Firstly, I am immensely grateful to have the opportunity to participate in the Optimism RetroPGF Round 2 as a badgeholder and also as a project contributor to help explore and experiment with how to solve our public goods funding problems. I value that there is no concrete method to doing this optimally as we all explore the best methods to allocating 10M Optimism tokens to ensure we make the greatest impact in positively growing the Ethereum + Optimism ecosystems for the world. This post is to outline my thought process as I navigate 197 projects nominated for this round.

Full disclosure: As the Project Manager for ChainSafe’s Lodestar consensus client, I am a direct beneficiary to the Lodestar proposal, the Protocol Guild proposal and the EIP-4844 proposal. These will be excluded from my allocations.

I do not claim to be an expert in any of these projects and believe that project contributors can have an influence on the allocations based on educating badgeholders about it. Badgeholders can be completely misinformed or have misunderstood your project and it requires just a quick conversation/tweet thread/one-pager to clear it up. Although, as the number of projects in future RetroPGFs increases, this is not very scalable and will require new approaches to help educate badgeholders on what they’re voting on. Simply keeping your project’s website clear, concise and informative (even a specific page targeted to badgeholders) can make an big impact.

As someone working in the Ethereum protocol space, I recognize my biases in seeing the immense impact from the lens of Protocol, which may affect my judgment on the types of projects I allocate to. I truly believe everybody has their own part to play in making this ecosystem successful. Whether you are an engineer, educator, artist or gamer, it is important to recognize that we collectively make this system what it is today and tomorrow. In order to remove my biases (generally for infrastructure and tooling), I will split my vote allocation to 1/3 for each category in total. Infrastructure gets 33.3%, Tooling & Utilities gets 33.3% and Education gets 33.4% (because I understand the education space the least).

I will then rank every project in each category with the following rules based on what I think are most important when distributing public goods funding for this collective:

1. Retroactive Impact on Optimism: We must recognize the collective good Optimism is doing here with the OP Stack and RetroPGF. The impact projects have already made for Optimism is the highest weighting for allocation. The more your project has done to advance the OP Stack up to this day, the higher the allocation.

2. Retroactive Impact on Ethereum: I believe anything made to have already benefited the entire Ethereum ecosystem has allowed us to get to this point, which must be rewarded, hence “retroactive”. Realized impact is very subjective, but how I generally view realized impact is through data. Including metrics such as users, unique Gitcoin contributors, Github stats, etc.) However, it is understandable that retroactive impact is not just metrics which describe what has already happened in a quantifiable measure, but if something has helped to advance us forward, even as a roadmap item (e.g. Research/Development), it is also considered “impact” because it has shaped our future goals in some positive way. Generally, the more information that is publicly available, the better!

3. Potential impact on our ecosystems: This third weighting will be the most subjective section and prone to my biases of how I see the ecosystem developing and what is needed to reach a point of useful and ideally, mass adoption. Some guidance for this section will include:

   1. Is this project solving for something that’s needed to unblock useful development and/or adoption?

   2. How does this project unlock a greater magnitude of value to developers or consumers from subsequent orders of effect?

   3. If this project is unsuccessful, will it be noticeable? Are many projects dependent on the success of this?

   4. Complexity: How difficult will it be for another team to replicate or sustain the project if it was abandoned?

4. Needs basis: This really is the crux of public goods funding. Teams take immense risk to launch their projects with little to no reassurance of its success and usually at their own personal expense. In my opinion, I see a badgeholder as a capital allocator with the bags of a charitable foundation. We need to think like an investor so we can make the most impact with the least cost, but we need to discard expectations of personal returns for how much positive impact we can make from distributing charitable donations from Optimism. Generally with this category, if you’re well funded, have VC capital or have means to generate your own runway (e.g. tokens), you’ll get less allocation from me. The team size and burn rate won’t make a huge difference to me as these are variables that are directly under the control of the project itself. It’s too hard to find a formula that measures productivity and their impact by team size and burn rate.

5. Public goods: I think the project needs to have a stronger preference to maintaining the project as a public good and doesn’t intend to restrict any access to consumers of the project. The whole purpose of having public goods is to ensure equitable access to everyone no matter their socioeconomic status. Not everybody can afford to participate if there is a subscription model, pay-per-use model or anything that economically restricts people to use it. More allocation will go to fully open goods that are and will remain public.

More to follow once I allocate to these projects based on this guidance!