Why most critiques of Retro Funding miss the mark—and what actually matters if we want to fund public goods better.

Voting for Optimism’s fourth round of Retroactive Public Goods Funding (“Retro Funding”) just started. You can check it out here. Last round, voters were tasked with comparing the contributions of more than 500 projects, from underlying infrastructure like Geth to pop-up cities like Zuzalu, and then constructing a ballot that assigned a specific OP reward to each project based on its perceived impact. This round, voters will be comparing just 16 impact metrics – and using their ballots to con...

This post is inspired by the work and thought leadership of organizations explicitly mentioned (Gitcoin, Optimism, Drips, Superfluid, Hypercerts, etc) as well as various conversations with Juan Benet and Raymond Cheng regarding the features of network capital vs private capital.Every funding ecosystem has domains that are core and domains that are important but peripheralGitcoin visualized this concept of nested scopes nicely in a blog post in 2021. The original post described a stack of impa...

I wasn’t planning to do any more writing about Optimism’s RetroPGF3. It’s been two months since the round ended, and I’ve already done a bunch of writing on the topic. You can find it here and on the Optimism forum. But then, a few days ago, I was nerd-sniped by this dataset of anonymized voting results. I vowed to only take a quick look at the end of my workday. Guess how well that went… The dataset shows how 21,813 votes were cast across 643 projects by 100+ independent voters (“badgeholder...

RetroPGF generated a considerable amount of noise, both during and after the main event. Now that the results are in, we need to find the signal. These are the messages, intended or not, that will likely reach the wider community. We can learn a lot by plotting and analyzing the distribution patterns of tokens to projects. In domains where the signal is too weak (ie, impact > profit) or too strong (ie, profit > impact), the Collective should be more explicit in shaping the distribution patter...

RetroPGF is a unique kind of repeated game. With each round, we are iterating on both the rules and the composition of players. These things matter a lot. To get better, we need to study whether the rules and player dynamics are having the intended effect. This post looks at the psychology of the game during Round 3, identifies mechanics that might have caused us to deviate from our intended strategy, and suggests ways of mitigating such issues in the future. Disclaimer: I was a voter and had...

✨ An impact vector is a direction of positive impact that projects in the Optimism ecosystem should work towards.ContextAs the L2 space grows more competitive, Optimism needs to maintain its early advantage and ensure it keeps improving the ROI of its grantmaking. Improving ROI means making both the process more efficient for all participants and the allocations more impactful for the ecosystem. Data is critical for badgeholders to transition from working at the middle of the grants funnel (i...

Open Source Observer is a platform for measuring the impact of open source software (OSS) contributions. We launched a few months ago with a commitment to open source everything. Here is our hello world post on the forum ICYMI. This report is a shallow dive on the 300+ open source software projects participating in the latest round of retroactive public goods funding (RetroPGF 3). It combines both off- and onchain data about projects. The report itself has two objectives:Kickstart more rigoro...

Here’s a talk I gave at the Greenpill NYC series on September 23, 2023. Two months after the event, I turned my notes from the talk into this blog post. I’m not aware of a recording of what I actually said but hopefully this is close enough. Great appreciation to Luciano, Tirisanna, Mathilda, Scott, Izzy, Owocki and others I’m not naming for making this event happen, and to the several dozen people who showed up in BedStuy on a rainy Saturday on the heels of NY Climate Week and Mainnet to tak...

This is a note I wrote on October 28, 2022 shortly after joining Protocol Labs to work on hypercerts. I’m sharing it as a blog post, almost exactly one year later, as an artifact that may be useful to other teams at the early stages of building a new protocol. I have now moved on from working on hypercerts full-time, but have great hopes for the protocol and the community that has sprouted up around it. I am also curious to see how well this doc ages. Note: the doc has been lightly edited fro...