Catching up with Optimism: Updates from Season 7 with Lavande

Transcript

[Music] [Music] Heat. Hey. Hey. Hey. [Music] [Music]

[Music] [Music] GM GM everyone we are live and I'm super

excited cuz I think this is the first live we are doing from the seedgov account and also because today we are going to talk a lot about um optimism and everybody that knows me know that I'm a huge fan and supporter of of optimism and also today I will have once again the pleasure to interview Justin Lavant head of governance at optimism welcome Justin how are you. Thank you. Hi everyone. I think I think we um I started doing these sessions with season five or

season 4. I can't remember. But anyways, we've done a few. Yeah, I I think we started at season Yeah, season five. I don't know. I'm not sure also. But it's always a pleasure to to have you. And this is the the first session that we are doing in English because the first ones it was in Spanish but uh from SIGO we want to reach like a broader audience. So it's quite a challenge for for us to to do this in English but we are super super excited and today we are going to like like I I mentioned we are

going to talk about optimism and what is happening through season 7 of governance. So before uh we start, I wonder if you can introduce yourself, Justin, a little bit for from every everyone that doesn't know you. Sure. Um yeah, I'm Justine. I also go by Leavand and I'm the head of governance at the Optimism Foundation. I was the first hire, so the first person that didn't come from OP Labs um at the foundation. So I've been there since it was nothing really. it was nothing when I joined. Um, and I've I've been in crypto working on different things for a long time and I've done a lot of

research into the development of other Dows because what I what I still see what I saw is that we were the different Dows repeat the same mistakes and that's slowing us down basically as an industry. So the place I always start when optimism needs to do something is okay well what has everybody else done and then what worked well and then what didn't work and so I say a lot working in governance we know what doesn't work we have like a pretty good idea of what doesn't work and then what we have to figure out is what does work which is what nobody really knows and I I'm sure that Lavan wouldn't admit it but to everyone in the audience she's

like the cornerstone of all the optimism governor going on system. So yeah, let's start with the with the with the questions and before like we start like deep diving into the into the optimism governance system. Um, I hear that you mentioned a few times that you're always like talking and sharing knowledge with your peers from different different dows and this is like more a a general type of questions like how do you see like right now is the current l landscape of of Dows. Do you feel that we've made

some progress in terms of DA management since the last year or does everything feel more or less the the same? Yeah. Yeah. I do talk to all basically all the other go governance leads or heads of foundations or whatever their titles are at the at the other Dows is like an initiative I started which was also like I don't want this vibe to be competitive. We we just need to share information. one, this job is hard, so let's support each other. And then two, let's just share our insights because if one DAO figures it out, everyone's going to copy and paste it anyway. So it's like this should be kind of like positive positive some dynamics and then everybody got on board

with that. So that's that's good. Um I yeah, I think that Dows have have matured in a lot of ways. What I see now at optimism but also at the other Dows that I'm in close touch with is like people going back to the basics and rethinking some of the kind of like fundamental in crypto we have this tendency it's probably not constrained to crypto but of just like copy paste like I think there was um like an Aragon podcast the other day where they were talking about like everyone uses the governor contract because that's like what compound compound used a long time ago and everybody just kind of like copy paste that into their system. And so I think a lot of what we've done is like optimize kind of

like the copypasted systems that we've had. And now what I see is like people going back to the basics and being like let's let's like rethink this from the fundamentals. What is the what is the purpose of governance? What are its goals? And then if we could rewrite or design the system from scratch, what would it look like? Um, which is like we also at optimism tend to do this like once a year and get very existential and just say like wait maybe we're wrong about everything and if we if we could just like start from scratch what would we do and then what does that mean for like how we would change things. So we're a little bit like in the middle of that of that process now. And then we talk to other um governance leads about these things and we also talk to other

people in other disciplines like a lot of polyai professors etc. because I think that's also a thing that we kind of in crypto not just Dows under utilize um and we just kind of like learn things the hard way and there's like people that have already figured these things out and so it's like what can we learn from governments and what can we learn from corporate governance even if it's like again learning what is wrong with those models then we understand where we want the delta between what we're building and what's already been built to be and I think It's super valuable for all let's say the collective and all the like ecos the DAO ecosystems in general that you guys are doing like this kind

of thing that sharing knowledge and and experience and and everything because I think we all want to push like the DAO system forward. So yeah we need to trust each other and help each other to like to success right. So yeah, the truth is like no one has figured it out. So if one like I don't think it's competitive like if arbitron figures something out that we haven't been able to figure out and their DAW works amazingly cool. We're going to do it too. So it's like we all win. I don't know. It's great. That that's great. So optimism season 7. Let's let's start with the with the fun part.

So compared to to previous seasons of of governance, this one um like one of the major changes is that this season only has one single intent. Yeah. And I want to to divide like the question in two parts because uh c can you first like explain a little bit what an intent is and also what the intent is for for this season and why we are only have one intent this this season. Yeah. And it so an intent is basically just a goal. It's like the focus of the collective and

what everybody should be working towards during that period of time, which is usually six months, which is a season for us. So, it's basically just like here's the target and everybody can aim at it kind of in different ways or do different work that supports it, but this is what we're all trying to accomplish together. Um, the reason the intent for season 7, oh, it's like, do I know it by heart? I think is like a set of stage one chains doing um of interoperable stage one chains doing 250 million in crosschain asset transfers something like that. The point is it's related to interoperability and chains uh doing

interoperable activity basically. Um the reason that there's one and I don't know that if there will be one in the future like it just was what we decided for for this time but as you know things change frequently at optimism and before for reference I think one season we had three and one season we had four anyway it's been between three and four this was the first time that we tried to align um the foundation OP Labs and other core developers and the DAO around the same goal basically So before it was like the DAO had intents but then labs had their own goals and the foundation had their own goals and like everyone's working in like slightly different directions and it becomes chaotic and

mismatched and so it was a big effort behind the scenes to get foundation and labs to uh to use the intent framework basically and then to have us all working towards the same thing. So I think honestly for this first uh round of doing that it was just the benefit is like a focus to just have one and get everybody focused on on one thing. Like startups uh and Dows have the opposite problem where they usually just like can't focus. They're focused on too many things or they're trying to do 25 like reach 25 goals at once. And so it's like all right let's simplify this as much as possible and let's focus on one thing.

And if the future it makes sense or we feel like we're able to focus on two or three, then then we'll do that. But for this for the first um kind of like unification of everybody, it was just like a lot cleaner to have everyone focus on one thing. And then I also think like just realistically uh everyone's just trying to ship in or up. So it's just like the priority over everything else. So it was like naturally and and one perception I have and and I want to ask you if you like feel the same is that this season I feel like there is no like no kind of noise for example in the in the forum

and a it's like a lot of people they are really like focusing on this intent and this single goal we have And it's like there is like like I mentioned no noise everybody is focused on on this thing and do you think like focusing only on one thing and I know like interrupt is like our top priority right now but what do you think about that it was like possible to have like another initiatives or it was like a good time to put a a stop to to other initiative.

tips and really focus on on this thing like inter yeah um in so I think there's like a lot of reasons for that like um so it's hard to attribute like is it related to the intent is it related to the fact that token house is like two or two and a half years old and like normally at a two-year mark you just see like activity engagement like it's not like new and shiny anymore and people move on and do other things that's normal Um yeah, so there there could be like a lot of reasons for it, but I think in general there's a lot of like distractions usually in Dows and the and the weakness is historically to try to

do too many different things at once and then end up doing nothing well really. And so if we have to air on one of those sides, I would rather heir on like everyone's focused on one thing. The downside of that approach is going to be like maybe you lose some of the benefits of emergence, right? Like somebody could have like a a very initiative that would drive a lot of sequencer revenue that's like completely outside of what anyone else is thinking about and we and we could miss that. I would actually love to do research on this, but um I don't know how real that benefit is versus hypothetical. And

then the other thing is if somebody did have an idea like that, it would probably get brought to attention. Like there'd probably be a lot of conversation around it and it would get like in front of people and then it would probably be possible to support that. Um but yeah, I think in general there's just like less activity right now. We have been Dows in the past have really struggled with not being scoped, right? They're like using the treasury to support things that have really nothing to do with the with the business of what the Dow is trying to support. And so like we probably have aired on the side of being like potentially over scoped, but the downsides seemed less with that approach, but they exist. There are

downsides for sure. Awesome. Awesome. So one one thing we are hearing a lot from from optimism right now is interrupt interrupt is like the next big thing and like it's like interwo with the superchain concept. So why it is so essential for the success of the superchain that we ship interrupt? Yeah. Yeah. So um you're probably all familiar with this but like when I joined the foundation and um probably when most of you started using optimism it was just like OP mainet and the goal was to scale Ethereum and then the

founders realized like oh we're not going to scale Ethereum with one chain basically we cannot reach um Visa level transaction or like internet scale with one chain. So we need to have multiple chains and this is where the superchain concept came from. The problem with that is that you scale but it's fragmented and the user experience is like I don't know if you all had tried to use different chains in the super chain but like it's yeah it's a fragmented user experience right now that takes like a really long time to do things and it's pretty painful and so the idea behind interop is that you can use any of these chains and it feels like one chain for

the for the user. It's also important because it's possible that a chain like bass for example might need multiple chains depending on the scale that they reach. And so you don't want what you don't want to have like bass A bass B C. You just want it to feel all like one chain for the base user. I'm just using them as an example. Um so that's and then that's where you also start to build within the superchain thesis like the network effects um between the chains and like you're not fragmenting liquidity etc etc. And so the super chain can't really it's not really real until we have interrupt. And so that's why everybody's so focused on it because then it makes that that vision and that value prop and those network effects real

and with the with the arrival of the of the super chain and and interrupt many OP chains are beginning to to participate in optimism's governance system. And really it's it's super like exciting to see the new post of of of these chains like hey we are delegates now we are going to we we we would love to participate in in in these systems and there is for example a a a program that is the chain delegation program and I wonder if you can briefly h say to us what of what consists this program

and yeah how how this program helps to the chains to join and participate the the optimism governance system. Yeah. Yeah. So um the op chains are all very impacted by the decisions that optimism governance makes and that's because um one of the main things governance is responsible for is protocol upgrades. So that really directly impacts the infrastructure that they're running their business on. Um and then two to be in the super chain the chains contribute like 15% or some other definition. Okay, they they contribute some amount of revenue to the collective treasury which then governance makes decisions about.

And so um when we think about governance participants, we think um about them in terms of like who has who is incentive aligned, who is knowledgeable and then who is impacted by the decisions. And so the chains are all three of those things, but they're really very impacted by the decision. And so it makes sense that they should be involved in making the decisions that impact them. Uh that being said, a lot of them are like new depending, right? Like we have OP chains like Sony. Um and then we have other OP chains like Uni Chain that are like not new to governance, but but some yeah, some of them are very new to governance. And so we're not sure exactly how they're going to participate. and it might look very

different like for a unit chain versus a Sony versus a Kraken. Um we created this chain delegation program though to like help chains um get involved and get on board into governance. The chain also um has a cap on the delegation amount which just means that it's it's more applicable to chains that um it's uh that that didn't receive huge partner grant partner fund grants to join the super chain and therefore they are very interested in making sure that they have influence over decision-m and that they're not like outweighed by some of the bigger chains basically. Um, so what the program does is it it reserved 20 million OP from the governance fund.

The governance fund has like 138 or something like that million OP that haven't been used yet. And so it's just taking some of those tokens that are otherwise sitting there doing nothing. And it delegates up to 1.5 million to like the the first 20 or something chains that that qualify. And to qualify, you need to be on the standard charter. And then um you can get more delegation if you generate a certain amount of um if you contribute a certain amount of revenue and and have a certain number of transactions happening on your chain. And then um it allows us to kind of like walk them through the onboarding process. So we have meetings with them and we tell them how to set up their delegate profile and like um yeah and

then we send them their first delegation and they need to they need to maintain 70% participation to keep that delegation for the first year and then it goes away and the idea is it just bootstraps their ability to participate. So, we give them temporary delegation, but in the year period, they need to be they need to be trying to build their own organic delegation that will replace that when it goes away. Um, and then like we have them in a group chat and we tell them, hey, this vote is happening. Like we just kind of like handhold them a little bit with the idea that after a year like they kind of know what they're doing and they don't need us to do that anymore. But yeah, the point is to get um as many chains involved as possible and a lot of those

will be kind of like smaller or newer chains. And with with these new chains that are involved in in governance right now, I think there is like a super dynamic new situation and I I I want to to ask you if do you think like it's maybe a a concern or or not that the how is the power of of of these chains versus stakeholders or or or delegates is going to be like balanced because well considering that the that the chain delegation program they receive a delegation and right now

with any I think with any amount they instantly became a a top 100 delegate so do you think like that would represent like a problem in the in the future or it's like balance we can say it's a balanced situation Yeah. Wait. So, we have to think about um voting power distribution and how to balance that with or without chains, right? Like that's like a that's a problem that blows up a bunch of Dows is that the the token distribution becomes really unbalanced and it doesn't matter really what stakeholder it is, but there's some stakeholder that can block everything or or whatever. And so, I we

think about it in a few different ways. Um, one is like balancing voting power distribution within the token house. And we have someone who's a strategic delegation lead that thinks a lot about this. Um, we have different like concentration of power metrics that we monitor. We have like a voting health dashboard that we monitor. We had a contributor make like votable supply targets that say, "Okay, once we're at this amount of votable supply, you can take off this guard rail and you're going to reach this decentralization milestone, etc., etc." Uh, so it's a problem that we think about a lot.

Optimism governance probably looks like actually most governance probably looks like bal trying to balance power between 50 participants more so than it does distributing that power among millions. And that kind of makes sense because there's not that many people that have the that meet the three kind of like voting um participation I don't criteria. It's not really a criteria that I mentioned before which is they have the knowledge to understand what they're voting on.

They have the incentives to make decisions that are in the collective interest and not in not to benefit personal agendas. Uh and then they're actually impacted by the decision. Um so those are kind of like the three things that should be present in like your governance participants. And so that there's probably not millions of people that fall into that category. It's probably a smaller group. and then you want to balance power among them. One thing that no other Dow has done that I think is a cool concept that we're not going to implement anytime soon, but if you think about how they do portfolio rebalancing, I have a finance background. Um you could do something similar different uh with like the voting power distribution where you

could basically like have a mechanism that monitors that and says like oh okay if any one token holder has more than whatever 25% voting power trigger this event which could be like uh delegation decay or delegation reset or at like marketing to have everybody reassess their delegate or like there's different things that you can do kind of formulaically that would like auto rebalance that or it could be like oh shift this like pile of reserve tokens to prorata distribute among like all the other delegates or something like this. Um which I think is like a really interesting concept. We call it like a balancing function. You could do it in the citizens house also

where maybe for some votes you want like to have an even sampling of people from of representatives from chains, apps and users or something and then you can you can balance it in the way that you sample from the population. Awesome. Awesome. And and speaking about delegates, yesterday I I saw a really interesting post that I don't remember if the main optimism account of the optimism go shared and it's about a foundation mission request about creating an AI delegate. So could could you tell us a little bit little bit more

about this initiative and what its goal is? Yeah. So, so the RFP is just to um have different teams try to develop a an an model or an AI agent that understands optimism governance. Um so can look at a proposal and say this violates the law of chains or this violates this policy or here's the impact of this on the collective interest or this would advantage the proposer over some other party and have like that level of understanding. We're ambivalent to whether that's a tool that existing delegates use or whether that becomes like an autonomous agent that then

people delegate towards. I don't think there's like a huge distinction between those two things, but I think that's that's definitely the future of governance and a lot of things, but a lot of um a lot of decision- making will be um algorithmic or either done by AI agents or humans that are using those agents. But do you believe like in the in the future there are going to be like for example like a really AI agent that people will delegate for him or she to took decision for for them like it's possible. Do you think if if they can yeah if it can be like accurate and and

there's different ways you can think about it right you can you can assess the agents ability on like comprehension or ability to understand the nuance of optimism governance or you can um you can have it what what other Dows or other experiments I've seen is more of like representing certain values I don't know I don't know which direction it will go in the thing that's interesting you We also have a third version of this which is like what's interesting to me is that a lot of the people who would theoretically be the best governance participants meaning they have the highest amount of knowledge or they're most impacted by the decisions or their developers or their work at the chains don't have time to participate in governance because

they're building whatever they're building and the builders have the most context uh or theoretically like kind of the most credibility to participate but they can't. And so you could also have like an agent that's trained by those people. Say you have like an agent that's trained by the developer advisory board or whatever or by a group of the chain so that it votes like like a chain would vote, but then the chains don't have to spend their time doing that. So I don't know exactly like what it's going to look like, but I do I do think it will go strongly in this in this direction, right? whether it's a tool that humans use or um it's autonomous agents that become delegates to make

decisions themselves and then like whether it's just on comprehension whether it's on values or whether it's like specifically trained to represent stakeholders that otherwise can't participate I'm not sure but I think directionally going there yeah it it sounds like a super crazy and and fun experiment yeah I mean that's why it's like an experiment also we're also are not sure like how accurate or like how well any of these things will actually function. So, this is what we're gonna we're gonna find out. Awesome. Awesome. Before we we continue, I have a a brief announcement. We have a poll up for everyone that came to this to this live.

You can go to the POP app and go to the section of secret word. And the secret word for claiming your poab is optimism governance all together without any space and it's going to be available like half an hour. So you have time but just remember that uh go to h po app secret word and the secret word is optimism governance all together. Okay.

Last year foundation introduced this concept of working models for decentralization and I I remember super well that you mentioned that this is not a road map it's like a living living plan to to guide the the collective toward decentralization and I want to ask you if you can tell us about this this like model, how it works and when we might see some updates from from it. Yeah.

Yeah. So, um we have the decentralization milestones and then we have like a system diagram and uh I designed both of them. There it's really hard to know what things are going to look or what the exact path is, right? We don't have examples. We don't really know. we have a guess of what things might look like, but then each season we learn and then we have and then we have to update our thinking and change. And so it's hard to strike a balance between giving the community insight into what the the vision is and what the path looks like and make some commitments that like yeah, we do have a plan for this and then balance that with like but this isn't exactly what it's going to

look like and like this is probably going to change and we're probably wrong about a lot of things. And I actually think that initially I wanted to share those things like six months earlier than we did. But I think there was hesitation internally to like put something out and like be wrong about something and look like we didn't know what we were doing or look silly or whatever. And then it's like anyways we realized that you just have to put it out and if it's wrong it's wrong and you just have to do a good job of explaining that it's like all subject to change. So, this happens a lot in my role where people will say, Justine, what does s such and such look like in season 11?

And I'm like, I mean, can we launch the thing in season 9 first and like see how it goes? But at the same time, I I understand that they they want to understand like what the general kind of progression might look like. Um, so we lay it out to the best of our ability and then like we'll we'll update it in public as we go. the we put a post on the forum um I can find it and send it where we highlighted all the milestones that are being worked towards uh in season 7 and then linked the things that are like related to that milestone. I feel pretty confident that we're making good progress on all of those things.

It's something that um we track internally. We were going to do an update on it at the midpoint of the season which I think was last week. So I um actually when I saw the questions for this then I added I added it to my to-do list. Um so we can provide an update but like I can pretty confidently say like there is a work stream or something that is being done for like each of those milestones we're making progress towards and then we're going we're going to introduce um I don't know we're probably going to change the name but we've referred to it in the past as a budget board in season 8. And then that that will um bring us much closer to a lot of the milestones in the like economic layer which is the least developed one.

So yeah we're we're working towards it and it is a framework that we use uh internally. It's not like something we published and then forgot about. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. And another question I have and I know you are not in charge of retrofunding that Jonas is in charge of that but retrofunding um evolve a lot from past rounds to what retrofunding is right now and maybe you can give us some context because I know mo most of our audience and and builders are always super interesting and in get to know how they can like contribute to

the collective and benefit from from retrofunding and how retrofunding looks right now in season 7. Yeah. Um so the I the idea behind the changes made in season seven was to like um lean into this like met metrics based approach reduce the overhead for voters who are being asked to evaluate like 900 projects that they had never seen before. Um so there's like two things we're always trying to get closer towards with retrofunding. one is um the ability to to measure things well, to measure impact well and that's something that we'll need to do kind of like all

over the collective. I always um refer to this part of retrofunding as like we need a really good ruler like we need to be able to measure anything and everything and understand what the impact was in order to make budgeting decisions in order to manage the treasury well in order to know what the grants council budget should be. in order to know if the gr if the grants council versus retrofunding versus the foundation growth team versus futuri is working better or worse than the other. Um and then obviously like the the we need to measure what retro funding measures which is like the impact generated by builders and in the in the season developer tooling and how

that generates value for the super chain. So that's one thing and that's what we're trying to get closer towards with like this metrics driven approach. And the second thing is like um the user experience for builders that are rewarded by retrofunding. And in the past that's been really bad because the rounds have been were really infrequent or like changed a ton um between them and then the payouts were also just like very infrequent. And so, um, by kind of defining the algorithm up front, it creates more more predictability for builders. And then there's also like monthly payouts now. So, those are kind of like the two things that we're always trying to improve in retrofitting. And I know Jonas is already thinking about season 8. Um, and I don't know exactly

uh what it will look like, but I know that those will like the changes that are made will be in pursuit of those two goals. Awesome. Awesome. Um, I'm seeing one question from the from the Twitter uh because we are also live on on on Twitter and Lucas asked if any updates on season 7 season 7 onchain builders uh retrofunding rewards. I think I saw Julian mention this in the governor's chat that rewards are going to start rolling this Thursday, but I'm not 100% sure. So, I don't I don't have the exact date um because I don't run this

program, but it's soon. I know that. Great. Great. And something I I always highlight about optimism is that this collective always try to innovate and and iterate a lot and a few weeks ago we had this amazing experiment about Future Turkey that you recently mentioned. Um could could you like tell us a little bit uh about what this experiment was and why exactly optimism is choosing to to experiment with alternative mechanisms for for grants.

Yeah. So if we think about um governance questions in three categories. One is uh measurement which is retrofunding which is like things that can be very metrics driven and are quantifiable. mathy types of questions. Uh then there's predictions where it's like things that we can't measure like we have to make a guess about what will be useful or about what we should do. Uh and then hopefully we can measure if we were right after the fact and then there are some questions that are just about values and only a human can answer that and there's no right or wrong answer. So these are the three type of decisions governance has to make. That's how we categorize things. So um we're doing a lot of work with retrofunding to make

measurement um very datadriven. It's also like more scalable. It's more governance minimized etc. The way that we make predictions is not that way. And we've most doubts have explored one way to make predictions which is like there's a council of experts that make those predictions and it can be about strategy or it can be about grants or it can be about what to do with the treasury etc. And so um I'm always talking to a lot of people and people are always telling me their governance ideas and so uh a bunch of people had mentioned futarchy to me and then a lot of times when people pitch me ideas or concepts I'm like okay that's interesting but like what you've

just described to me is like a solution and I can't and I don't have a problem that it maps to yet and so but then it's like in my mind and then a problem will come up and I'm like ah maybe futuri is a way to do this maybe this solution maps to like this problem that I'm looking at now. Um, and so that's that's kind of what happened is that we wanted to evaluate futur as a way to make predictions. Uh, the grants council makes predictions, algorithms make predictions. So there's different ways to make predictions. And so the idea behind the experiment was like let's let's understand the the different properties of these different ways to make predictions and then figure out

which one is best for what type of prediction basically. So it's not necessarily like is futur better than the grants council. It's like what is different about futuri in making this decision than a council of experts basically. Um, and we're still like the experiment's not over, so I can't I can't like draw the conclusions yet. Um, but the idea is not like, okay, now all of a sudden everything's futarchy. This is like typical what Dows would do in the past. They would like do an experiment with futuri. People would be excited about it. They would be like, yes, let's put futur everywhere. Then they would put it in places where it shouldn't be. And then they would say, oh futur doesn't work. And then they would get rid of all of it. So we're

trying to not do that. Okay. That that's awesome. So the Yeah, the the experiment is like currently still running and I'm I think we are going to see like the final results in mid June. We we are also going to see like a a reflection from the foundation about the the experiment. Yeah. Yeah. So a few things that we can say so far just based on what we've observed is that the projects selected by the grants council and by the market had high overlap. So three of the five were the same. And

then what we did was like we're not going to give two grants to a project. So the grants council just moved gave it gave grants to the runners up basically but the but there was high overlap in the selection. We know that the estimates for change in TVL from the prediction market are high relative to the own the project's own estimate of the change. We think that might have something to do with the fact that we used play money in this experiment. So there was no downside basically and it it had to be that way in V1 at least.

What's interesting is that uh Uniswap we partnered with them on designing this experiment and so they're going to run a version of it and they're going to use real money so we can look at the differences in behavior and participation and draw some non-scientific conclusions about what impact play money had. Um and then it will be interest I think the other thing that was interesting that that we've seen already was we had um like a hypothesis that the people most likely to participate in the market would be or in the experiment would be optimism like people already involved in optimism governance. That's not what we saw. Actually, we had like 431 unique addresses or non- civil

addresses participate and oh I'm not going to remember the exact number but like like 15% something like that had attestations. So actually the majority of participants were not people like highly involved in optimism governance which was which is super interesting. Um and then we need to wait um for unis swap to run their experiment and then for the like measurement of actual um change in TVL um to happen in June to like draw any more conclusions. But everyone inside the foundation is very excited and asking me what V2 looks like and I keep saying we don't know yet because the

experiment hasn't ended. Um, but I I I'm pretty confident there will be a V2. And then I'm trying to calm everybody down so we can do like a proper analysis and not just like go with like biased conclusions that we already had before we did the experiment and like get I'm trying to not get ahead of ourselves. You answered the the follow-up question that I have if we are going to have a a B2. So I will consider that an alpha from from this from this life. Yeah. I don't know what it will look like but yes I imagine that we continue to experiment with it. Awesome. Awesome. Um I I we have another question from the

from the chat and it's again related to to retrofunding but I will be completely honest with you because the point about the the the the question I didn't read the the article so maybe you didn't read it also Elisa asked how do you see the future retrofunding with the latest post of Vitalik and the idea of funding open source of open source project. I think this is in reference to to deep funding. I'm not sure but deep funding is a an experiment and initiative that um Vitalic is a part of or supportive of which um

is similar to retrofunding or is like based on concepts of retrofunding and takes a slightly different approach. So um basically there's this concept of the of a value chain which is a concept we've talked about for um a long time or like a dependency graph. I think you can call it either thing. Um but it's basically like a map of how much value or impact different parts of the of the open source stack, right? Not the OP stack, but the open source stack generate for other parts of the system.

And then you can kind of start to to quantify impact throughout the throughout the whole value chain. And so that's what they're basically doing. and they're having um an algorithm basically like okay they're h they're have they're assigning weights to different parts of the value chain and then they're having um basically like an algorithm uh extrapolate that or approximate that and so they're they're making algorithmic like the human judgment part is my understanding I'm not an expert Jonas is an expert in this and so I think it's it's like a similar um approach to ours in a way But it's [Music] uh the implementation is different in important ways and that it is really

kind of like making um the human judgment part is still really strong part of that mechanism. Uh whereas we're leaning more into like reducing that part and leaning into the data. I don't I don't um I would imagine like Jonas has studied that very closely and so I would imagine in season 8 is infor the design for season 8 is informed by um the deep funding experiment but it's super interesting and it's also cool that to see other people um taking different approaches to try to accomplish the same thing. And then an important part um of that concept in that post is the is the goal to fund open source projects which is still the goal of um

retrofunding. Our scope is just limited now to onchain builders and dub joint. Basically limited to the things that we can measure like as best we can, right? It's it's hard to measure those things still, but like it's easier to measure those things than other things, but the the goal is still to kind of like add like slivers of contributions over time. But what we realized what we're trying to do is like quantify impact for everything and doing like a okay job at it. And we thought, okay, what would probably make more sense is just like get really good at measuring or or quantifying impact for like two things and then add like a third thing and get really good at that and then it's kind of basics, but sometimes

sometimes we miss it. Uh and so that's the approach that we're taking now. Get good at, you know, two things and then add the third and then add the fourth and add the fifth. Awesome. Awesome. We have uh one last question and is from Alex, one of our governors and Alex asked how could we define the next intent in a more participatory way if it if it's a decision based on values. Yeah, it's strategy setting. So I don't know if it's uh it's not it's more of a prediction actually than a than a values thing, right? So values would be like how important is what multiplier should be on open source like how important is

open source to the collective. The intent is like what are we aiming the entire business at? What do we think will generate um sequencer revenue or I mean that might not be the the only goal of the of the intent but what do we think will be will generate the mo most positive impact for the entire collective and typically that is a what we call a convex decision. This was Vitalik's framework that I borrowed and adapted. But we have a there's a framework for thinking about a concave decision which is a decision that benefits from the wisdom of the crowds.

So like the typical um example of this is like how many jelly beans are in this jar. If you have a lot of people guess and then take the average, you'll get very close to what the actual number is. A convex decision is like the opposite and it um it does not benefit from the wisdom of the crowds. You'll make a worse decision when you use the wisdom of the crowds. Um and that's because basically it's a thing where a compromise like taking an average will get you to a worse answer essentially. And so strategy in general is a convex decision. Setting the intent is a convex decision. And so what you usually want to do is delegate that decision to to experts or to data. And so the intent

kind of falls into that into that category, right? That's why right now it's done by the foundation who is theoretically at least the highest context in building the superchain and the business strategy and talking to the partners every day etc. in the future uh we need to get to a place where there are parties that are a that are able to compete with the foundation in that way but have like a similar level of of context. So, um the way that um the decision can can reflect more inputs basically like there can be more inputs into that into that process from

partners and users and app developers and like participants in the system. Um but it should still be proposed by basically like a delegated set of experts at least using our like decision- making framework that we use. Awesome. Awesome. And we're reaching our our time schedule. Um before we we close this live, I want to remember everyone in the audience that you can claim a POP for being here and hearing all Justin's knowledge about optimism. Erh so you can go to the POP app, go to the secret word section and the secret word is optimism

governance all together and it's going to be available for five more minutes. So hurry up. So thank you very much Justine for being here. It's always a pleasure to to talk with you and get to know you more and and your ideas about optimism governance and I'm sure that this is not going to be the the last one. So see you again in in in season 8. Yes. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you all for being here.

Thank you. Thank you guys. And with that, we are closing this live. We will see you on the next one. Have a great rest of the day and of the week. See you. Bye-bye. [Music]