Retro Funding Round 2

The Optimism Collective’s second round of Retroactive Public Goods Funding (Retro Funding) took place in Q1 of 2023. RetroPGF 2 allocated 10m OP tokens to fund public goods that support development and usage of the OP Stack.

Optimism’s vision is to build a global system where positive impact to the collective is rewarded by profit to the individual. Retro Funding is an experimental mechanism to realize this goal of “impact = profit”.

By funding public goods sustainably, the Collective can create a rich ecosystem and a better economy ✨

Results

In this second round of Retro Funding, 195 people and projects were nominated, and all 195 were awarded funding by the badgeholders! While going above and beyond in assessing project impact badgeholders allocated their votes among 40 different projects on average. The median OP received by a project for RetroPGF 2 was 22,825, while the top 10% of projects received more than 140k OP.

• You can find the write up on the results of round 2 here (opens in a new tab)
• You can find a sheet with all projects and their OP allocation here (opens in a new tab).

Process and timeline overview

1. Badgeholder selection - badgeholders have the power to distribute OP tokens to projects. They’re instrumental in running an effective Retro Funding round. For RetroPGF Round 2, badgeholders were selected across four different criteria.
   1. 14 badgeholders were selected based on their participation as badgeholders in round one of RetroPGF (opens in a new tab)
   2. 21 badgeholders were selected by the Optimism Foundation
   3. 10 badgeholders were elected by Optimism’s Token House (opens in a new tab)
   4. 29 badge holders were nominated by badgeholders from the three categories above
2. Nominations (Jan 17 - Jan 31st) - anyone could nominate a project on the forum (opens in a new tab) by providing a name, impact description and link to Github/Twitter
3. Project profile creation (Feb 7th - Feb 21st) - Projects had to create a profile (opens in a new tab) where they were asked for general information, as well as a description of their project and its impact. Information provided by Projects can be viewed on the Retro Funding discovery page (opens in a new tab).
4. Voting (Mar 7th - Mar 21st) - Badgeholders were provided with a badgeholder manual (opens in a new tab) and asked to evaluate and vote on nominated projects via a voting form. (Mar 7th - Mar 21st)

Learnings and Reflections

You can find an extensive write-up of the learnings and reflections of round 2 here (opens in a new tab). These learnings will inform the design and execution of RetroPGF round 3.