Retro Funding Round 5
The Optimism Collective’s fifth round of Retroactive Public Goods Funding (Retro Funding) took place in Q3 of 2024. Retro Funding 5 allocated 8m OP tokens to reward contributors to the OP Stack, including core Ethereum infrastructure that supports or underpins the OP Stack, advancements in OP Stack research and development, and tooling which supports its accessibility and usability.
You can find a full overview of Retro Funding Round 5: OP Stack here (opens in a new tab).
Process Overview
- Sign up: Aug 22nd - Sept 5th
- Application Review Process: Sept 6th - Sept 20th
- Voting: September 30th - Oct 14th
- Results & Grant delivery: October 21st
Results
👉 You can view the Retro Funding 5 Results page (opens in a new tab) (opens in a new tab) announcing the Retro Funding Round 4 recipients, and explore the results calculation (opens in a new tab).
Retro Funding recipients must complete a KYC process with the Optimism Foundation. If you're a recipient, please direct questions or problems with the KYC & grant delivery process to [email protected].
Voting
👉 Voting was live from September 30th - October 14th.
The thesis behind Retro Funding 5 was that guest voters with subject-matter expertise would be able to better understand and vote on a given project’s impact.
This round sorted Badgeholders into smaller groups dedicated to evaluating a specific set of applications. A number of guest voters with expertise relating to the OP Stack were selected, to test if there are significant differences in how experts versus non-experts vote to allocate rewards to OP Stack contributions. You can find out more about the round's governance design here (opens in a new tab).
Process Overview:
- Subgroups were established: voters were randomly assigned into subgroups.
- Category allocation: All voters voted on the allocation of OP among the three categories of the round’s scope. These votes are public.
- Impact Evaluation: Each voter voted on the amount of retro rewards all projects within their assigned category should receive. Votes were private to prevent intimidation and coercion, promote unbiased decision-making and protect against bribery.
Badgeholders can find all the information relevant for voting in the Badgeholder Manual. (opens in a new tab)
Project Applications
👉 Projects are able to apply for Retro Funding rounds via retrofunding.optimism.io. (opens in a new tab)
All projects for Retro Funding Round 5 had to create an Optimist Profile, which serves as a builder's persistent identity across the Collective. You can read more about this here (opens in a new tab).
You can learn more about future Retro Funding rounds here. (opens in a new tab)
If you're looking for inspiration on what you could contribute to the Optimism Collective, check out contribute.optimism.io (opens in a new tab).
Badgeholders
Retro Funding 5 had 111 voters, of which 84 were normal Citizens and 27 were Guests. All 27 guest voters were experts, whereas 29 out of the 84 Citizens were classified as experts (and 55 were non-experts).