Carl Cervone

Jun 28

A 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 Cervone

Nov 17

The 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 Cervone

Dec 14

Levels of the game: the psychology of RetroPGF and how to build a better game

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...