501 builders, writers, creators, educators, and contributors from across the Optimism ecosystem have been allocated a portion of 30M OP! RetroPGF Round 3 rewarded contributors for the impact they provided to the Optimism Collective across four categories: OP Stack, Collective Governance, Developer Ecosystem, and End User Experience and Adoption. View the full list of awarded contributors here.

RetroPGF is an economic flywheel that supports positive impact to the Optimism Collective. Without public goods funding, core tools and infrastructure required to keep blockchains running and ecosystems thriving might not have the resources for ongoing operations, or building their vision in the first place.

Public goods builders and creators are beginning to rely on RetroPGF as an alternative to traditional, often inaccessible, funding sources. Rewards are determined by badgeholders, who review submissions and award projects that demonstrate their positive impact, whether they’re consistent contributors, or teams and individuals contributing to the Collective for the first time.

To date, RetroPGF has awarded 643 projects in categories that spanned infrastructure to education, governance to the OP Stack, and the developer ecosystem to the end user experience. Categories and rounds are iterative and evolving, but the focus on impact - whatever part of the ecosystem it benefits - remains constant.

Many of the top recipients of this round are familiar names that have played a significant role in sustaining and expanding the Optimism and Ethereum ecosystem.

RetroPGF also offered the opportunity to showcase the meaningful impact of projects across the ecosystem, from established developer tooling to new initiatives that started building for the community over the past year.

“The community values what we do. And if we continue to deliver value to the community it will find ways to reward us for it. So we decided to focus solely on producing public goods that are consistent with our self-defined mission to be an independent and impartial watchdog that provides on-chain transparency.” - L2Beat

“RetroPGF has made it possible to work on public goods without needing to convince people that it is valuable from the get go. Instead, I am able to work on what I think will provide the most value and get rewarded if others agree.” - Revoke.Cash

“Previously I loved working in the Optimism Collective, but constantly needed to think about how to resource projects. RetroPGF has given me the economic buffer I need to not only focus full time on Optimism, but to consider hiring people to work as an organization building useful RetroPGF projects.” - Michael Vander Meiden

“RetroPGF gave our team the ability to take ambitious bets on building governance software for the long term, without the need to go down the traditional fundraising path. This provides an economic model for our work that is strongly aligned with our users, who are also our stakeholders” - Agora

Optimism is building a new, self-sustaining economic system where contributors are continuing to apply and continuing to be awarded with RetroPGF. 19 projects have applied consistently over the three rounds of RetroPGF, receiving total distributions of over 5M OP. And over half of the projects that applied for round 2 also submitted their impact in the latest round.

With learnings from previous rounds, Optimism experiments with the scope, structure, and process of RetroPGF, aiming to provide the community with a self-sustaining, reliable grant source that public goods builders can depend on. To date, RetroPGF has been fully funded from the initial token budget allocations dedicated to supporting public goods. In future rounds, surplus protocol revenue will also be used to fund RetroPGF.

None of this would be possible without the badgeholders who dedicate their time and effort to evaluating projects and providing feedback that helps to improve the program incrementally over time.

This round was also supported by the teams building public goods infrastructure that enabled Round 3 to happen, specifically: OP Labs, Agora, West, OS Observer, Pairwise, GrowThePie, Retrolist.app, and RetroPGFhub.

Productive conversations between badgeholders, infrastructure builders, and engaged community members are critical components of each round, and these discussions shed light on areas of improvement and build on the experimental nature of the RetroPGF process. In addition to the feedback we’ve heard so far, badgeholders will participate in a retrospective to reflect on Round 3 and suggest improvements for the future. Subsequent rounds will include new developments based on what we’ve learned from this past cycle, progressively shifting RetroPGF into a truly community-driven system.

Congratulations to Round 3 recipients, and thank you for paving the way for our collective future through your impact.

RetroPGF 3 recipients will receive an email from retropgf@optimism.io with instructions about claiming OP token grants. After wallet addresses are confirmed and KYC/KYB has been approved, OP will be delivered to recipients over 90 days.

If you want to share your impact and RetroPGF result, check out this template to create your own custom design!

RetroPGF is a pillar of the Optimistic Vision, a never-ending cycle, an infinite game. If done right, RetroPGF will scale beyond the Collective to demonstrate a new type of global economy that rewards impact. Between then and now, there’s plenty to experiment with.

Optimism will run more rounds of RetroPGF in 2024. Stay tuned for details about future rounds, and in the meantime, keep building!

And, as always,

Stay Optimistic! 🔴✨