Best of gov.optimism.io on Kiwi News
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19 stories from gov.optimism.io have been shared on Kiwi News since 1 December 2023, with 47 upvotes and 1 comment in total. The latest was shared on 3 April 2025. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
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- Retro Funding 4: Voting Rationale Thread
- Upcoming Retro rounds and their design
Optimism's Retro Funding is shifting from broad rounds to more narrowly scoped rounds, and the Foundation has published its plans for all of 2024. The plan lists Retro Funding 4 (Onchain Builders, May 2024, metrics-based evaluation), Retro Funding 5 (OP Stack, August 2024, Impact Juries) and Retro Funding 6 (Governance, August 2024, Impact Juries), with Retro Funding 7 (Dev Tooling, October 2024, metrics-based evaluation) to follow. The article says round scopes and sizes will be announced 8 to 12 weeks before each round starts, and that the goal is to keep citizen workload from increasing as the number of rounds grows.
- Burn the surplus RetroPGF
A temp check proposes burning the roughly 500 million OP overallocated to RetroPGF, keeping distributions at the 140 million OP currently projected through year 5, per an erratum correcting an earlier 700 million figure. Genesis projections intended all RetroPGF and Ecosystem Fund OP to be distributed by the end of Year 4, but only about 40 million OP, or ~4.7%, had been distributed after nearly two years. Without burning, RPGF would make up over ~75% of pending unlocks at year 5, so continuing it afterward would instead rely on protocol revenue shares and a 1% to 2% inflation share.
- Retro Funding 4: Eligibility criteria enforcement
Optimism has published the eligibility enforcement notice for Retro Funding 4, listing applicants who did not meet the round's criteria. To be eligible, projects had to deploy onchain contracts on OP Mainnet, Base, Zora, Mode, Fraxtal or Metal, with at least 420 unique addresses interacting with them between January 1 and May 1, 2024, a first transaction before April 1, 2024, and more than 10 days of activity in that window. Projects also had to verify contracts during sign-up, publish code in a public GitHub repo, confirm compliance with Optimism Foundation KYC requirements, and submit an application before June 6, 2024. Excluded projects can appeal as a data error by 19:00 UTC on Tuesday, June 18, through a linked form. Rejected applicants who provided an email were notified, while 50 who gave no email address were not.
- Retro Funding 5 Guest Voter Selection Algorithm Explanation
Optimism's Citizens' House proposes using random sampling to select which Citizens vote in some Retro Funding rounds, scaling from three to four rounds per year. The authors say the change responds to Round 3 feedback that the process was too time-consuming for badgeholders and gave builders too little predictability. Under the plan, badgeholders would fully participate in two rounds, with the other two rounds split using random sampling, and the approach would be tested throughout Season 6. The article cites Hélène Landemore's hypothesis that sortition can avoid concentrated power without meaningfully affecting collective outputs, and argues that random sampling aims to approximate the entire Citizenry rather than a self-selected subset.
- Give the retro funding to the L1 instead
- Retro Funding 4: Onchain Builders - round details
Retro Funding 4: Onchain Builders will allocate 10m OP to reward onchain builders who have deployed contracts to the Superchain and driven demand for Optimism blockspace, with impact counted from October 2023 to June 2024. The Foundation says the allocation responds to feedback that Retro Funding 3's 1.5M OP for top applicants was too low, and to growth in developer activity. Eligibility requires contracts on OP Mainnet, Base, Zora, Mode, Fraxtal or Metal with interactions from 420 unique addresses between January 1 and May 1, 2024. Voting will use metrics-based evaluation rather than votes on individual projects, and grants will stream over 100 days via Superfluid after results and KYC approval.
- Analysis on the 300+ OSS projects applying for RetroPGF 3
Open Source Observer published a shallow analysis of the 311 open source projects that applied for RetroPGF 3 and included GitHub repos, combining off-chain and on-chain data. The report finds that the RetroPGF 3 cohort's monthly active developers hovered between 500 and 600 around RetroPGF 2 (March 2023), with growth rising sharply from late 2021. Of the 296 OSS projects in the round, 86 included OP Mainnet contracts, with 1.4M unique users over the past two years. The projects generated a combined 148 ETH in Layer 2 sequencer fees, compared with 894 ETH from about 150 other high-activity projects.
- OP Update Proposal #3: Enable onchain treasury execution
Agora, the governance software company behind the Optimism token house governor frontend, proposes an upgrade that lets OP token treasury transfers execute onchain automatically, without manual execution by the Optimism Foundation. Non-treasury transfers, such as protocol and governance upgrades, would continue to be executed by the Foundation. The upgrade updates the governor contract and a voting module and proposal types configurator, and adds a newly deployed Timelock with a 3-day delay that controls treasury funds. The change is being audited by Trust Security, and Agora does not anticipate downtime, with proposal creation and voting unaffected.
- Retro Funding 4: Impact Metrics, a Collective Experiment
Optimism's Retro Funding 4 round shifts from badgeholders voting on individual projects to selecting and weighting impact metrics, built through surveys, a May 7th workshop and a post-workshop survey. The first survey found balanced interest in quantitative growth and qualitative impact, a strong preference for sustained engagement over one-time actions, and concern about gaming the system. Open Source Observer (OSO) is working to expand the trusted user model, which currently uses three trust signals (Farcaster IDs, Passport Scores and EigenTrust by Karma3 Labs), and will test options such as Optimist NFT holders and ENS ownership. Badgeholders will test the metrics in the week of June 3rd before a final session decides the set used in the round.
- The role of VC Funding in RetroPGF
The Optimism Foundation's position is that venture funding should not be treated as profit under the impact = profit framework and that project funding needs should not be considered in RetroPGF, but it will require projects to disclose VC funding in the next round after strong badgeholder feedback. The post summarizes RetroPGF 3 debates over whether VC funding and existing resources should count in evaluating impact. Badgeholders such as Tjrush, Zoomer and Griff argued for disclosure, while Willian argued against asking, and Hudson and Laurence argued that well-funded projects should not receive rewards. The Foundation states that RetroPGF is an infinite game rather than a charity, and that rewarding only those in need would weaken the incentive market it aims to build.
- RetroPGF Round 3 Feedback Thread
Badgeholders are invited to leave feedback in this thread on a series of announcements that give more insight into RetroPGF Round 3. The organizers also plan to start monthly community calls to collect badgeholder feedback. They will also hold a series of small workshops as they prepare for Round 3. More details on the calls are to follow, and feedback is requested in the meantime.
- Badgeholder learning materials
The author is asking the community to recommend learning resources for new and future badgeholders, the people who vote in the Optimism Retro Funding rounds. They were prompted by a retrospective video on the RPGF1 round from January 2022, which they found helpful for understanding RPGF's history and for meeting some early contributors. The thread invites readers to share their best recommendations for badgeholder education.
- Optimism Cycle 28 Grants Final Roundup
Optimism announced that all milestones for Cycle 28 of its grants program were completed on time. Of 53 applications received, 41 passed preliminary review, 32 passed final review, and 8 were approved. Mint Blockchain was congratulated for securing a Superchain grant this cycle. With the last mission request approved, the season's entire budget is allocated, so no further rolling mission requests will be opened this season.
- Retro Funding 5: OP Stack - round details
Retro Funding 5: OP Stack will reward contributors to the OP Stack across three categories: Ethereum core contributions, OP Stack research and development, and OP Stack tooling, with 8m OP allocated to the round. Impact generated between October 2023 and August 2024 is in scope. The round's timeline runs from sign-up on August 22nd through September 5th, with voting from September 30th to October 14th and results and grant delivery on October 21st, with dates described as preliminary. Grants will be streamed to recipients over 100 days via Superfluid, and grantees must receive at least 1,000 OP to be eligible.
- Introducing Backstop Grants
The Optimism Foundation is experimenting with backstop grants, a bootstrapping tactic that gives teams the confidence to work full time on the Collective while still orienting them toward Retro Funding as their long-term support. If a grantee receives less OP from Retro Funding than its backstop grant value, the Foundation covers the difference; if it receives more, no additional tokens are paid. The grants are more likely to go to teams dedicating all or most of their bandwidth to Optimism and working on critical infrastructure such as the OP Stack, and the list of recipients as of 14 April 2024 includes Agora and Open Source Observer. The exact grant amounts are not disclosed so that Retro Funding voters can assess projects without considering them.
- lightclient‘s response to being removed from the OP Citizenhouse
The Foundation removed Lightclient's voting badge following RetroPGF 3 after finding that Lightclient, a member of the Protocol Guild, voted for Protocol Guild in violation of rule 2d of the Code of Conduct, which bars badgeholders from voting for organizations where they expect funds to flow to them. A random sample of 55 badgeholder ballots found no Code of Conduct violations. Of 145 badgeholders, 133 voted in RetroPGF 3, and after removing non-voters and the violator, 132 Citizens retain voting rounds.
- Impact = Profit framework discussion
- OP grants through Season 2: where has the OP gone?
This thread will be a continuously updated tracker of where OP tokens from the Season 2 grants have gone, covering how the OP flowed to likely user or team wallets and whether it was used for its intended purposes. The author plans to measure distribution, including OP paid out per connected user and the share held by the top five wallets. The author also invites others to help, especially the project teams named in the grants, and says outreach to those teams will generally happen privately before anything is posted publicly.