Rewarding positive impact while fueling ecosystem growth

Retroactive Public Goods Funding is the engine that drives the growth of the Optimism ecosystem.

With the knowledge and data afforded by hindsight, RetroPGF aims to effectively allocate capital to the builders whose efforts have provided public good to the Collective.

By investing in the projects and people that have created positive impact, the Collective is supercharging the tooling, education, infrastructure, utilities, and open source software that makes Optimism the best crypto ecosystem to build on.

In the Optimism Collective, your positive impact will be rewarded with profit.

RetroPGF Round 2 is the Collective’s second experiment in allocating public goods funding. In this round, 69 out the 71 selected badgeholders – our early “citizens” – voted on how to allocate 10M OP to projects and people who have supported the usage and development of the OP Stack. For more information on badgeholder selection criteria, see the Optimism docs.

In this second round of RetroPGF, 195 people and projects were nominated for funding, and all 195 were awarded funding by the badgeholders! While going above and beyond in assessing project impact these badgeholders allocated their votes among 40 different projects on average. The median OP received by a project for RetroPGF 2 was 22,825, while the top 10% of projects received more than 140k OP.

Together, projects from RetroPGF round two have collectively built some of the core infrastructure that Ethereum and Optimism depends on (shout out Protocol Guild, Solidity, Geth, Goerli, and many others), supported thousands of devs in building decentralized applications (shout out Remix, BuidlGuidl, CryptoZombies, and ETHGlobal to name a few) and onboarded countless new Optimists with their Educational content (sup Optimism Support NERDs, Michael Vander Meiden, Optimism en Español, and more).

See the full list of all RetroPGF 2 recipients here, or through the RetroPGF discovery page.

Funding was evenly distributed by badgeholders across three categories: Education, Infrastructure, and Tooling & Utilities.

In the Education category, the Collective funded 70 people and projects. The top three recipients were L2Beat, ETHGlobal, and BuidlGuidl.

Round 2 also funded 43 infrastructure projects. Protocol Guild, geth, and Solidity were the top three recipients in this category.

Lastly, 82 Tooling & Utilities projects also received funding. OpenZeppelin, DefiLlama, and wagmi received the most for this category.

Optimism is committed to running regular rounds of RetroPGF, experimenting with scope, structure, and process along the way.

The Collective aims to make RetroPGF as reliable as clockwork, creating a source of funding that public goods builders can depend on. If done right, the Collective will create an economic model where public goods are rewarded with profit equal to their impact—something our modern economies fail at.

This vision is key to Optimism’s future.

The completion of RetroPGF 2 is a massive achievement that puts Optimism one step further down the path of decentralization. Congratulations to the recipients of this round, and a massive thank you to the citizen badgeholders who helped to make it possible!

Want to get involved? The best way to participate is to create something for the Collective! Stay tuned for our upcoming announcement about RetroPGF 3 by subscribing to our newsletter.

Want to learn more? You can read more about RetroPGF in our announcement post, or find more details about how each round works in our documentation.

We’ll be sharing more about our learnings and reflections from RetroPGF 2 soon. In the meantime, you can mint this Mirror Subscriber NFT to commemorate this historic milestone for Optimism, Ethereum, and the open source community at large. All proceeds from the minting of this NFT will be added to funding for RetroPGF 3.

And, as always,

Stay Optimistic! 🔴✨