Season 6: Intents Ratification

[system]

Special thanks to @ceresstation, @GFXlabs, @Gonna.eth, @jackanorak, @kaereste, @Matt / @mastermojo, and @Porter_Smith, for review and feedback of scope changes as part of the Feedback Commission.

Season 6: Intents

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Context

In Season 4, we introduced the concept of Intents, or high level strategic goals the entire Collective works towards. In Season 4 Intents and Season 5 Intents , we experimented with having the community set an Intent.

As the Collective grows, and Intents apply to the broader Superchain ecosystem, we believe the Foundation has the best insight into the strategic priorities of the broader ecosystem. Therefore, in Season 6, the Foundation will propose all Intents, and they must be ratified by the full Token House. Please note that the Citizens’ House may eventually be involved in the Intents process but will not be in Season 6.

The goal continues to be to reduce the Foundation’s role in this process as we bootstrap the infrastructure required for the Intents to be set in a data driven and governance minimized way.

Robust data infrastructure and analysis capabilities must be developed to enable the Collective to set Intents. Ideally, this system would allow the Collective to derive something that looks like a KPI tree stemming from a north star metric (ie. network usage) so that Collective Intent setting looks more like a calculation than a subjective brainstorming session. Importantly, the Missions (tactics) to achieve each Intent still remain open to subjectivity and can support moonshot or strategic bets. The thinking on this is open to feedback, iteration, and evolution over time.

Furthermore, in Season 6, the Foundation will propose the budgets for each Intent. This is a temporary measure, meant to occur only in Season 6. In Season 5, the Grants Council proposed the Intent Budgets with the intention to transition this responsibility to a Budget Board in the future. The Budget Board won’t be introduced until Season 7 but, given the amount of influence the Grants Council already has in the Token House, we believe it’s more appropriate if the Grants Council doesn’t also propose the Intent Budgets.

Please see Suggested Mission Requests for specific examples under each Intent. The Grants Council will continue to process all Mission Requests under these Intents.

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Intent 1: Progress Towards Decentralization

The Collective must continue to make progress towards its core value proposition to provide resilient, decentralized, scalable compute. This includes both technical and organizational decentralization – including work to improve fault provability, upgrade processes, governance execution, the development ecosystem, and governance processes of the Collective.

This Intent, or a version of, has been Intent #1 for three Seasons in a row. It continues to be the Collective’s top priority.

Consumer facing applications, education initiatives, and/or events may be supported by this Intent, in so far as they contribute to the target governance metric.

Target metric, technical: Stage 1 rollup with multiple fault proofs running in production

This target metric uses L2Beat’s Stage 1 in order to measure the actual properties of the system, rather than measuring inputs (like “add three new core development teams”).

Target metric, Token House governance: Increase votable supply by 15% to 100M OP

Target metric, Citizens’ House governance: Increase in the percentage of Citizens that feel confident voting on upgrade vetos (to be measured via the voting UI in each veto proposal)

The Collective aims to develop a more comprehensive framework for mapping decentralization beyond just technical properties that may be used in future Seasons.

• The Foundation is focused on:

  • developing a roadmap towards onchain execution of governance outcomes
  • iterating on the Security Council implementation to bring OP Chains to L2BEAT’s Stage 1 decentralization
  • developing the Path to Open Metagovernance design
  • increasing the autonomy of the Citizens’ House, and
  • increasing votable supply of the OP token

• Core development teams are focused on implementing:

  • permissionless fault proofs across the Superchain
  • alternate fault proof implementations like Asterisc
  • delayed protocol upgrades
  • high-availability sequencing
  • expanded core development program of teams contributing to the OP Stack

• Retroactive Public Goods Funding (Retro Funding) will support Intent 1 through Round 5 (OP Stack) and Round 6 (Governance).

• The Gov Fund is well positioned to support the decentralization of governance processes, including:

  • Critical DAO infrastructure (examples here)
  • Rigorous research and analysis on key governance parameters (examples here)
  • Driving delegation
  • See example Mission Requests here.

• Proposed Gov Fund Budget: 500k OP

  • Please note the Gov Fund will not support technical decentralization under Intent #1 in Season 6. As the core dev process continues to develop, it is possible the Governance Fund may support these types of technical grants again in the future but, currently it is difficult to ensure a high enough degree of compatibility with core roadmaps.

Intent 2: Bring Chains to the Superchain

The Collective continues to focus on the growth of the Superchain, a network of OP Chains building together. OP Chains on the Superchain contribute revenue back to the Optimism Collective, and share in the Collective’s security, governance-approved upgrades, retroactive public goods funding, and ecosystem support. The complete list of Chains considered to be part of the Superchain is defined in the Superchain Registry.

Our hypothesis is that this strategy will allow the Collective to grow faster, go farther, and scale Ethereum more effectively.

Target metric: 20 new chains in the Superchain in the next 6 months

This target is set based on our internal deal pipeline.

• Core development teams will continue work on highly-requested features from OP Chain operators, including:

  • OP Plasma
  • Interoperability
  • Protocol-enshrined revenue sharing
  • Lower transaction latency
  • EIP 7212
  • Alt-DA Integrations
  • Customizable gas limits

• The Foundation will continue to grow the Superchain by establishing Superchain governance processes, making grants through the Partner Fund to OP Chains, and through refining core Superchain branding & marketing.

• Retro Funding now includes all chains on the Superchain as of April 2024, which are in scope for upcoming rounds in 2024. In particular, Round 7 (Dev Tooling) supports essential infra and tooling for OP Chain growth.

• The Gov Fund will not directly support this Intent, as it requires high touch negotiations with well-established partners

• The scope for Airdrops in Season 6 will include chains in the Superchain beyond just OP Mainnet as timing and data infrastructure allow.

Intent 3: Grow application devs on the Superchain

In addition to bringing new chains to the Superchain, the Collective also aims to grow application developers across all OP Chains in the Superchain.

Developer growth and consumer growth are two parts of the flywheel that drive network usage for the Collective. But rather than focus on consumer growth in Season 6, Optimism is focused on developer growth – bootstrapping the supply side of this market to support developers across the globe in building valuable, demand-generating applications on any OP Chain in the Superchain.

Consumer facing applications, education initiatives, and/or events may be supported by this Intent, in so far as they contribute to the target metric.

Target metric: 9,500 active developers driving network usage (link) relative to 6,800 now.

This metric is based on projected and targeted market share.

• Core development teams are working on the Superchain Dev Console to support app devs across the Superchain, which will continue to grow to include paymaster functionality, ecosystem integrations, and more.

• The Foundation will support Intent #3 through infrastructure partnerships for app developers and experiments around identity infrastructure. It will also develop and fund vertical-specific growth campaigns (like WLTA).

• Retro Funding supports this Intent through Round 4 (Onchain Builders), Round 7: (Dev Tooling)

• The Gov Fund supports this Intent in two ways:

  • The Grants Council will be responsible for processing Mission grants for builders OP Mainnet. See example Mission Requests here.
  • OP Chains may also apply to the Gov Fund to support builders via their own chain-specific grant programs. See full details in the corresponding Mission Request here.

• Proposed Gov Fund Budget: 18M OP (3A + 3B)

  • Intent 3A: 6M OP for grants supporting OP Mainnet
  • Intent 3B: 12M OP for chain-specific grant programs supporting the Superchain (to be run by these Chains).

[system]

As part of the Path to Open Metagovernance, we’ll be experimenting with polls this Reflection Period.

Is it clear how the Intents are supported by the Governance Fund?

Please provide additional feedback in the comments if you select any answers below

• Yes
• No
• I’m confused about how the Governance Fund supports the Superchain

[system]

Do you believe this proposal is ready to move to vote?

Please provide additional feedback in the comments if you select any of the below

• Yes
• Yes, with adjustments
• No

[Luckyhooman.eth]

@system

Intent 3B: 12M OP for chain-specific grant programs supporting the Superchain (to be run by these Chains).

Will these Superchain grant programmes be run on their respective chains. If so does this mean we will be bridging OP token to different networks? eg OP mainnet-> Eth mainnet-> Base
Or will these Superchain grants utilize OP mainnet for grant distribution.

[Griff]

@system

Proposed Gov Fund Budget: 500k OP

• Please note the Gov Fund will not support technical decentralization under Intent #1 in Season 6. As the core dev process continues to develop, it is possible the Governance Fund may support these types of technical grants again in the future but, currently it is difficult to ensure a high enough degree of compatibility with core roadmaps.

Maybe I’m missing something… but if the Gov Fund will not support technical decentralization under Intent #1 in Season 6, what is the 500k for?

[lefterisjp]

Agree with the general intents. I would like to think a bit on the funding of each intent but guess this proposal is not for this. So voting for.

[lavande]

Intent #1 now encapsulates both technical and organizational decentralization. You can see a list of examples of the types of Missions that could be supported with the 500k OP budget here.

[SEEDGov]

The SEED Latam delegation, as we have communicated here, with @Joxes being an Optimism delegate we VOTE FOR both proposals, Intents ratification and their budgets.

We think the scope for Intent 1 makes sense for now, as aligning Optimism’s goals with core developers and external teams might be challenging when referring to OP Stack development. In this regard, the work accumulated in Season 5 suffices for now and demostrate how difficult is to find alignment. Thus, we believe the GovFund making focus on decentralizing governance processes is reasonable. Regarding Intents 2, we agree that we’re currently in the stage where the efforts must be done from a very well-focused strategy. and for Intents 3, clearly pushing for more developer growth within the Superchain and launching applications is very positive and need to continue. About budgets, they seem appropriate for us and we have no comments in this regard.

Note aside, one question it’s the exact rationale behind the decision not to have a slot available for governance to propose a vertical as Intent.

[lefterisjp]

After this clarification I can vote FOR the budget here too. I don’t see anything too weird.

[kaereste]

The following reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @kaereste and @Sinkas, and it’s based on the combined research, fact-checking, and ideation of the two.

Disclaimer: we’ve been consulting early versions of this proposal as part of the Feedback Commission.

We vote in favor of this proposal. We believe that the proposed scope of focus for Season 6 provides a good foundation for expanding the Optimism Collective for the Superchain vision.

We like the non-technical focus of Intent 1 as it addresses the social infrastructure aspect of protocol decentralization. Furthermore, we look forward to Superchain chains grant program experiments, which we hope will provide us with different perspectives on both the structure and scope of the funded initiatives.

[itublockchain]

We support this proposal overall because the Collective’s goals of advancing decentralization efforts and encouraging growth in the Superchain ecosystem are well-aligned. Intent 1 plans to make significant strides in technical aspects and decentralization, though we need more information on how the 500k OP budget will be used. Intent 2 aims to add 20 new chains to the Superchain, which will support the rapid growth of the Collective. Intent 3 aims to increase the number of developers. While the budget allocated for this intent may seem large, it is critical for supporting developer growth. Overall, we believe this proposal should pass in its current state.

[system]

Minor update was made to add the following target metric for Citizens House governance under Intent 1, based on feedback from Citizens on the Feedback Commission:

Target metric, Citizens’ House governance: Increase in the percentage of Citizens that feel confident voting on upgrade vetos (to be measured via the voting UI in each veto proposal)

[xochitl]

gm gm!! I have loved learning more about the intents of Season 6 and how the various parts of the collective come together to support the strategy. I’m curious if there is a process for giving updates throughout the season on progress made toward the intents.

[lavande]

We’ve been working with the Grants Council to set up Governance Fund grants in Season 6 in a way that will allow us to do an analysis on their contribution towards the Intents at the end of the season. Apart from that, the Foundation posts bi-annual budget reports and we do round by round analysis of Retro Funding rounds.

The goal is definitely to get to the point where our data infrastructure and collection methods are standardized enough that we can analyze all contributions to the Intents and post regular progress reports like you mention!

[xochitl]

Thank you @lavande

[alexsotodigital]

Hey.

Here are the results of the ‘collective input’ exercise we conducted at the Joint House Community Call yesterday.

The intention is to nourish the reflection and design process that the OP foundation @system will take to define the intents for season 7.

This was an initiative by the govNERDs contribution path, knowing (of course) that the OP Foundation and the Collective Feedback Commission will have other (more formal) spaces during the reflection period. We hope this brings some value.

If anyone else would like to add their anonymous input, they can do so via this link (between now and November 20, that is the end of season 6).You can also see the updated results at this link.