Optimism RetroPGF Round 3 with Jonas Sieferth

Transcript

[Music] welcome to the green pill. network podcast if you're just joining us we are building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers using crypto to bring positive some digital systems to the world this podcast features the people who are doing it and is published every Tuesday and Thursday if you want to learn more visit our website at Green pill. Network where you can download the green pill book for free join the Discord or become a member of your local green pill. Network chapter my guest today is Jonas from the optimism Foundation he is the retroactive public goods funding lead at the optimism Foundation if you're just joining us retroactive public goods funding is a way of funding public goods

things that benefit the broader Community but traditionally have not had a strong business model we're funding public goods retroactively so retroactive public goods funding is a really powerful way of funding public goods because it's easier to see what has had impact in the past than to speculate on what might have impact in the future and sort of the vision of optimism retroactive public goods funding is to bootstrap a cycle in which people who build public goods are getting funded with millions of dollars of rewards using the op token so basically optimism has become an epicenter of funding public goods as of retroactive public goods funding rounds one two and now three and on this episode we talk about retroactive public

goods funding round three which we'll have voting in November and early December which will distribute 30 million op and we'll have results live in early January so I'm really excited about this because optimism just feels very values line to me they were um one of the earlier funders on gitcoin and have funded getcoin in the past getcoin has funded them I I'm I'm pretty sure so we're building the regen public goods funding movement together and um this episode we're going to talk about retroactive public goods funding round three what are the nuts and bolts of how the mechanisms are designed but then Jonas and I during the episode sort of parachute into the broader Theory vision and movement that is being built around

public goods funding in web 3 so a really fun episode for me I am a huge believer in what optimism is doing and I think you're going to enjoy this episode with Jonas valow is an open Global Collective working to finance and democratize the governance of synthetic biology technology to protect the future of our planet research and progress into synthetic biology is critically constrained by the world of nation state regulations and bureaucracy from middlemen but the potential that synthetic biology has for the world is massive it can produce a world in total harmony with nature we can grow stuff using cells like software it's awesome and the best part is we no longer have to pull carbon out of the ground to grow and maintain civilization don't you think we should be funding this Valley

da does and that's what they're here to do to try and make the solar Punk world of Tomorrow a reality today so join Valley Dow right now and save the planet at Valley dow. bio hey Jonas how's it going hey how's it going pretty good I'm really excited about rpgfallout what you could apply for and then in November and early December we're doing the voting for this uh so this is going to be super exciting we

have around 150 batch holders participating in this um which is this super cool group of of optimism citizens and then in January we're going to announce the results and and start to get the tokens out there so rpgfan public goods funding and the whole idea here is to reward people in the optimism ecosystem and the broader ethereum ecosystem that are contributing to public goods with retroactive air drops of optimism tokens and as I understand it retroactive public goods funding is easier to do because it's easier to see who has provided value as opposed to speculative who will have value in the future so

retroactive public goods funding could bootstrap a lot of uh amazing things from there did I get that right yes you got it um you got it ex exactly right I think one of the the beautiful things about this mechanism is you're doing one simple thing and you're trying to do it extremely well which is reward past impact we do this because we think like one of the reasonings here is it's simpler to reward uh things on based how use based on how useful they've been in the past that's easier to do versus then um rewarding Things based on how useful they might be in the future and the nice thing is you do this one really simple thing and it has all these like great big implications if you do it over and

over again so if you reward past impact reliably um this becomes this becomes like this this thing people can rely on for their funding and you start to create these almost market likee dynamics about building public goods and providing impact I remember reading in a blog post from vitalic uh a little while ago about I think it was a review of optimism retro pgf round one and I believe that the vision that was put out there was that if you're regularly rewarding with tens of millions of dollars people who are contributing to public goods then eventually what you do if you're if you're doing that consistently over time um and it gets big enough is that you're creating an

opportunity for private investors to invest in public goods because then they can have a rational expectation of an exit in the future so basically going from funding the next Ico or alt layer one because that's where the market can return funding now to investing in public goods uh things like ethereum infrastructure uh because you can expect that in retro pgf round 13 when there's tens of millions of dollars that you could you could make an argument that that that there's going to be an exit from that and so it actually is retroactive public goods funding is is is sort of like one thing that's happening but the broader vision is to bootstrap the ability for private Capital which is right now pointed at

things that can only capture value to be able to point at things that can create value for public goods and I think that vision is just a really exciting thing to me yes um Ben from the from the optimism team had this fun talk which was like freeing VCS from only from only investing in and value extraction uh that was like one of the things that got me ped into this like this really fun idea of like you as a VC are are currently held back um to only invest in things that are like value extraction machines and now through retro pgf we give you this opportunity to invest in like positive some things I think overall it's super super exciting in this mechanism that you're trying to to

kind of create a market and um put a price on positive externalities and through this you start to create this this Dynamic where it becomes really predictable and you get like Market type behaviors that are similar to like classical markets and like upfront investment uh VC funding into these things is one of these aspects but really just um changing the playing field so providing something useful to ethereum and optimism becomes this like playing field that feels like you're competing and you're playing in this Arena similar to how you would build any other project in this space and this is really something where I think currently we're being held back a

bit because that is not the case and so it's like much more profitable to spin up the next old L1 or much more profitable to kind of jump into the def the def space and like create this yield form rather than building a public good that supports the users of this network yes I see sort of the broader Vision here um and each retroactive public goods funding round is sort of a notch in creating The credibility in The credibility of that expectation of return so I wonder if you could paint us a picture of round one round two what how those went at a very high level and how that informed round three which is just about to launch in a month or so

here I say it's simple right like agree on how how useful have things have been in the past yeah then simple after working on this thing for a while I was like it's actually not that simple um so uh really how these rounds progressed is we're making we're making big changes and improvements round over round I think think the first two rounds have been like super simple super MVP prototype like in the way we've ran them so we had in the first round we had around like 20 people doing quadratic voting on like project information collected via Google form uh the second round was like a bit more sophisticated and how we've done it we've we did a

nomination uh process we we had products great profiles tell us uh the impact that they had in this space we had a slightly better voting tool and so the the big difference there was like round two was like 10 million op totens it took place beginning of the year round one was I think towards the end of um 2021 and really the key is like round three is like a whole different scale of how we're running this project and I hope like this these big improvements keep on coming and what also Chang a lot is the Cadence right so before that we had like round one which took place in end of 2021 round two which took place in early 2023 so it was like this long

time span and it didn't create this predictable kind of reoccurring uh loop of retr funding and now we're hoping to run these rounds at least every every six months yes so that consistent Cadence I think is important because you create you you collapse the reward what's what's creating public goods from like a theory and a hypothetical into actually oh we have results um and you can sort of s to infer the mechanism that we use created this results and we want to tweak it round over round internally but also the market gains confidence in oh this is the way it's going so we could allocate Capital to X Y and Z public goods because it's already happening definitely in the end we want this to be

highly predictable so we want to want people to know beforehand what will be bboed um the rough kind of mental model to think of this is like uh think of like an impact calculator where you know know like if you support these many projects with your tool or you create a library that this many these many projects use these are roughly the metrics that will be used to evaluate this impact and this is kind of the reward you can expect I sometimes compare this to like if you're an artist and you're putting up music on Spotify you can put into a calculator like based on the number of streams this is what Spotify will pay you uh not saying right like Spotify is a great great system we

should all pay our artists more but this is kind of the the predictability that Spotify has created around the system and I think this is where we want to get to as well so we want people to know what will be rewarded in the future so they can they can build things um in expectation of these rewards and um really start to kind of lean on the system one of the things I think is uh really important here is the understandability of the system uh I would call it legibility of the system and it's it's late 2023 right now 2023 I think has in a lot of ways been the year of AI uh and one of the things that I think is really sort of highlighted about crypto in the year of AI is how legible it is with

crypto you can see the mechanism it can be provably credibly neutral if you look at the mechanism whereas AI it just does a bunch of stuff and you don't know how it got there and it's not legible at all because there's a bunch of neural networks that you have no idea what they do and we actually for the governance of collective resources need to have legibility to humans about how these systems work being able to infer which types of public goods are valuable is is good because you can keep a mental model in your mind of where to invest in public goods as opposed to just like some benevolent maybe benevolent but completely opaque AI that uh that would be delivering verdicts on what public goods are valuable and could change out

a whim in a very Mercurial way so that legibility feels like a really important thing for any mechanism but especially something as important as retroactive public goods funding I would say um what's interesting here is with with AI or llms you definitely understand what it does for you right at least as like a simple end user of these products while you don't really understand how the sausage is made in different public goods funding mechanisms and I think we're part of this uh we're trying to tell people a lot about like how to How It's Made and how it how it works uh and people rarely understand what it does for them and I think this is the switch that we're trying to get to try to make it really clear like if you if you

create this impact this is the rewards you can expect uh and this is actually what I want to want people to get rather than what we're currently doing which I think we want to we want to change a bit which is like explaining people like this is retro pgf and these are the voters and this is the voting model and trying to tell them all these intricacies of the system and then people look at me and they're like like I don't what what am I supposed to do now kind of vibe yeah totally yeah it's kind of like you almost have to have like the version that's very solid for the people who are actually paying attention and will'll read the docs the version that's meable on Twitter and they both have to be legible in their own way we need more we need more and

better retr pgf retro pgf memes stepan withby definitely well it feels like to me the most important constituency is the badge holders so those are the people who are actually deciding hey we've got xot and we want to allocate why tokens uh according to to the voting and um I'm actually a badge holder I was a badge holder last round and um I know the badge holder set is growing so it feels like um you know maybe you could tell us about the criteria that you had for the badge holders how they're selected because it seems like that's where a lot of the decision- making is is is happening yes I find this one of the super fascinating uh aspects of what we're doing here which is typically in in a a lot of dows especially um

especially kind of bigger wellestablished Dows you have a plutocratic or plutocratic only um voting system where it's about one one token one vote and what we're what we're doing at optimism is we're establishing this bamal governance system where one of the two houses the citizens house is a non- plutocratic system which is a one citizen one vote and the idea really is uh optimism is not only governed by op token holders which make up the token house but it's also governed by uh the core users of optimism and the members of the optimism Collective and so this is the citizens house and the people voting on ROP pgf personally I find this

like a super like a super cool almost goes back to Red like can you find alternative ways these systems are governed that are not only um plutocratic but that can also like represent user interests and the the vision for this long term is it's really uh essentially reputation and criteria based we want to get to something where if you're a core user of optimism and you've used this platform over and over again and you've built reputation here and you've maybe contributed to optimism you maybe received some retop PDF you may participated in governance you automatically become a citizen like nobody needs to elect you or nobody

needs to like invite you in um but this is like automatically based on the reputation that you've built this is where we want to get to and then uh where we currently are is we're only bootstrapping this uh reputation graph at the moment and how we've done the expansion of this set of bolders of the set of citizens is m mostly an invite based way so how we did this in round three is every existing Bolder could invite a new batch holder and projects that received retrop pgf in round two the top 50 projects could also invite a new batch folder and a a few other other minor tweaks but it's been mostly invite based and I think the really interesting

thing is we're now at around like 150 batch holders and I hope the next round we can at least start to go into something that feels more like reputation criteria based so it feels like there's kind of a spectrum from in these projects if we're progressively decentralizing uh at first the capital allocation decisions are made by the founders and then in some places it would be the founders and their lieutenants they'd push decision-making down um but in Dows what we're doing is and this may be too reductionist tell me if I'm wrong but uh creating this sort of badge holder system where progressively more and more badges can be given out based off of reputation and we're going to go from Founders to

Founders uh and the people around them to eventually everyone in the citizen house or the or the token house at optimism from there so Distributing the power uh over time but doing it incrementally as we're testing the results is that fair yes that's fair uh one of the challenges is R like try to build um a really collusion resistant voting model right what's really interesting if you get into this is at least in some aspects you can Model Behavior in like a plutocratic system pretty easily because it's like if you make like very very simple assumptions it's like this person and wants to increase the value of their token and it's kind of their behavior

model and why they're acting in this way if you do something like a Citizens house where you give users a participation right it's not as straightforward to model anymore and so I think while we grow this a really interesting challenge will be to figure out what are like the incentive models there and how can we ensure that that people that are bolders and citizens have like this strong alignment with the interest of the collective there is definitely like a lot of things to figure out there uh I think running these experiments and like always pushing towards where it hurts gets you to figure them out fast yeah I love that philosophy I'm always telling people we

should look for the pain not avoid the pain in my work which is counterintuitive in some ways um I'm wondering if you could give me an example of collusion or the type of behavior that you would like to prevent so is that like basically like me as a badge holder Kevin aukee if I went in and I voted for getcoin because I think gcoin is the ultimate public good it could be construed that I'm doing it because I'm the founder of gitcoin and I benefit reputationally or in some way from voting for getcoin is that like the kind of collusion that you're you're trying to prevent with badge holders um in order because you want them to steer for what's best for the collective not not what's best for them there's like a principal agent problem in there somewhere yes it would be even worse if

you done got together with other batch holders and you all elaborate on doing this at scale this problem is probably not as bad because it's um because then you have like really large sample size of people behaving in this way yes this is exactly one of the things we want to prevent I think this is also a difference in doing retr pgf versus doing something like quadratic funding right I think this is really nice about quadratic funding which is you kind of um implicitly measure the utility of different things uh by people participating in this system while in retrop pgf you try to do this kind of more abstract voting system uh and at the moment where it is it's kind of

you're really evaluating how much somebody has contributed uh for the collective you're not telling us what projects you like and what projects you used but your role as a voter in the system is really to tell us what you think this Project's impact has been for the whole Collective and that's just a very different model of voting which is counter into intuitive and it's also requires like different incentives and assumptions about how how people behave yeah totally in I'm recent episode that I did with a vitalic he talked about impact evaluation and impact measurement being one of the things that he's most interested in um in seeing and I'm going to be paraphrasing and I can never

capture vali's genius uh exactly but basically like having an open standard in which we're measuring and evaluating impact and putting that information on chain so that people in future retroactive public goods funding experiments will have good good data to say oh Project X has created y impact and project Z has created uh ABC impact according to D and E you know you can look at the audit trail of of where that impact out testation came from and so it feels like there's a whole category of interesting tools that could be invested in around making helping badge holders make more informed decisions about what has had an impact on the collective so so basically going from a gut check of

like oh here's the vibe check that I get or from my limited Vantage Point what I see to actually providing a little bit more quantitative data is there anything that you're excited about in that category of things yes impact evaluation is really this this kind of data collection and then like analytics problem that you're running into and it took me some time to realize it's just like that is just it like you want to collect the right data and then you want to essentially run analytics to evaluate the impact this is where we we try to push the system a lot towards becoming better and better and more reliable uh at measuring impact so to give you an example round one and two have been more gutfield type voting on

projects this also worked because we have this highly informed group of citizens and it was like this small set of projects it was like round one was like 70 projects round two was like about 200 projects and now what we're doing is we're trying to get uh trying to push the system much more towards like quantitative and qualitative metrics so if you sign up for rgf we actually ask you provide us some metrics of your impact like how many users do you have how many people have visited your conference and this self-reporting is really the the first naive step in getting to something that really feels like evidenc driven well

measured impact proofs if you will and I think there are different exciting projects um in this ecosystem at the moment like hacking hacking on this stuff like open source Observer and I I hope what we get to is we can run rounds where we really pre-commit to uh to the impact metrics that will be used and um like the dream would be to have a distribution formula so like if you generate this impact this is kind of the reward you can expect and make this like super useful and reliable um for for our participants uh but you're really we're really at the start of like opening this box up of convincing everybody to like start

tracking and measuring their impact and getting these Primitives out there so it sounds like self-reporting is sort of the way of decentralizing uh the problem to start and and starting to have more metrics but then there's also projects like OS Observer that are creating infrastructure for this there's obviously hypers Seer ethereum attestation service that could start to decentralize attestations and impact measurement and uh over time hopefully we'll see rpgfan Tota and measurable and have I love the word impact proofs there it kind of breaks my brain to think about how one would might construct that but maybe that's part of the challenge uh in the the part of where the ecosystem is is trying to figure out how to generate these impact impact proofs yes I think

what's cool about what we're currently doing is by doing self-reporting we get to understand how projects think about their impact themselves this is one of the aspects where I think we don't want to design a very top down system uh that is like abstract like putting up like these abstract metrics and then saying to projects like here is essentially the goal you should optimize for by doing self-reporting first now we have this huge collection of metrics that people have given to us and also pain points around how they collect these metrics and so the next step is is kind of optimizing for methods to more reliably track and measure them to give you an example that I found that I found

interesting is we have all these events telling us how many people evented attended the event and at the moment what they're doing is they're they're just like putting down a number and then it's like trust us that these many people actually were here if we did something if they had something like poops right or similar they could do this really nice traceable thing where people self attest to to to visiting the event and they can attest that this person was there and this would have the effect of all of a sudden doing this creating this proof of impact for the system but also building this civil resistant reputation graph where

somebody can right like poop is essentially this graph where people can prove that they've been to all these events and I think these are these are interesting aspects you get around to which is like uh initially you think of poab as the super cute small like nft you got for visiting visiting an event and then then in the end you understand it's kind of like a prove of impact and at the same time it's it's like this this thing uh that's useful for your reputation graph the meme I really like here is is moving from virtue signaling which I think web is famous for to proof of virtue and what would it look like like if we moved from a world for where people give to impact projects so they feel good about themselves uh and so they can virtue signal to their friends

that they did it to giving to the most impactful projects and you actually have decentralized cryptographic proofs that of of what has created the most impact and so um it's sort of excited to exciting to think about this this stepwise change and the fact that there's off the shelf components that we can take to compose it I think as one of the superpowers of web 3 I think we're all kind of at the moment um getting to gather around this base it kind of is becoming the selling point if you look at a lot of project so hypers Sears for instance um really went deep on on formulating this idea of like what if we have something like carbon credits for impact and that as like a generalized

framework I think the the protocol ABS fols have been have been thinking about this a lot I know I know people have gitcoin have been as well uh and you're you're kind of in the middle of this whole thing and I think just happy uh at optimism that we're able to to push this spacee forward and uh really build on this idea that at the core of what we're trying to to realize as a project is rewarding impact and uh creating this whole new kind of economic layer that goes be goes beyond just uh rewards for validators but we have rewards for people contributing to the n workor and the ecosystem and it feels like we're

all we're all kind of kind of starting to go in like a similar Direction here of the problems we're looking to solve plus one to that I actually just tweeted yesterday this little graph of um all of the different web 3 funding out impact funding allocators of which I would count optimism and DOW drops and clear fund and gitcoin and gith and protocol Guild and a bunch of different Tools in and uh and basically like the visualization has optimism in the center because optimism actually is giving out the most uh funding I think optimism and protocol Guild are giving out tens of millions of dollars and then you've got gith and getcoin and clear fund giving out millions of dollars um and then smaller experiments from there but what

I think is really interesting is like like optimism giving out funding to getcoin and clear fund and giveth and protocol Guild and then from there each of those projects have their own mechanisms in which they're funding more impact from there and so it's almost like this positive SU game in which it's it's creating hearts and Minds like a ground swell of like hearts and Minds coming into it and people working on it but the net export the GDP of this like multicellular impact organism that we're building here is the um the the money that's going out and funding actual impact projects and those could be you know Carbon projects those could be ethereum validator clients consensus clients things of that nature that could

be anything anything that's creating impact and so I'm really interested in seeing this like multicellular organism which I'm calling optimism a cell getcoin a cell gith Dow drops all all or cells like what does this look like when it's not just five or 10 impact allocators but a thousand in the future like every Dow is part of this mesh Network this multicellular organism we're we're creating that has like pro-social outcomes from it and so a it's really cool that that exists now because five years ago when I was starting gitcoin there's no one that was working on this stuff but B it's also like how can we how can we create the ground swell create that make that shelling Point stronger and then there's this feedback loop between more hearts and Minds working on it better impact and then more people join the movement

from there so yes plus one to it being a positive sum game between all these different projects and I think optimism is one of the biggest funders of that so so thank you for your role in that I don't know if you have any other takes any takes on the multicellular organism or S of the re regen ecosystem that's that's evolving here yeah the way the way I think about this is essentially um back to this like you want to do bottom up curation and I think this this applies as well into like you want to do bottom up funding so you don't want to construct one system which which kind of tries to do this job of evaluating impact for everybody what you want to do is like you want to allow communities to essentially do this job for themselves

and so one of the the things I'm currently seeing in in the retr pgf applications is we have some communities where a lot of individual members apply to retrop pgf versus applying as one community and if you're like part of one contributor group um it's much easier for you as a group to understand who did what and how to reward these contributions rather than like one top like one batch holder or multiple batch holders trying to understand the same thing and I feel like in this aspect it makes a whole lot of sense if we're getting to an ecosystem where you're getting funding to trickle down to be as close to kind of essentially be governed as close to the ground as possible and

this is one of the interesting aspects um if we think a good example of this is maybe a bidle guild so retop pgf funded bidle Guild and bidle Guild then distributed at least part I I don't have like the full context but at least part of these rewards to members of The bidle Guild and they have for instance like a Ubi program this makes much more sense than like every bidle Guild uh member that is receiving this Ubi to apply to Retro pgf this is how we can build this really like why building a highly composable ecosystem uh where all these different parts essentially work together and like the funding flows down makes a lot of sense in in my mind you

can you can use the aspects of the different of the different mechanisms um where they are the most strongest and I think is this like quadratic funding in different aspects this maybe retr funding in different aspects etc etc yeah I think that's really beautiful I had Divia sarth on the podcast around episode 50 and she talks a lot about this uh principle of subsidiarity which is that you know you've got people in their local communities that understand more in their ho on in their community and their subsidiary uh Bottoms Up what's valuable and um you know through the principal subsid ity or modularity we can really scale a lot of these things but um my mind also returns to

you know in the episode with vitalic he we talked about how a lot of these things are basically they have funding sources and they have funding distribution allocation mechanisms and I think one of the challenges here is that uh your allocation mechanism has to be really local in Bottoms Up but sometimes it's really hard to scale your funding input mechanism when you have that sort of Grassroots or organic Bottoms Up decision-making and so the the the ability to decouple those things have open source software so that we can cross-pollinate these genes across the cells and then bootstrap the funding with something like optimism which has a very scalable funding source creates a really interesting opportunity have local decisionmaking but Global Sources

of funds and there's like an economy of scale there that I think is pretty revolutionary it's only possible in web 3 where we have this open source software so that we can trade decision- making with each other but Al like really sustainable recurring sources of funding so uh plus $1 everything you're saying I'm trying to paint another picture of of what it looks like from where I'm where I'm sitting totally I think at the moment we're we're in this ecosystem where people that create funding mechanisms seem slightly disconnected from funders in this ecosystem yeah and they're mostly like different groups and we have this problem which is we don't have enough funders we're with optimism I think we're we're the sing single single

biggest ones and there should be many more many more actors in this ecosystem including l2s uh participating in this way I think if we can get people building mechanisms and funders closer together we create this really great feedback like product product iteration feedback loop of understanding um what is helpful and what what works and what doesn't to close the kind of close the lube of where this funding is is coming from you you alluded to this optimism as a project uh is really uh qued is this public goods funding aspect and this is at the core of who we are to to like do the the kind of quick version of the

background story uh that that I wasn't here for but but other people were is it started out as this research Collective called plasma Group which couldn't receive funding for the great the grade work they were doing and so plasma group transitioned to optimism and part of the so tasar group wasn't able to to um to capture enough funding even though they were doing the super valuable research on how to scale ethereum as tasar group transition to optimism core of the Mion mission and vision behind this project is to fund the public goods that we all rely on and the core way we do this and the the feedback cycle we have at the

heart of what optimism is is through um protocol Revenue so part of every time you set a transaction fee on op mainnet every time you set a transaction fee on Bas every time you set a transaction fee on public goods Network anytime you set a transaction fee on Zora and there will be more op chains to come uh part of this transaction fee revenue is dedicated towards retro pgf so part of this will be used for retro pgf round which hopefully will inre increase the contributions and the impact generated in this ecosystem which should make everything more useful and should drive more demand for a block space so we see

more participation and more transactions so we have more Revenue to distribute via retop pgf and this is really this this Great Loop and I like I want to be like slightly slightly spicy here and like the mental model you should think about this is uh think about ultrasound money sound moneyist is way where we burn eth it kind of benefits eth holders and we get into this really nice cycle this the more transactions to have we have the more e we burn the more e should go up in price that's kind of the core like economic feedback Looper thinking about there I think what we're doing at optimism is kind of the regen version of this which is the more transactions

there are on the network the more funding there is for public goods uh the more value this ecosystem gener generates the more transactions we should see in this ecosystem and so I think I think we need to meme this better but we should come up like what is the alternative to the ultrasound money meme like the the regen Ultra regenerative money yes so that that key thing the P point there feels like the loop where basically the the more transactions generated on op stack chains on the super chain the more the optimism treasury grows the more can be funded public goods and those public goods funding creates more transactions and so what you're doing here is you're not treating public

goods as this hippie dippy thing that you do because you're donating a certain amount to build your brand or to be seen as altruistic for recruiting you know the whole Google thing where you support enough open source that you can virtue signal to software developers that you fund open source this is actually like a fundamental core part of optimism where you see funding public goods as kind of like a meta for growing your L2 spinning this flywheel captures hearts and Minds creates more transaction volume creates more value in in optimism and that's like a pretty core difference from how a lot of teams in the space view funding public goods and so it's it's that closed loop where you're where impact equals profit and you're able to to create a flywheel around it that feels

like the genuine Innovation here we win because we fund public goods I think this is part of part of the big picture here and I think we want to demonstrate this to others uh so this becomes like a dominant strategy and this is not only in the way like the overall optimism Collective behaves but also in the behavior of different participants within retrop pgf we move away from this thing where it feels like you're asking people to to or predominantly it feels like you're relying on donations to do this open source project and it's kind of like people have this Good Will of donating to you to sustain it uh we we're trying to shift sh this to

something where it feels like obvious and rational that these projects receive funding and for the people that are running and maintaining these projects uh that it becomes rational to do this because it's actually like a a highly profitable fun engaging thing and this is something where I think the mental model should be more like if we think of like the nation state type comparison you're not surprised you're paying taxes and these taxes go to like good causes that provide value to you right this is not currently how we're thinking of this we're thinking right like in this community we're often thinking of this as like a nice like a

nice good-hearted thing to do and we should think of this much more as like the rational obvious that you want to do yeah totally you know op in vitalic interview with David Hoffman during permissionless Che this year he said Dow governance and funding public public goods are the same problem and it kind of like blew my mind for a sec because I was like you know in the community uh you want to allocate funding to what matters in your community that's the same problem funding public goods in your community is the same problem as Dow governance just at a different scale um in a large corporation you'd have this bureaucratic departments and hierarchies where you would fund everything the the department needs but since we're not building these J giant

hierarchical centralized corporations we're creating these decentralized ecosystems with many different cells in them uh we have to have funding public goods mechanisms that are scalable incredibly neutral and and it's just the The Meta indow governance and ecosystem governance is going to be funding your public goods um in some way what what really excites me about this is like if optimism can bootstrap this meta in the web 3 ecosystem we get all the l2s you know running rpgfinal velocity where the mechanisms that we bootstrapped for funding public goods in web 3 can start to go towards like real world public goods things like open source software climate change you know solving for surveillance software

but like we're going to bootstrap it and hit it at escape velocity within web 3 because it's our meta to do it within web 3 but then it could eventually be what governments will use their tax dollars to fund public goods for one day I don't know 10 years out that's that's at least what's in my vision so um yeah how does that land with you Tim uh we interviewed Tim Boo for for Rea pgf as like a small little fun promotional video um where he talked about protocol Guild and he had a good quote in there which was uh ethereum is is the economic test net for the worlds and here we're just like experimenting with things before we ship it to to essentially ship it and extend it in the real world uh non the exact quote but kind of kind of

vuring it and I feel like this is what we're doing doing here as well I think the ambition is optimism and what we're doing with ethereum becomes the backend infrastructure for the web and so with this we can also build the public goods funding infrastructure for the web and from there right like you can think further of like how far you can pull this thing if you can demonstrate that it's actually a very efficient Capital allocation mechanism which creates the goods and services that people want right if we're able to demonstrate this and we're able to really do something unique that is kind of better than

existing methods such as right like you you have a you elect a board and this board elects a CEO and the CEO right and like this is how you do things through like top down delegation uh if we can demonstrate that we're able to to to build better more efficient mechanisms that fund the things that we want and like drive to behavior we want to see we can we can take it to to like scales unimaginable uh I think that's the really large Vision I think to do this we need to find our first first grounding and I think this is where we really really current currently are and I think um what I wish to see is like many more experiments to really get

going there should be funding rounds like gitcoin rounds or like retr pgf rounds constantly going on and in mass and we really want to experiment and test on this stuff and get from like a landscape of like very theoretical thinking to like very applied uh programs yeah moving from Theory to practice and then back again as we iterate yes um I just want to share real quick an anecdote I think I've shared it on the green pill before and um you know anytime getcoin and optimism cross I I share it but in the bare Market I had been uh sharing with a few people close to me that I was worried that getcoin was not going to make it the last fa Market the the 2018 2019 one and um

vitalic pulls me onto this call which is kind of scary because like you know he's like my idol and like a hero and everything like that as much as he doesn't want to be and I was like I have no idea what the context to this call was and I was worried that I I was just worried about it and then I I pop on and it's it's vitalic and uh Jing and Ben and Carl on the call and I'm like what is going on and they're like Kevin we want getcoin to have the last 100k from plasma group so that you can like get through the bare market and I was like oh you guys like bless by bless bless your hearts um and it did help us get through the last be market like you know getcoin um is was a very stressful time

and what they said to me was you know you're bootstrapping this culture of public goods in the ecosystem and we just think what you're doing is important and we want you to have this money because we want you to make it and for me it's sort of like you know people can talk about uh like working together and cooperating a lot but like you know when when you put some money behind it it just has like a little bit more of like a a heft to it and from from there it sort of like really planted the seed for me in this idea of like practical pluralism of of basically uh we're going to have many different regen protocols and apps that are all building a movement together and it's about the movement and cooperating uh together in order to bootstrap the vision of the

world that we want to see and uh I always tell the story to people at getcoin so that they know that you know optimism are our partners in in build the ecosystem but it really extends out I think to all of the different applications for me now clear fund gith Octan protocol Guild all of them with this this ethos of we're building this movement together and and we should support each other um and not play the Zero Sum games of the past and I think there's also you know like a little bit of analogy for me of like client diversity at the ethereum layer where we've got prism and Lighthouse and all these other uh applications that don't buy for like 100% market share but it's in the diversity of the of the clients that we create anti fragility in the network and I think the same is true of

public goods funding uh to have this like pluralistic uh network of different things that fund public goods but um I don't know I just wanted to share that anecdote with the audience so that they know how much I consider optimism in getcoin to be friends with each other and um and that we're all working together to to build this movement so um I hope to invite you back in a couple years and we'll talk about how far we've come at that point because we've come a long way in here 2023 from 2019 when when uh when the plasma group folks made that gesture towards towards us so so um yeah thank you to optimism for leading the charge correct me correct me if I'm wrong is there isn't there like an even even bigger full circle aspects there where like plasma grou initially got

some funding through gitcoin I man I wish I had the data in front of me so I could say for sure but it would not surprise me if that happened but but yes but this is like I I know this sounds like it it it felt more profound in 2019 because there's the whole meme of like ethereum is a dark forest and it's a very PVP environment and it's very Zero Sum and just like bootstrapping a couple positive sum like flywheels back then was like incredibly radical act and it still sort of is because ethereum by and large is very PVP but we can grow this positive some ecosystem together so I I'm I'm just here for it same 100% one one thing I'm excited about is as we get

a lot of more and I feel like that's happening at the moment we get a lot of more like applied public goods funding online is we also get to to uh sharing all our learnings so we don't do the same the same mistakes twice uh to give you an example we talked to different or I'm I'm often talking to different teams that getcoin just to learn uh to learn what gitcoin has learned uh for instance in like review applications or these specific aspects of running these rounds and I feel this is what we're trying to Pioneer more and more at optimism and how we run these rounds so if you're interested in like what we've done and what we've learned uh you can check out

like we we like write extensive blog posts and documentation on like all the pain points and everything that went wrong uh in these rounds and what we learned I think one of the one of the things that we're currently not great in ethereum landed is embracing failures so so this is one of one of my personal personal pet peeps when I go to conferences which is I feel like I go somewhere and every time it's like new ideas and new great like thought leadership on like the high the the large vision of what people are building and I never like I rarely ever get to go to a talk and it's like this is what we shipped and it didn't work and this is

what we learned and I think part of like what you're describing as to playing these positive some games um is really embracing embracing failure and make sure we learn from each other and I hope we see like I hope I hope like this I think also the environment is changing so I hope like when I go to the next conferences this is starting to become more and more of here is what we actually actually learned like how we solved this yeah I think the learning is is an important part of the the iteration experiment life cycle well I'd love to keep riffing with you but we're down to 3 minutes left before the end of the hour so I guess we should start wrapping up maybe we'll end on a tangible note can you just rattle off the dates and um you know for retro pgf

round three like the tldr of round three so that we can we can we can end on a tangible 100% uh we're doing the voting November to December we're we're going to announce the results in January I think the the call out really is this is round three and we're going to run a whole lot lot of more rounds until until we can't anymore um yeah so if you're interested in building something for R pgf you can jump in um if you're if you're building an open source software project in this in this area in the arena check it out and see if you're you're probably eligible and you probably should apply to the next to the next round so this is kind of the next day is like mid 2024 we should see the next R pgf round round four yeah and so

there will be some links in the show notes in which people can check out the information about retro pgf round 3 and get involved apply for the rounds and um and keep an eye on how things are going Jonas is there anything I didn't ask that you want to say no I don't think so um thank you for for having me wonderful to be to be on the Pod uh I've been I've been following along for for a long time and great to great to see a lot of Green P initiatives I think see see at def connect uh and I think there are like a load of public goods events where where we will all hang out uh and have a blast yeah that sounds great well uh back to

you thank you to optimism and and you uh for running the [Music] rpgfan [Music] all right we just heard from Jonas from the optimism Foundation I am very excited about retroactive public goods funding it's one of the most legitimate and largest experiments in funding public goods in web 3 thanks again for listening to the green pill. network podcast again we are building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers focused on using crypto to bring positive some digital systems to the

world like optimism like Jonas like retroactive public goods funding if you value our work please remember to subscribe rate and review the podcast just really helps get into the ears of more listeners to build the regen web 3 movement so remember to subscribe rate and review and share this podcast episode with a friend that you want to be part of the movement talk to you next time peace and love