S4 - Ep. 24 - Metrics Based Voting On Retro Funding Round 4 w/ Carl Cervone & Jonas Seiferth

Transcript

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 focused on using crypto to bring positive sum digital systems to the world this podcast features the people who are doing it and we publish a season of five to 10 episodes every couple months this season is lean mean Capital allocation machines now that we have onchain Primitives in what way will that change how we invest or spend capital in order to create a return not just a financial return but to maximize impact equals profit or any other Collective action goal that we would have in what ways can we use web 3 to maximize public goods funding achieve ecosystem growth achieve protopia how

can we build cryptoeconomic systems that precisely allocate Capital at scale democratically allocate Capital at scale what are the coolest experiments these are the themes of green pill season 4 lean mean Capital allocation machines and this episode does not disappoint we are talking about optimism round four and the completely redesigned voting system that has been built into optimism round four on this episode for those of you who have been following the public goods funding space and the ecosystem growth space over the last year optimism and retr funding has really been definitional in creating momentum around airdrops for public goods funding and for ecosystem growth building the super

chain building the optimism ecosystem with token economic rewards for people who are building good stuff in the optimism and super chain ecosystem so our guests today are Jonas from the optimism foundation and Carl trone of the open source Observer ecosystem uh Carl Carl told me the the way to pronounce his name is uh is Chone so uh hopefully I'm getting that getting that uh correct and shout out to uh Carl's parents uh who who listen to the green fil podcast what's up thanks for taking an interest in what we're doing with capital allocation and public goods funding in the web 3 space all right this episode with Jonas and Carl is all about round four and metrics based voting which I think is a new primitive

that is quite mindblowing for doing retr funding so I think you're going to enjoy this episode with Jonas and Carl travone hey Jonas hey Carl hey what's up Kevin what's up Roy the gang's all back together uh reuniting impact season for Capital allocation season great to see you all yeah it's good to be back it feels like years have passed since uh the last time we got on the Pod together there are they are years in crypto years kind of like dog years but uh when you're building the ecosystem moves very fast well we're here to talk today about retr funding round four maybe we'll start Jonas with you on a quick chat

about the nature of retr funding and how that's evolving and then Jonas I want to go to you to talk about the next the future of metric space voting so Jonas tell us what's been Evol and what's been cooking around retr funding yeah a brief recap of of why do we retrun why is that exciting we kicked off with this initial idea of saying it's easier to agree on what has been useful in the past rather than like try to predict what will be useful in the future it's kind of at the core of this so the idea is predicting what technology will be impactful is very hard right most startups fail even VC funds have a high failure rate and so how could we do any better and then if we if we only care about the things that have already shown impact that is much

easier to figure out uh that's kind of the primary point and then there the second the the the secondary is is the really exciting one which is if we consistently retroactively reward builders for the impact they have provided we almost create this market-like structure where you know that if you build something impactful you will be rewarded for it in the future and if we if we get really good at rewarding impact and doing that reliably and consistently we we create this kind of market for providing impact and so that's that's kind of what we're building towards uh what we've what we've done after round three is uh kind of changed the program so you uh

remember maybe round three of um retroactive public goods funding was this round where we rewarded all kinds of things uh everything from developer tooling to onchain builders to op stock contributions or uh ethereum client teams and now what we're doing is each round has the specific scope the specific topic and with the upcoming round round four we're talking about rewarding onchain Builders the people that build and deploy applications on optimism so on the super chain this is BAS this is op mainnet Zora Mo Etc yeah that that's my brief SP of of like what what has evolved and I think we we're now going to chat about some exciting

stuff that we're shipping for round four all right that's a segue to you Carl what are we doing for round four yeah so we're doing a lot of things I think as as Jonas mentioned the most interesting change here is that instead of voting on individual projects people are going to be voting on the metric themselves and then based on the metric that they wait that's going to determine the allocation I don't think anything like this has really been tried before so it's it's very experimental I think the the other like really important thing to call out at the beginning is that over the past six months the size and the breadth of the optimism EOS system or the super chain ecosystem has has grown exponentially so back in retr funding 3 it was basically activity that was on optimism optimism

main net or that was kind of closely associated with optimism and base was kind of a a new thing on on the side right and since then Bas has really become the center of gravity for a lot of the activity on the super chain plus you now have at least four new chains that have um kind of entered the scene since then and even since we began working on the retr funding for metrics there have been new chains that have appeared even since then so you know every three months or so I think the number of chains in the size of the ecosystem is going to be growing by orders of magnitude um and so one of the challenges about that is that in order

to look at activity across all of these chains you need to create this kind of unified event model so some way of kind of looking at all all of the different activity and trying to unify certain things so if a team is working across all of the chains on you know on the super chain how do you reflect that somehow if there's an address which is doing things on Bas and then doing things on optimism should that count as a distinct user or should you treat each address and each chain as something unique and so those are some of the like pretty important things that we had to figure out at at the very beginning um how to have some consistent metrics that would reflect activity anywhere on the super chain and so working together with a variety of Partners um so on the

obviously we work very closely with the foundation with the op Labs data team um we also worked very closely with uh Gold Sky as a data partner that was able to provide access to very clean trace and transaction data for all of the op stack chains and then a number of kind of third- party providers like getcoin passport and open rank we were able to kind of build out this unified event model for tracking different types of activity across the super chain so that became this like really interesting foundational data set and then on top of that uh we would work with you know the the Agora team and the Charmers team to identify projects um as they applied and then as they submitted their you know

different contracts and GitHub repos for verification we'd make sure that all of that was being indexed and we could derve metrics from that um so that was kind of the all of the work behind the scenes to get just a basic mapping between who who's doing what um and where on the super chain you can you can see signs of that impact all of that is effectively it should be invisible that stuff should really be behind the scenes the important part and I think one of the the real successes that we have here is that once you have that kind of a unified event model you can have really good discussions about what type of impact you care more about and so there have been really good debates about what constitutes a trusted user what are the types of signs that you might be able to

get from their social graph or you might be able to get from their their wallet activity that would con a trusted user across the super chain there have also been really good debates about do we care more about pure Network growth metrics like gas fees and absolute transaction numbers um or do we care more about like the quality of of apps and user interactions and so previously a lot of the debate was about do I like this project more than that project and now the good thing is that there the badge holders and the community members are having really substantive debates about what defines a trust user do we care more about pure Network growth or the quality of of activity that's on the network do we care more about onboarding

new users or ensuring that there's a really good experience for the users that are already here these are the types of impact related discussions that are happening now and again that will be the thing that that Bachelors are voting on this time is what types of metrics they want to reward more Jonas tell us more about metrics based voting and why you're excited about it I think this all started with with a quote from Carl like a year and a half ago something like that where um he said batch holders so the voters in retr funding are not batch holders because they know the intricacies of each project right they know the details of each project that applies and everything that they've done Etc but rather they are within this trusted role because they really care

about the health of the ecosystem and they're there to really enforce the values of the ecosystem and this got us I on this path where we were thinking thinking about how can we become more more measurement driven so how can we transition this program to something that feels very Vibes driven to something where it feels like we're actually measuring the impact and we can we can show how the measurement works and this is important not only to scale the voting system to allow us to reward more projects but it's really important for the predictability of projects that are building something if you go to a project and you're saying we have this voting system where 100 people essenti submit their opinion about how much onchain activity you've driven that's

probably way less uh credible for them or something they feel like they can rely on and if we do something where we say we are measuring your onchain activity and here are the types of measurements we're doing and you're getting rewarded for that that is something projects can count on and so I think it's it's um it's also really from this perspective a really exciting opportunity to not require batch holders to go into each project and check out all the details but they're really in the driver seat of steering this this ecosystem at like a higher abstraction level exactly what Carl Carl just talked about and the discussion the discussion leads to something very different all of

a sudden instead of talking about individual projects and what they doing we're having these conversations with are much higher level what types of impact do we want to reward um how do we measure a certain types of impact these types of things and that much more that feels like very very valuable to discuss about this and agree on these these types of things rather than discuss about a very specific project and what they've done so you're moving the aperture of the badge holder discussions from which projects do we like sort of based on Vibes to which impact metrics are the best proxy for who's growing the super chain ecosystem and I just want to volunteer here that uh I tested the voting interface and you know if you've contributed to public goods either as a

optimism badge holder or on getcoin grants you're used to adding projects to cart and then you check out those projects and either issue tokens or vote to them but what's mindblowing about this interface and I just want people to visualize this this interface in their Mind's Eye is that you're adding impact metrics to cart and then the system does all the work of Translating that impact metric into a list of projects so I can add one thing to cart say it's how much gas has been consumed and the open source Observer and the Agora and getcoin backend will automatically translate that into 300 different projects distributed of course according to who has had the most impact there and so it really saves the badge holder a lot of time to use this interface and um I'm just really excited to see how the results differ from the last round

because we're taking this new methodology and abstracting away all the research uh not all the research but a lot of the the low value research away from the badge holders and it's just mind-blowing for me to add impact metrics to cart instead of projects to cart I think you you've really accomplished something cool there yeah I've actually been um holding off on on using the the voting interface until we really feel that all the metrics for every project are kind of closed out um so I'm excited to to have that experience as well Kevin because I think that like um my my prediction is that it's actually like the best strategy is not going to be to optimize on any one particular impact metric um like actually let me take a step back uh long

term a thing that I'm very passionate about and that I've spoken a lot about is that there should be some really clear signal about what are the things that are going to be rewarded by the optimism community and so that should be like Jonah said creating a market or an incentive for people to work in a certain way because they have some confidence that over time they're going to get some regular cash flows from from retr funding now this is only round four and the first one or two rounds were were very basic so I think it's probably several rounds maybe dozens of rounds before we get to that level of predictability that said what I think you're going to see is that anyone who really focuses on just one of the metrics like maybe they only care about transactions or they only care about gas

fees and they try to design their project around maximizing that metric my sense is that they're actually not going to perform very well in this type of voting interface because in total there's about 16 metrics and badge holders are going to be looking at the results and then thinking what's the right adjustment based on what's most important to the super chain at any given point in time um so there'll be this kind of interesting reflexivity which is going to happen as the products respond to the metrics and then voters see the impact of that and they readjust their their their allocations obviously for for this round right now one of the things that that I can see is that there's a real there's kind of two broad categories of projects so on the one hand you have the the

well-known projects that have driven a lot of usage so they have a lot of transactions a lot of gas fees and so on and then on the other hand you have products that have really built very very loyal communities um users who are coming back every month or so doing number of activities on chain um that score well in The Trusted user metrics and so I think my my my guesses that coming out of this you're going to see two types of projects performing the best those that are you know very good for growth and those that are also very good at building community and so it'll be up to badge holders decide at this point like which one of those is is the more important thing to reward would love to to dive into we're we're creating these metrics right and what you're talking about Carl's like

projects optimizing for in the future for hitting those for for maximizing those uh metrics and that reminds me Kevin you've you've written something about how impact measurement how the system needs to be evolutionary so that we we avoid good Hearts law um do you maybe want to want to go a bit into that why why is that a thing why do we need to evolve I'll pull my leg a little bit uh I'll step out of the host and be a guest for a second basically good Hearts law is a law that states that when a measure becomes a Target it ceases to be a good measure so basically the idea here is that if were to say hey the the this is just a totally madeup example but in optimism round four I'm going to vote for only projects that have have a

Cil resistant unique uh address list so basically I want to reward the the most civil resistant consumers of gas on the optimism network uh I've taken that measure which is a measure of of of the number of unique people that have used the the super chain and I've turned it into a Target because we're allocating tokens according to that measure according to that impact measure and so basically in time t+1 after that measure has become a Target then people are going to start to Cil attack the Civil resistance mechanism that measure has become a Target so as measure at time T becomes a a Target at time T and it ceases to be good measure at time t plus one and so you can make this argument from first principles using good heart's

law that we're going to have to continuously evolve retroactive public goods funding rounds and probably quadratic funding in this also applies to any other metrics based type of voting where basically there's going to be this infinite evolutionary game where measures become targets and then you have to change measure at t+1 to measure at T plus2 in order to make it a good measure again or and there's I think there's multiple ways that system designers can deal with this evolutionary nature but one of the things that I just want to highlight here is that for a lot of crypto we've talked about absolute immutability of systems for good reasons for things like sensorship resistance and capture resistance and Stu stuff like that but I think it's it's really interesting to think about designing these systems such

that they're capture and resistant and sensor resistant and immutable at some level but the metrics can be evolutionary to accommodate for good Hearts law in this infinite evolutionary game between the people who are doing good work and the people who are sort of attacking it in order to aird drop Farm or whatever anyway so I wrote a gov post on this entitled public goods funding must be evolutionary in which I made an argument from first principles that will always have to evolve and yeah I mean maybe in the next metric bace voting rounds we can actually play with some of these things and look at how metrics becoming targets affects the behavior on on chain is is that what you're hoping to get uh out of your brief stint in the host chair and asking me that question Jonas yes 100% so what we're saying is

kind of Carl is already exhausted from all the work and getting the metrics for this round and now it only continues and trying to evolve the metrics to to still be good measures just just to to kind of paint a picture what metrics we're talking about we touched on very simple things like the gas fees a project has generated or the number of transactions but we we also leaned bit into more esoteric stuff uh to try to to measure to measure something that goes beyond civil resistance yeah I think one of my favorites maybe we can talk about trusted user model but one of my favorites has been something fairly new which we called in our exploration vitalic rank I thought that concept was pretty funny Carl do you are you down to

explain vitalic rank why why is why does it solve all our problems yeah so uh I don't think valal grank in its current implementation is going to solve all of our problems but the the basic idea Kevin you've done a series of episodes about this is that you can create this web of trust around a a user um it could be their address it could be their their forecaster ID and you can identify the closest nodes in their Network and then you can go you know one one layer out and get their closest nodes and then through that you can start to construct some kind of a reputation based way of identifying who the most trusted users are and so the first implementation is we actually said okay well let's just look at vitalic forecast R and identify the people that are you know friends of

his friends and then there can be some lasso that we draw around that using using an algorithm called open rank um so I think we ended up getting 2,000 or so addresses that were close connections of falic we decided to uh play with that a bit more and actually the implementation that we have for the for the round itself is based on all of the batch holders so in total there's about 130 batch holders I think up the 130 70 had their badge holder address linked to their forecaster ID and so from that we were able to build a web of trust that was seated by the badge holder Community I think in total there's about 5,000 or so addresses that are kind of within this web of trust and so what we're able to do is actually create a badgeholder

rank and so we can look at the projects that are most favored by the badge holder communities weighted by these you know trust relationships totally experimental I think the results will be quite interesting to see how they hold up to other metrics that we have but obviously this opens up a really interesting you know potential future or maybe instead of actually going in and voting you are going in and looking at your own Rank and using that to determine what your portfolio is and and making adjustments all sorts of interesting possibilities open up here so the the the future kind of looks bright uh especially with all the different data sources that are combined here right so it's not only that we're looking at onchain data we're looking at the forecaster social graph

working with gitcoin passports we're working with The Optimist nft in the future you could imagine a bunch of data sources that are pulled in uh for these types of metrics and so it's really really I think something like measuring uh the amount of gas fees is like the tip of the iceberg and we're starting to explore what the more elaborate schemes here look like and then we're also in this conent can go into this constant iterative mode where we try to discover new metrics that measure a certain type of impact and we can continuously iterate to understand how we improve them uh how we get to this future of ether's Phoenix which is kind of we have perfected we have perfective these these metrics um and and it's all said and

done we have this beautiful AI taken care of it right and we can can timely go home yeah so what like reading between the lines here and just being a little bit familiar with the optimism ecosystem retr funding round four is onchain Builders so basically focusing on metrics based voting for onchain Builders where we will have onchain metrics for the onchain builders therefore we can use metrics based voting but for something where the metrics aren't really on chain and so you don't have a good source of Truth on them you couldn't use metrics based voting but from the the picture that you painted there it seems like progressively more and more information will be put on chain and therefore could be used in metric based voting overtime metric based voting

could expand out to to cover more and more uh rounds is is that a fair way of reading between the lines Jonas yes I think I think not all the data necessarily has to be on chain the magic really is combining these different data sources with ident with uh relevant identifiers so my favorite example for a long time has been a downstreet impact measurement to to measure which Library perform best with onchain Builders so we're doing a lot of work uh at the at the foundation to build the identity model around this and a really cool thing for instance is now we have all the onchain builders that have applied to this round we have all the GitHub reposts which they which hold their

contract code or at least we try to and now for future rounds we could go in and look at their dependency graph and say look these are the libraries that are the most popular and these are the libraries that are um that are used by kind of the projects with the most traction and so it's really really we're we uh are are spinning the web from uh onchain data to social graphs like forecaster to uh GitHub data and I think this combining these data sources is really where where we see kind of the magic happening yeah I just want to enthusiastically endorse what jennis just said the other thing that that I'll add to that is crypto moves pretty quickly and every few months there's a

series of Innovations which unlock unlock all sorts of new applications and smart contract architecture and so one example of that is that you know six months ago when retr funding 3 was happening account abstraction was still pretty new and now there's actually a lot of applications that are using account abstraction um that are you know creating their own smart contract wallets Etc and you know we need to have a a way of accounting for that um The Challenge though is that there's a lot of nuances with with um how account abstraction works and how those transactions look and so as a result of those not being I guess well reflected in in the current impact metrics there's been a huge um I guess You' say like

group of people that have come together and said hey like we are concerned about this and we want to make sure that we can create some like data standards and some better ways of making it so that uh information about what these products are doing can be made more visible and so what I'd like to see hopefully is that the next time we do this there are entirely new data resources which allow you know novel forms of uh you know novel architectures to be much more discoverable and we can have metrics that are based on top of those just like again three or four months ago it was only optimism and base and now we have a bunch of change that that we're looking at I'd like to see you know the evolution of the trusted user model the evolution of of how we assign impact um

being able to uh build on top of these Community Source data sets and these kind of responses to they not being good data publicly available well let's let's let's solve that problem let's make it available yeah we're we're getting into the territory of what of uh what was hard or what is hard around running around like that uh based on standardized measurements and it really is that we have to standardize the measurements and that's where we have felt a lot of the pain so I spent I spent weeks uh talking with Builders and explaining why their particular project uh is either not eligible or will not perform well and the main reason is we

can't we we have to um create a system here which is standardized to measure these types of impact we can create a system where there's a custom rule for each project that applies and because of this need to standardize um some projects that are really impactful might not qualify just because they are building their application in a very particular way so to give you an example example what we've seen is for instance projects that directly send transactions on behalf of their users this is a lot of farcaster projects right in this case for us right we can't we trust these projects and I'm sure right if they're telling us they're sending these

hundreds of transactions on behalf of their users that's probably correct but there is no way for us to standardize and a standardized way measure this right we kind of would have to take their word for it get them to give us a CSV file of all the transactions they have sent on behalf of their users and that is simply A system that does not work we can't create right if we want to scale the system to thousands of projects we can't create custom rules for each project also because of the the uh inconsistency it it creates among how impact is measured among projects and I think that has been like the the more painful part which is probably with how we standardize measurements we capture 80% of the projects or more but then

there is this crowd of like 20% or 10% of projects which are really impactful but they just work have designed their system in in such a different way that we currently can support it yeah I think that that has definitely been one of the the hardest things here is kind of dealing with those those edge cases and projects that you know are doing really really good work oftentimes are on The Cutting Edge um doing things that make onboarding much easier for users or that abstract away a lot of the complexity and yet because of that same reason it makes it difficult to attribute impact to them I think another thing which is important to call out is that there's been some design choices made about how impact is attributed and obviously it's kind of important that impact can only be

claimed once you can't have some complex math deciding how impact is going to be split across four or five different projects and so design choices had to be made kind of at the beginning about who would be able to claim impact and in some cases that means like as you know as Jonah said if people doing peer-to-peer transactions there's no way of being able to claim that impact if someone is using a factory deployed by by Zora or another nft platform then that impact is um in this case attributed by is attributed to the you know the team that deployed the the factory contract so there's a number of examples of this what I'd like to see hopefully is that some of the recipients

of of retr funding they then find a way to find you know their own mechanism um for paying that forward and identifying users who have actually driven a lot of that growth um Builders who have have been kind of you know interacting with their factories or um are kind of responsible for the metrics they did well in and they can pay that forward in some way kind of going back to what we said at the beginning it's really really difficult even where things are now for bolders to have a sense of what all these products are doing across six chains um I think right now it's like 500 products that had to be reviewed of which roughly half made it through and even then this being a very knowledgeable group of badge holders there were a lot of projects that had a lot of activity that people had never

seen before and they had to kind of you know learn about what they were doing and so on in order to to make a review if you extend that out in both directions so the things which are Upstream from that as well as the things which are you know being used directly by by creators it's GNA be very difficult for these you know for bolders to have a informed view on on each of those projects and so hopefully what happens here is that larger protocols like anzor being good example example they find a way to embody this the same Spirit of retr funding and identify the builders and the creators that have had the most impact and paid forward yeah we we walked oursel into ourselves into a really tricky topic here which is I think Zora was the perfect example

because it essentially was how much impact should be attributed to Zora and how much impact should be attributed to the users who are creating nfts VI Zora right and that's kind of almost like a a subjective decision that you're making here right should should Zoro be able to claim that impact or should the users and then then you that should be consistent right right we don't want to make caseby casee decisions and I also don't think that retr funding optimism retr funding is the a good body to decide for Zora what should be done here and so what what feels right here is establishing a standard for how impact is attributed what we've done now is attributed to the factory so if you're if you're creating an nft via Zora that

impact is attributed to Zora as the protocol and then as you said Carl we would love to see this this explosion of more retr funding programs it's almost like how we scale how we scale optimism in the super chain we have all these we have the standardized model and we're able to to scale it by running more of these rounds like we're able to scale it by spinning up more of these op chains and Zora actually has announced that they will forward part of these rewards to their creators so I think that's that's a great success that that said I think it was a communication failure on our part to to make for for not making this as clear as it should have been from the beginning I think that has caused some pain but on the part of of spinning up

uh hundreds hundreds of retr funding rounds um pull pulling back on on the host auke you've you've you have this beautiful diagram of of this this the stream of uh of rewards running through a lot of fretof funding rounds um how how how do we use this to scale to scale public goods funding yeah I mean I think that in some ways uh if you zoom out from from one retro funding round you can almost think of like a retr funding round is like a neuron AI is hot right now so I'm going to call them neurons where they basically take in money and data and they spit out a bunch of recipients of that funding so retro funding will for will will take in millions of op and then spit out like

almost think of it like a sprinkler spits out tokens to uh other places and one of the interesting things we saw Circa retrun three is that people took their retr funding rewards and instead of just putting them in a nosis safe and sitting on them they distributed them out into their communities we had people doing retr funding uh on top of the retr funding and so when when you zoom out each retr funding or qf round or any other type of round is kind of like a neuron and then you plug them into each other and they sort of make like a circuit in which we're we're sprinkling out uh public goods funding to hopefully to to more and more people in more and more legitimate ways and what I would like is for these millions of op and millions of eth that are spread on

gitcoin millions of dollars worth of eth to be spread out to the edges of the ecosystem to the people who are having the most impact and you can do that by stacking rounds on top of each other so uh really quick shill for easy retrop pgf doxyz which I think we'll probably have to change the name to easy retr funding. XYZ soon where you will be able to do metrics based voting on retr funing rounds soon TM the the goal is to take what we discover in round four and eventually offer it to anyone in the ecosystem that wants to do metrics based voting in their ecosystem that's the goal we're going to take what we learned from this round and and do hopefully put together a pilot cohort of metric spased voting that anyone can swim in

optimism's wake and and deploy what they've innovated into their ecosystem so maybe we'll do an episode on that in a couple months if and when the time is right but uh I think democratizing these mechanisms is an important part of building those circuits of of retr funding and qf and other types of mechanisms is that what you were looking for yes would love to see many more retro rounds I think we we have to scale we have to scale horizontally we can't try and I think that's right like the learning we had with splitting up the retr funding program about optimism into these different types of rounds we can't put any everything into one round it's uh the complexity level is way too high that we have to solve for and so the I

think the best way where we end up in this future where where the impact you provided leads to you generating an equal amount of profit the best way to get there is really if we we uh experiment more if we run more rounds if we see more communities working with this so I think it's it's essentially the the the more the more rounds we see and the more we see this like onward onward giving of retr funding rewards to uh to projects own community the the better this thing will will work out one thing that you were kind of touching upon earlier that might be good to to mention again is that even though this round is very much focused on on metrics the one that comes right after is an entirely different mechanism it's going

to be focused on I think it's a impact jury or a group of people that have kind of proven reputation and I guess contributing to the op stack they're going to be doing the voting and then for the developer round it kind of goes back to a metrics based and then for the governance round it goes back to their being some kind of a impact jury and I think it's it's very important again that like these are experiments where there's real you know funding which is being deployed so they're like real incentives here and they are trying out different mechanisms and very very quickly trying to incorporate the feedback about what works and improve on it so I know a lot of people are kind of looking at this and saying oh my

goodness I didn't qualify for retof funding four my hopes are dashed uh I don't think they should have that takeaway I think they should continue to lean in offer their feedback if it's a question of the data not being there making sure that that data is more accessible and uh you know continuing to shape the program because again one thing I I've definitely seen is that there's a lot of willingness to learn and improve and to make sure that each round is fixing some of the problems that I've identified from from previous ones yes this is an infinite game where we try to improve round over round and this year we're testing a bunch of different designs here like like you said Carl which I think is really really uh exciting we're also getting getting

towards for the upcoming rounds getting more scientific so we're going to do some AB testing where one side of the voters vote within a particular design and the other side of Voters do not uh so these kinds of experiments will be really um really fun fun to see I think over over all it's always like this Clash where where we are thinking about this program as to like the next 10 Rounds that are coming and how can we improve and iterate and I think obviously from from uh from a perspective of somebody just participating in a round it tends to feel like this is now the model and this is how it's going to be forever uh and so yeah just just um just restating what you said Carl I think if if um you you you didn't qualify for this round there

will be many more rounds moving forward if you uh disagree with some of the metrics that's exactly why we iterate and we love to hear what you want to measure or what types of impact uh you would see rewarded and and so I think that's the the muscle we're also getting get better at with running many more specialized round rounds rather than like this one big one big monolithic type of Round And as as we create all these diverse mechanisms uh someone should cartography them and put them all in one place so that we can study them relative to each other it's an exploring exploding design space all right uh I want to get away from meta commentary about the design of the round and actually get into tangible stuff about the round so what are the round dates

how many op are are going together where can people learn more uh let's get really tangible for the last five minutes here 10 million op for for the onchain builders uh around 230 projects that are participating the voting will start on June 27th and end on July 11th this time around we even have uh the opportunity for or or we have the ability for anybody to play around with the voting application so you can go to round four. optimism. IO to to play around and see what impact metrics you like and and see what the voting experience is like and then by mid July we will we will come back with the results so and and with a

lot of learnings that we get from learnings and feedback that we will get from the batchers and on the impact metric side people can go to opens source. Observer they can read about the metrics themselves so we have a few blog posts that are describing them all of our models and all the data are fully open source you can actually go in and inspect the query logic you can see the descriptions of where these things come from you can kind of Trace how all these metrics are are are calculated and you can actually even go into the data warehouse and you can do your own experiments so you can you can grab the data directly you can modify the logic and see what that would do so we've taken the hard decision of trying to build all of this entirely in the open um using kind of fully open

infrastructure there's already a number of teams that are building on top of that forking the data Pipeline and connecting it to their own data so anyone who's interested uh we we have some docs that will tell you where to go and how to start playing with the data and then we'll have a a series of kind of post explaining the impact metrics themselves I'm hoping to have some time to actually do some data visualization and explore what the data show about all the products that are building kind of zoom out and say okay how much of the super chains activity is actually represented by what you see here in this round what types of products are are present Etc it's been such a such a marathon this past month or so that I haven't had time to do that but hoping to in the coming weeks that's definitely

for people that are into Data that are data scientists there's a a ton of really really valuable and interesting data to play with yeah I mean I think Carl we didn't get into it in this episode but I think open source Observer becomes a really important piece of infrastructure for metrics based and databased impact tracking I know from knowing you that you're really interested in D centralizing some of that data work and creating that network of data scientists in the community yeah people can check out I think it's regen learning. XYZ which is our interface for for people who want to work on that work is is that the place where we should send people regen learnings doxyz yeah that's great all right uh final question is there anything I didn't ask that you want to say I'll go to you first Jonas I'm cautiously optimistic I think that

there's again just been a huge amount that has gone into this from from so many sides one thing that I love about the the builders and the optim in community is that they are just incredibly solution oriented uh so this required a lot of teams kind of working directly on on the voting interface on the signup on the review flow Etc and just the I don't know kind of the desire to do the right thing and to not necessarily like the fastest thing in many cases the most thorough and the most comprehensive way of of um kind of fixing a problem or looking at stuff has been what people have chosen consistently and so I just Contin to be really impressed and Blown Away by like the integrity and the values of the people working on this I'll also say that just like you know for me I get to

interact with a lot of projects through their pull requests and through trying to understand what they're doing and how to make sense of that and um it's also just been like really really inspiring to get a kind of a broad canvas of all of the projects that that they're building here and what they're trying to do again you kind of open yourself up to being spammed and there being potential attacks and so on obviously there's a little bit of that but I would say that like in general the quality of people that have showed up and the the effort that they're putting into getting this right is really is really amazing um so again it's only one experiment this is a very long game it's a repeated game but I'm I'm pretty optimistic there can be some very valuable learnings and there's going to be some some pretty interesting

results to come out of this it takes a village to summon ether Phoenix just echoing what you said Carl it really was a a big effort of our friends at Agora who built the whole signup flow to power to collect all the artifacts that we need to do this metric based approach obviously Carl and the open source Observer team creating all these metrics getting all the data pipelines right Etc that was a huge huge lift many more people that have contributed here the bolders are continuously giving feedback shaping the impact metrics together with the O Observer team the Gold Sky Team for providing the data for this the gitcoin how could I forget the gitcoin team voting building the voting client uh that that is making all this happen

and then our uh uh the optimism Foundation team a lot of people have have put put sweat and tears into making that happen I'm a big fan of of of uh bold experiments I think this is a bold experiment uh thus far I think we feel we feel very very I feel very confident in it uh but you we will I think know best once we get uh get people voting uh and and and get a sense of of how how the kind of broad public feels about this I think our intention here right Remains the Same we're really interested in pushing the space forward getting to a future where Within These networks like optimism like ethereum we have public goods funding

baked in and we have this really credible way that we're rewarding contributors and I'm hoping that this experiment that we run here is a a step closer uh closer to that uh and I think anything anything that we learn here and and anything that goes wrong will only be another learning opportunity for us to get to get closer to ether's Phoenix and making sure impact people's profit yeah and you know I guess I'll just step out of the host seat and just answer man question for a second and I'll just say that like it's been really fun just to watch The Evolution you guys are making really bold bets Jonas like I look back and I reflect on getcoin and I'm like we should have been making bigger bets a lot of these times and so kudos to you for for really dreaming big with

this metric space voting stuff and and not just copy pasting what you've done before I think I'm taking inspiration for that as as we're rebuilding gitcoin 2.0 for the future and the other thing I just want to call out is this philosophy of practical pluralism Agora charm verse optimism getcoin open source Observer you know like we're like The Fellowship of the Rings like you've got my sword you've got my Axe and um it's just cool to see it happen uh I had Orin McMillan on the podcast two and a half years ago and we wrote this essay called practical pluralism which is all about taking the philosophy of client diversity that exists at the the at the eth layer one you know we gu and Lighthouse and Nimbus and all these ones interoperate for the good of the ethereum network taking that and bringing it into other parts of the

stack where we don't build fums or like Empires but we just do one thing and do them well and we combine the modular components together and like it's just cool to see it coming together under the banner of the super chain and optimism and retr funding and you know I hope to see it Force multiply in the future this this model of working is completely new working in public working in Practical pluralism and we can just accomplish so much together so that's what's cool to me about this I mean there's lots of things that are cool but that's what's cool to me about it yeah anything else to say about that before before we wrap I'm good thumbs up from Carl I tried to take us really practical down to the voting mechanics and then we got like philosophical towards the end but it's cool it's because there's so much

cool stuff happening here all right well uh we've got links in the show notes where you can check out open source. Observer to check out Carl's work you can check out round four. optimism. and then as always you can find each of us and our Twitter bios in the show notes Jonas Carl thanks so much for coming on looking forward to having you back hopefully after round four to do a postmortem or maybe before round five I think optimism is running the some of the most interesting experiments in capital allocation so thanks again for joining thank you Kevin thanks guys alrighty we just heard from Jonas from the optimism foundation and Carl Trevon of the uh open source Observer ecosystem on retr funding for I'm just so excited about retro funding I think metric space

voting is mind-blowing and you know this is the kind of stuff I live and breathe every day and so hopefully by having a podcast about it I'm decentralizing my knowledge to all of you and hopefully you're enjoying listening to the green pill podcast for that reason again we are uh studying and building and meing into existence a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers and dreamers and doers focused on using crypto to bring positive sum digital systems to the world like Carl travone and Jonas if you value our work you can collect this episode go to pods.

medgreen pill then you can collect all episodes from Impact season shout out to inverter doe who is a recent collector of green pill episodes also to MMA on chain. E sky. eth JT nickel. eth Simons sd. eth zerox luucas and how. E for collecting green podcast really appreciate your support of the green pill movement uh the podcast nfts are an interesting onchain experiment and seeing who actually cares about the green F podcast I think we'll continue doing those as long as people find them interesting while you're here might as well make an offering to our algorithmic overlords Please Subscribe rate and review really helps to build the regenerative cryptoeconomic movement and to let people know about the podcast and

the work that we are doing building a coordination well this was a fun one I think we're getting close to the end of green pill season 4 lean Capital allocation machines and looking forward to wrapping up the season in the next couple episodes thanks for tuning in and I will see you on the next one peace and love