mention, and what enabled the projects I founded to apply for a larger percentage of the grants than other teams. I am working with those teams to loan them funds and take the OP that is locked as collateral so that they can have the short term liquidity they need to pay their employees. Honestly, this is a huge risk on my part, but it’s ok, I’m an Optimist. I want all of my teams to work with Optimism. Also I do believe in the long term value of the OP token and am hoping to work with the community to add utility to the OP token, see my comments in Economic Co-design of Gas Fees for the OP Stack for more details on my thoughts here.

As far as Espacio Cripto or HER LATAM alliances that Brichis supported… Yes, Brichis works for GM, but she is supporting these Latam projects on her own time, and is not being paid by GM to support them, nor does GM have any contracts or expectations in any way with those teams. GM also doesn’t have any insight into the deals she has made with these orgs. I am sure, though, that Brichis’ knowledge on the complicated grant program this quarter would be very helpful to any team. It was very difficult to navigate.

I want to reiterate the independence and autonomy of each project within and around the Giveth Galaxy. The collaboration and support among these projects, including grant application support from General Magic, aim to foster a thriving ecosystem for public goods. My involvement as a founder is focused on advisory roles, and the leadership and decision-making lie with the individual projects. Transparency and open dialogue are essential, and I am available for further discussions to address any concerns or provide additional clarity.

I am trying to be overly transparent. If anything that I am doing is going against the rules in any way, I am happy to learn about it so I can support Optimism in a more acceptable way. I am VERY aligned with the Optimistic Vision, I have been working towards a similar vision since 2015 and I don’t intend to stop anytime soon. Optimism has created the best system out there to support Public Goods and it is something I am excited to really support behind. All I want to do is help in any way I can.

If you or anyone else wants to have a deeper understanding I am happy to arrange a call.