This is a copy of a two-part post on the Optimism Governance Forum. You can find the original post here.
Season 7 budgeted 8 million OP to open source developer tooling.
This analysis looks in detail at three questions:
This is a copy of a two-part post on the Optimism Governance Forum. You can find the original post here.
Season 7 budgeted 8 million OP to Onchain Builders across the Superchain.
This analysis looks in detail at three questions:
The first (of six) periods of rewards for Season 7 Retro Funding were just announced. Here's the official post; you can view the results on OP Atlas. This marks a significant milestone in Optimism’s journey toward scalable, transparent, and data-driven token allocations.
At OSO, we’ve been fortunate to support this journey since RetroPGF 3—building open data infrastructure, surfacing impact metrics, and helping the community make sense of complex funding decisions. With Season 7, we’ve taken a more active role: implementing the evaluation algorithms that determine how funding is allocated.
This is the final post in our Opening up the Ballot Box series for 2024. Changes planned for Retro Funding 2025 will likely reshape how we analyze voting behavior.
In RF6, our results (as an organization) reflected a critical issue with Retro Funding in its current form: subjective visibility often outweighs measurable, long-term impact.
We had two project submissions:
We are humbled by the support for our Insights & Data Science work. Retro Funding has made our work at OSO possible, and we are deeply grateful for this affirmation. But we can’t ignore the underlying signal: the work that is most visible-—like reports, frontends, and ad hoc analysis—-tends to receive higher funding than work that delivers deeper, longer-term impact.
Open-source projects power innovation across industries, yet they often face a significant challenge: securing sustainable funding. Retroactive funding offers a promising solution by rewarding impactful contributions based on past results, but today’s retro funding rounds are complex, time-consuming, and infrequent, making them unreliable sources of support for public goods.
This inspired us to build AutoRF during ETHGlobal San Francisco 2024. AutoRF makes retroactive funding continuous, simple, and scalable by removing the barriers that hold current models back.
Optimism’s Retro Funding Round 5 (RF5) just wrapped up, with 79 projects (out of ~130 applicants) awarded a total of 8M OP for their contributions to Ethereum and the OP Stack. You can find all the official details about the round here.
In some ways, this round felt like a return to earlier Retro Funding days. There were fewer projects than Rounds 3 and 4. Venerable teams like Protocol Guild, go-ethereum, and Solidity were back in the mix. Voters voted on projects instead of metrics.
However, RF5 also introduced several major twists: voting within categories, guest voters, and an expertise dimension. We’ll explain all these things in a minute.
Like our other posts in the “opening up the ballot box” canon, this post will analyze the shape of the rewards distribution curve and the preferences of individual voters using anonymized data. We’ll also deep dive into the results by category and compare expert vs non-expert voting patterns.
Finally, we'll tackle the key question this round sought to answer: do experts vote differently than non-experts? In our view, the answer is yes. We have a lot of data on this topic, so you're welcome to draw your own conclusions.
The voting results for Optimism's Retro Funding Round 4 (RF4) were tallied last week and shared with the community.
This is the last in a series of posts on RF4, analyzing the ballot data from different angles. First, we cover high-level trends among voters. Then, we compare voters’ expressed preferences (from a pre-round survey) against their revealed preferences (from the voting data). Finally, we perform some clustering analysis on the votes and identify three distinct “blocs” of voters.
Retro Funding aims for iteration and improvement. We hope these insights can inform both the evolution of impact metrics and governance discussions around impact, badgeholder composition, and round design.
You can find links to our work here.
This post is a brief exploration of the before-after impact of Optimism’s Retro Funding (RF) on open source software (OSS) projects. For context, see some of our previous work on the Optimism ecosystem and especially this one from the start of RF3 in November 2023.
We explore:
As always, we've included source code for all our analysis (and even CSV dumps of the underlying data), so you can check our work and draw your own conclusions.
Voting for Optimism’s fourth round of Retroactive Public Goods Funding (“Retro Funding”) opened on June 27 and will run until July 11, 2024. You can check out the voting interface here.
As discussed in our companion post, Impact Metrics for Optimism Retro Funding 4, the round is a significant departure from the previous three rounds. This round, voters will be comparing just 16 metrics – and using their ballots to construct a weighting function that can be applied consistently to the roughly 200 projects in the round.
This post is a deeper dive on the work we did at Open Source Observer to help organize data about projects and prepare Optimism badgeholders for voting.
Filecoin’s first RetroPGF round ("FIL RetroPGF 1") concluded last week, awarding nearly 200,000 FIL to 99 (out of 106 eligible) projects.
For a full discussion of the results, I strongly recommend reading Kiran Karra’s article for CryptoEconLab. It includes some excellent data visualizations as well as links to raw data and anonymized voting results.
This post will explore the results from a different angle, looking specifically at three aspects:
It will conclude with some brief thoughts on how metrics can help with evaluation in future RetroPGF rounds.
As always, you can view the analysis notebooks here and run your own analysis using Open Source Observer data by going here. If you want additional context for how the round was run, check out the complete Notion guide here.