Best of docs.opensource.observer on Kiwi News
Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
6 stories from docs.opensource.observer have been shared on Kiwi News since 5 January 2024, with 21 upvotes and 6 comments in total. The latest was shared on 26 October 2024. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- What’s been the impact of Retro Funding so far?
This post examines the before-and-after impact of Optimism's Retro Funding (RF) on open source software projects, and reports that developer activity rose across cohorts after RF3 while cautioning that the data cannot establish causation. Among the 315 projects that participated in RF3, average full-time active developers grew from around 225 to over 300, a 13.9% growth rate over the past year. Projects that had been in RF1 or RF2 as well as RF3 grew faster than the RF3-only group, while a baseline of 852 projects that never received RF showed a -0.4% change over the same period.
- Opening up the ballot box (Retro Funding 5 edition)
Optimism's Retro Funding Round 5 awarded 8M OP to 79 projects, out of about 130 applicants, and the article analyzes how voters and expert and non-expert badgeholders shaped the results. The round's distribution was the flattest of all five Retro Funding rounds, with top project go-ethereum receiving 235K OP (2.9% of the total) and the median project receiving 93K OP. The article states that 80% of the 111 voters funded every project in their assigned category, and that experts were more likely to produce steep, power-law voting patterns. Go-ethereum would have received 146K more OP if only experts had voted.
- WAR for public goods, or why we need more advanced metrics in crypto
The article proposes adapting baseball's Wins Above Replacement (WAR) metric to measure the value of ecosystem grants and incentive programs in decentralized networks like Ethereum and its Layer 2s. It offers strawman "protocol WAR" and open source software WAR formulas, which score projects by active user days or active developer days against a replacement baseline. The author's group, OSO, describes the idea as a thought experiment it is seriously considering while developing metrics for measuring impact. The article also suggests tying future funding to these scores, though it treats the formulas as starting points needing normalization.
- Onchain impact metrics for Optimism Retro Funding 4
Open Source Observer is working with the Optimism Collective and its badgeholder community on a suite of impact metrics for projects applying to Retro Funding 4, the Collective's first Metrics-based Evaluation experiment. Badgeholders will vote by selecting and weighting metrics rather than voting on individual projects, with the goal of arriving at up to 20 credible metrics. The metrics rely on public datasets covering six Superchain networks (OP Mainnet, Base, Frax, Metal, Mode, and Zora), and include gas fees, total transactions, and interactions from trusted users, where trusted users must meet at least two reputation criteria. The RF4 scope period runs from October 2023 to June 2024.
- A snapshot of the 20+ open source software projects in Octant's Epoch 2
Open Source Observer, one of 24 projects in Octant's Epoch 2 funding allocation, published a snapshot of the open source activity behind the funded projects. It reports that 23 projects with an OSS component used 322 GitHub repos with regular activity and 542 developers making regular code commits or reviews. In the last six months, these projects attracted 556 first-time contributors, closed over 5,608 issues and merged over 10,817 pull requests. The report states that its project-level metrics are context on maturity, size and developer activity, not rankings.
- Fund your dependencies
Open Source Observer argues that npm downloads are a poor metric for crypto ecosystem growth and that funding the open source dependencies behind crypto networks is needed. Responding to a chart in Messari's Crypto Theses for 2024, which came from a16z's State of Crypto 2023, the article says downloads for web3.js, ethers and wevm (wagmi + viem) hit all-time highs in late 2023. It proposes alternative metrics: at least 4,000 active open source developers work on projects depending on these libraries, and more than 80K unique addresses on OP Mainnet use apps that depend on them. The article also cites the December 2023 Ledger incident as a reminder that crypto networks are only as secure as their weakest dependency.