Retroactive Grants: Planting a Thriving Ecosystem

Transcript

hi i'm uh la raz siri i'm going to be giving a talk about uh retroactive rents which is something that i have been uh working on recently with some friends in the ecosystem and our goal is to figure out how to plant a thriving ecosystem so i currently have two hats one is trying to push forward retroactive grants from concept to practice and then setting an example um and iterating on it so other projects can do that as well and in my second role i am coordinating

uh the team that has been developing the gas station networks and has some other interesting things in the pipeline um yeah and currently what i'm going to be presenting today is ideas that i cannot fully take credit for um there have been a bunch of people involved in developing them and uh very proud to have carl from optimism um and the bitcoin people and uh matam from dalstack and we've been chatting about this uh metallica's been contributing a few ideas so um now the question is you know how do we get this into practice so this is one of my favorite quotes

society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in and the question is well how do we grow great as a society within the ethereum community so i feel like i'm qualified to talk a little bit about this because i worked very closely with the team that was developing and is still developing public goods for ethereum um and it was very very hard [Music] everything everything was a challenge from funding keeping the team together getting recognition so initially when we came on stage nobody really knew about us

and it was hard to kind of get the attention that made it feel like it was worthwhile it was a little bit of a bootstrapping problem there where if nobody knows about you and it's hard to get people to pay attention and there's also a little bit of a catch 22 where in order to get funded for public goods within the current model um you have to you have to have credibility but you don't have credibility if you haven't already done the work um but there's sometimes a policy of no funding past work so it's a little bit of a catch-22 paradox um if you if you need uh funding and in our case we were lucky uh because we we uh we

managed to do the first stage of the project under the shelter of uh of a funded company before it became an open source project that was uh completely independent so we managed to get some credibility um but i can still see how this would have been very hard for other teams so in that situation um the harder it is um the harder it is to ship and then you know this is just not good for an ecosystem of public goods for creating a lot of friction so um the vision is is um is to create an ecosystem where um you know imagine you you want to

develop public good you come out of nowhere you're willing to to put in uh the work or you have some people willing to to back you and you just focus on doing that in your area of expertise knowing that somehow it will work out and and then magically after you do have an impact positive impact uh you get rewarded uh both financially for that and with recognition uh for your uh for your accomplishments um so you're encouraged to do more of that and you set an example for others so the big question is okay we're talking about retroactive brands and decentralizing ecosystem support

where does the funding actually come from so there are a few angles to this one for um um for any new system we believe it makes sense to allocate a portion of its equity to supporting the ecosystem um so you support the stack that you build on um with the gas station network we allocated five percent of our of our tokens to ecosystem support and then um the idea is it would be this this network of dows that are kind of competing on ecosystem support in order to gain legitimacy the the other route would be to do nft fundraisers for grant programs this has been done uh recently and has

been uh reasonably successful um so that's another option but oh sorry so am i starting right now so um another option is um that seems to appeal to some companies that i talk to is basically you know they already have marketing budgets but you know the question is wouldn't you rather spend the money on something that has a positive externality and promote your brand by supporting the ecosystem that seems to be uh seems to have more of a bang for your buck potentially than just paying for advertising the other problem that that community support ecosystem support

could solve and and you know be a source of funding for is with recruiting it's very competitive right now and if you're not well known um it's hard to hire people um but and you know you you might end up kind of chasing after the people who are most uh uh most mercenary instead uh if you find people that are already doing um public goods for the right reasons you're intrinsically motivated and you um you develop a relationship with them uh it's it's easier to have a conversation about well you know maybe you want to work on other things as well in the future so the key principles i'm going to try to breathe uh a breeze through this

because we don't have a lot of time um but the key principles is first you know impacts are more powerful uh more meaningful than than prospects it's much easier to anticipate um it's much easier to uh to evaluate than to anticipate um the the other principle is that you know it would be better um to push support um as opposed to having it pulled because not everybody has the skills the full support um and we want to encourage people who have domain expertise and maybe they're not super social and then that makes the developing of public goods more inclusive it's not an exclusive club because you know you don't need to have

that credibility up front uh if you have the expectation of getting rewarded for doing good work and if we manage to create the right examples or we can inspire future contributions and we get a lot of leverage uh on doing that so inspiration is is uh is a higher leverage potentially than perspiration and um you know it would be ideal to do this not only in one program but have many an ecosystem of programs so we have diversity and we have different domain expertise on different opinions about what is valuable and that way if there are blind spots in one area they get covered and and the last one is really want a program that optimizes for substance as opposed to

form because it's very easy to um to you know turn things into a beauty contest where we only kind of vote for the things that are on the surface but you know the important deeper work uh isn't uh isn't getting recognized so there are a couple of precedents that we can kind of learn from one is sort of the the nfc fundraiser recently that uh trenton for the ap 150 1559 and that that was pretty successful so the idea would be to generalize this concept and do it uh for a lot of things and in a way git point also kind of functions like this but the question is how do we systematize expectations around it and not and make make it so it doesn't

require so uh break very uh very quickly um you know there are a lot of things that we can optimize but we think the simplest program would be to start just with with an mvp uh experiment iterate on that you have you can have a policy maker the policy maker kind of delegates to domain experts the domain experts get suggestions from the community they filter them they curate them and um we created a bitcoin campaign and at the end of the process we we meant uh we meant nfts with everybody that contributed um from from start to finish so the the grantees they get support um and they get funding so

um uh you know you get the recognition and we could do it in the context of something that works kind of like the crypto oscars which could be cool beyond that there are many ideas uh for how to scale it um we could have public a good tokens and we could have a lot of things um and ideally we could just kind of pull all the dependencies even outside of crypto um so grantees grantees they uh they kind of point to the stack that they are supported by and they contribute some of the funds that they get back uh we could automate this with smart contracts um and therefore in a way we could we could pull the entire open source ecosystem into the program

um and uh you know we could hold the funds in the reserve before they they get on boarded but afterwards they would have a reason um to um you know use the tools we're creating so we're creating the um one of the first uh retroactive events uh programs i'm gonna try to systematize this and announcing soon a bitcoin uh slide round um and we would like uh ideas your ideas on who deserves support we're thinking of focusing on the projects that are most impactful yes most underrated uh because you know that would get more uh have more of a bang for the buck um and we have some ideas but it would be

uh great to have the community's input on it so join us um on on the grants channel on our open opengsn.org discord and happy to answer any questions as well we can develop this model together and iterate and uh yeah thrive everybody thrives together thank you