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Initial Project Notes

Public Goods

Rolling Creator & Developer Grants

Last week, we ran a creator grants program with Reveel.  55 teams of artists (~130 total creatos) submitted a song as an open edition NFT.  Collectors could then vote for their favorite by minting up to 10 NFTs per song: 1 mint = 1 vote.  The grant program ran for a week and we saw 1,710 NFTs minted, 8.55 ETH of sales, and 373 unique collectors.  We received interest from Dequency and Polygon for future grants programs, which was encouraging and made us consider whether it deserves a productized format.

Given Optimism’s focus on retroactive public goods funding, we think you all would be the perfect partner to launch this with.  We believe creators are a foundational community for any chain ecosystem, so we would ultimately love for “Creators” to become a meaningful category within OP’s general RPGF and Decent x Gitcoin to be the means by which creators + collectors are onboarded to Optimism (Decent) & the means by which the creator portion of OP RPGF tokens are distributed (Decent x Gitcoin / Allo). 

We would use Gitcoin’s Allo Protocol to launch funding rounds and the Attestation Station to track contributions.  Reveel put up the prize pool for the grants project we ran and decided that the allocations should be $4K to first place, $750 to second, and $250 to third & stipulated that each wallet could register a maximum of 10 votes.  This distribution could be easily gamed and required manual accounting work; both of which are not ideal.  We’d think quadratic funding is a clear and obvious improvement by essentially baking sybil resistance into the distribution mechanism and mitigating the impact of high-net worth collectors / perpetual “rich-get-richer” outcomes.  One person in our community actually tweeted this, so we know there is some community demand for this specific product as well!

Decent intends to implement a protocol fee soon (tentatively a $1 / mint).  We’d like to run grant programs monthly and recycle a significant % of our fee (100% short term) to fund the next round of grants.  To increase the size of the purse, we’d recruit at least one anchor partner each month to really sponsor the funding pool (similar to Gitcoin grant contributions from HNWI’s).  We have asked Optimism to anchor the grants program by providing a very generous 25K OP purse for each of the first four funding rounds, but we would love for Gitcoin to be involved as well + Decent will contribute and recruit other purse / funding round sponsors.  

Based on our initial grants program, we believe this would drive significant NFT volume and creator activity + be a timely innovation in wake of the creator royalty debate.  As royalties trend to zero, we believe a this funding mechanism to be an exciting supplement and would be a very on-brand selling point for Optimism’s NFT ecosystem differentiation among L2’s & Polygon.

This structure should be equally valid for a creator grants program or developers submitting open source work to OP x Decent repo’s (probably most similar to the tokenized repo idea in your list).

Initial Project Notes

Public Goods

Rolling Creator & Developer Grants

Last week, we ran a creator grants program with Reveel.  55 teams of artists (~130 total creatos) submitted a song as an open edition NFT.  Collectors could then vote for their favorite by minting up to 10 NFTs per song: 1 mint = 1 vote.  The grant program ran for a week and we saw 1,710 NFTs minted, 8.55 ETH of sales, and 373 unique collectors.  We received interest from Dequency and Polygon for future grants programs, which was encouraging and made us consider whether it deserves a productized format.

Given Optimism’s focus on retroactive public goods funding, we think you all would be the perfect partner to launch this with.  We believe creators are a foundational community for any chain ecosystem, so we would ultimately love for “Creators” to become a meaningful category within OP’s general RPGF and Decent x Gitcoin to be the means by which creators + collectors are onboarded to Optimism (Decent) & the means by which the creator portion of OP RPGF tokens are distributed (Decent x Gitcoin / Allo). 

We would use Gitcoin’s Allo Protocol to launch funding rounds and the Attestation Station to track contributions.  Reveel put up the prize pool for the grants project we ran and decided that the allocations should be $4K to first place, $750 to second, and $250 to third & stipulated that each wallet could register a maximum of 10 votes.  This distribution could be easily gamed and required manual accounting work; both of which are not ideal.  We’d think quadratic funding is a clear and obvious improvement by essentially baking sybil resistance into the distribution mechanism and mitigating the impact of high-net worth collectors / perpetual “rich-get-richer” outcomes.  One person in our community actually tweeted this, so we know there is some community demand for this specific product as well!

Decent intends to implement a protocol fee soon (tentatively a $1 / mint).  We’d like to run grant programs monthly and recycle a significant % of our fee (100% short term) to fund the next round of grants.  To increase the size of the purse, we’d recruit at least one anchor partner each month to really sponsor the funding pool (similar to Gitcoin grant contributions from HNWI’s).  We have asked Optimism to anchor the grants program by providing a very generous 25K OP purse for each of the first four funding rounds, but we would love for Gitcoin to be involved as well + Decent will contribute and recruit other purse / funding round sponsors.  

Based on our initial grants program, we believe this would drive significant NFT volume and creator activity + be a timely innovation in wake of the creator royalty debate.  As royalties trend to zero, we believe a this funding mechanism to be an exciting supplement and would be a very on-brand selling point for Optimism’s NFT ecosystem differentiation among L2’s & Polygon.

This structure should be equally valid for a creator grants program or developers submitting open source work to OP x Decent repo’s (probably most similar to the tokenized repo idea in your list).