Optimism’s RetroPGF Round 3 wrapped up last week, with 30M OP awarded to 501 “builders, writers, creators, educators, and contributors” in the Optimism ecosystem. The Optimism Collective’s announcement noted that “public goods builders and creators are beginning to rely on RetroPGF as an alternative to traditional, often inaccessible, funding sources.” Optimism aims to build a “new, self-sustaining economic system” through RetroPGF, with recipients determined by Citizens’ House Badgeholders. Some badge holders posted reflections on the process, assessing the program’s sustainability, noting the time and effort it took to review the many applicants, or debating VC funding in RetroPGF awardees.
Adjacent to public goods funding, Hall and Oak’s paper analyzing Optimism’s second airdrop, “What Kinds of Incentives Encourage Participation in Democracy?” (published last November), concludes: “results suggest that reward schemes that give people a durable stake in the community and promise a sequence of future rewards can broaden participation in online democracy noticeably, at least in the short run under the proper conditions.” It shows how retroactive rewards, even ones baked into the protocol roadmap, have at least a short-term impact on engagement.
The day after RetroPGF 3 results were revealed, Kevin Owocki announced EasyRetroPGF.xyz, a new tool developed by WEST Software Services and Gitcoin to facilitate Optimism-style Retroactive Public Goods Funding rounds. The software, initially created for Optimism RPGF Round 3, is now open-sourced, allowing others to run RPGF rounds easily. Owocki also described elsewhere how public goods funding mechanisms could be stacked. The Public Goods Network, however, announced yesterday that it plans to wind down by June 2024 due to being unable to generate “significant funding.”
Election Excitement
Uniswap is conducting elections for its Deployments Accountability Committee, whose role has been “to liaise with projects seeking to deploy Uniswap; ensure deploying projects are correctly configured; and providing a recommendation to the community on whether to approve certain deployments.” From now on, the Committee will focus more on “upkeep” and “managing the pipeline” of chains.
Arbitrum has two elections running, one for Pilot Program Advisors and the other for the Pilot Program Council — both in service of the Long-Term Incentive Pilot Program, which was recently approved. The LTIPP aims to “distribute 25-45M ARB to protocols building on Arbitrum.” And lastly, SuperRare is accepting self-nominations for its DAO Council, with elections next week.
To Keep An Eye On
Aave is discussing “Frontier,” a staking-as-a-service product for the DAO aiming “to further decentralize the protocol’s staking exposure and actively participate in network security” — while earning passive income. The Aave Chan Initiative would operate it.
Optimism’s Season 5 has just started and features several evolutions, including Citizens’ House governance — which comes “online” for the first time by gaining veto rights over Token House protocol upgrades (such as the upcoming Delta network upgrade).
The proposal introduces a six-month Experimental Incentive System for 50 selected ArbitrumDAO delegates to enhance active participation in governance. A budget of 1,580,000 ARB is allocated, with incentives distributed based on a point system developed by Karma. Delegates are chosen based on specific criteria, including minimum voting power and historical participation rate. The system incorporates various activities like Snapshot and Tally Voting, requiring delegates to achieve a Total Participation score of at least 60% to qualify for incentives. SEED Latam oversees the program's administration and will deliver periodic reports, while Karma provides automation and tracking support.
This proposal focuses on treasury management for the Aave ecosystem, particularly for the GHO Stability Module (GSM) and a $1M Real World Asset (RWA) strategy with Centrifuge. It outlines the need to allocate sufficient USDC and USDT on Ethereum v3 to support these initiatives. The proposal includes specific funding allocations for GSM and RWA, adjustments to existing reserve holdings, and the revocation of legacy allowances. It also details a plan to transfer assets to Ethereum and convert DAI to USDT to meet these funding requirements. Voting ends on January 19th.
This proposal outlines a framework for Ape Temperature Checks to poll the ApeCoin community on various topics. These temperature checks aim to understand community perspectives on ideas, benefiting the ApeCoin ecosystem by facilitating information gathering. The process is proposed to be conducted on the same platform as regular ApeCoin DAO voting (such as SnapShot) for consistency and ease of access, and it is noted that there will be no additional cost since this is an administrative measure. Voting ends on January 18th.
As the (short) proposal notes, only the grant categories of “Core Unit” and “Platform” require a grant recipient’s code to be open source. But perhaps all DAO-funded coding should be open source? Voting ends on January 20th.
