Carl CervoneA deep dive on impact metrics for Retro Funding 4
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...
Carl CervoneThe past, present and future of public goods funding
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...
Carl CervoneEcosystem Impact Vectors
✨ 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...
Carl CervoneA deep dive on impact metrics for Retro Funding 4
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...
Carl CervoneThe past, present and future of public goods funding
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...
Carl CervoneEcosystem Impact Vectors
✨ 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...
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Tokens = shares = votes. Most coops have a 1 member = 1 vote model.
Instead, grant a utility token based on a Log(production) formula, e.g., a farm that produces 1000 units gets 3 tokens and a farm that produces 10 units gets 1 token.
A utility token is required to sell coffee through the cooperative, participate in governance, and receive other benefits.
The goal is to give a bit more power to bigger farms, but not too much.
A "lot" is coffee industry-speak for an atomic unit of coffee production.
Each lot has non-fungible properties including: varietal(s), date(s), processing, cup score, provenance, etc.
You see some of these properties printed on the bag at specialty coffee shops and all of them in the fine print of actual green coffee contracts.
When a lot is bagged and tagged, it could be minted as an NFT that reflects the physical lot.
And the NFT is "burned" when it's sold to a roaster. (Hopefully the roaster IRL doesn't go too far past second crack!)
The traditional coffee trade has a "buy low, sell high" mentality. This creates lots of haggling and mistrust over price.
If each lot were an NFT, the cooperative could earn 100% of the first sale and a 10% royalty on each subsequent sale.
This would better align incentives throughout the chain and create less pressure for the cooperative to have a high floor price (asking price) during the harvest.
Corruption and cronyism are major issues for coops.
On-chain voting and multi-sig wallets could improve transparency. So too would predetermined protocols and treasury allocations for services like milling and management compensation.
Reputation metrics, such as participation in meetings and cup quality, could help qualify members for governance roles.
Futures and options strategies to hedge price and currency risk could be executed algorithmically, like the major trading houses already do.
A fair amount of logistics work (insurance, vessel booking, document forwarding, etc) could too.
The infrastructure may not all be there today, but it should be soon as none of these requirements are unique to coffee.
✅ Cashless payments + royalties
✅ USDC staking + lending
✅ Payments for ecosystem services / verified carbon offsets
✅ Tips from end consumers
✅ Results-based financing of impact outcomes
... and much more!
Tokens = shares = votes. Most coops have a 1 member = 1 vote model.
Instead, grant a utility token based on a Log(production) formula, e.g., a farm that produces 1000 units gets 3 tokens and a farm that produces 10 units gets 1 token.
A utility token is required to sell coffee through the cooperative, participate in governance, and receive other benefits.
The goal is to give a bit more power to bigger farms, but not too much.
A "lot" is coffee industry-speak for an atomic unit of coffee production.
Each lot has non-fungible properties including: varietal(s), date(s), processing, cup score, provenance, etc.
You see some of these properties printed on the bag at specialty coffee shops and all of them in the fine print of actual green coffee contracts.
When a lot is bagged and tagged, it could be minted as an NFT that reflects the physical lot.
And the NFT is "burned" when it's sold to a roaster. (Hopefully the roaster IRL doesn't go too far past second crack!)
The traditional coffee trade has a "buy low, sell high" mentality. This creates lots of haggling and mistrust over price.
If each lot were an NFT, the cooperative could earn 100% of the first sale and a 10% royalty on each subsequent sale.
This would better align incentives throughout the chain and create less pressure for the cooperative to have a high floor price (asking price) during the harvest.
Corruption and cronyism are major issues for coops.
On-chain voting and multi-sig wallets could improve transparency. So too would predetermined protocols and treasury allocations for services like milling and management compensation.
Reputation metrics, such as participation in meetings and cup quality, could help qualify members for governance roles.
Futures and options strategies to hedge price and currency risk could be executed algorithmically, like the major trading houses already do.
A fair amount of logistics work (insurance, vessel booking, document forwarding, etc) could too.
The infrastructure may not all be there today, but it should be soon as none of these requirements are unique to coffee.
✅ Cashless payments + royalties
✅ USDC staking + lending
✅ Payments for ecosystem services / verified carbon offsets
✅ Tips from end consumers
✅ Results-based financing of impact outcomes
... and much more!
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