S5. Ep. 3 - Retroactive Funding Round W/ Pocket Ecosystem

Transcript

welcome to the green pill. network podcast you are listening to season five this summer of retro rounds which is hosted by SEL and La now Ma this season we'll explore retroactive funding in web 3 and each episode features a different ecosystem unpacking their experience in implementing the retr funding mechanism we'll explore how they're tailoring retroactive funding to their unique ecosystem along with the challenges they've faced in ways of overcoming that this season is co-hosted by SEL and laau and the next voices you'll hear on this episode are from [Music] enjoy hi everyone welcome to the third episode of Summer of retro rounds this episode is with pocket so we have Ben

who leted the Retro round for pocket you know interestingly this is not the first retro round of pocket uh they have done it previously but it's the first time they have used e rgf to run a retro round right so I'm exced excited to explore how that went pocket's round design has been quite unique it has been quite creative and excited to explore and learn more about you know what went in that process what are you excited about L yes there's at least two things that I'm really excited to ask been more of the first one is I love to see how pocket use the funding that they received from optimism and arbitrium through different Grand programs like

one of them being optimism rgf3 to fund their own dependencies I know that this is something that we want the whole web3 ecosystem to move forwards because we know that decision of and evaluation of what's been impactful to one part of the ecosystem is better done by those within those projects or ecosystems so really excited to hear how they approach that and then secondly is pocket was so fascinating and how they ran around they for their own version of the platform to add new features that make voting a lot easier for batch holders so I'm really looking forward to hear how that process

was and what were some of these new features that they implemented hi Ben welcome and Hi l my co-host for this season welcome Ben would love for you to share a bit more about your background like if you could give a dldr of your experience in you know um where all you've been looking at and yeah sure I would love to yeah my background is sort of in organizational design um so I worked for quite a big company sort of managing their human capital and resource allocation of their people which got me really excited about the role that people play in organizations and eventually reached a point where I was like what uh cool uses of

organizations and I found Dows which basically brought me into the web three space so I've been doing this for probably three and a half four years now yeah helping organizations in terms of the way that they organize people Capital their financial capital and the coming together of those two things now around grants programs so yeah it's been a great experience and um looking forward to the chat today yes I think this is one of the pieces that's really interesting and often times overlooked when people are thinking about grants programs it's like at the end of the day several of these grants programs are focused on how do we bring more people into the ecosystem how do we and not only bring them because like this is also one of the backlashes that some of the grants programs have had in terms of

having extractive members that come along so how do we keep people here how do we give them a good experience and I think this is also one of the fundamental pieces when we think about retroactive rounds these are rounds in which we have a very large inclusion of the community or certain community members that are voicing preferences about what they think might be useful for the ecosystem so can you tell us a little bit more about based on your background and what some of the other programs that the pocket ecosystem had ran what inspired you to embark on this new community-driven experiment on grants by using retroactive funding sure

yeah so we had a situation it sort of always existed at pocket there was retroactive funding all of the time that pocket existed but it was pretty horrible it was usually people sort of turning up and saying I did this work yep I would like to be compensated for that yeah and then just like a pile on of all these different perspectives of like this is useless and you're asking for too much and all of that sort of stuff so it was a very like high burden on the individual to sort of prove that individual instance and it was all like singular proposals so we quickly identified two things one that's not experience that people want they're not going to keep coming back they're not going to keep building for you if you

sort of do that to them every time um the other thing was that actually we needed different grants mechanisms you know like we needed a quick grants mechanism that allowed people to just start innovating quickly yep got out of the debate and started to focus on evidence which was here's a small seed fund y you go and do something if it works you'll keep going if it doesn't work that's the end of it yep and we thought that was a better way to sort of get people started and then we also focused on rfps like how we actually find the talent to do the things that we really want and create that Focus yep and then the third one was retroactive funds which we like all right we got to come up with a better mechanism for that so we started with the other two yep the

option was always there for people to still seek retroactive funding but a beautiful thing happened those other grants mechanisms started working yep and optimism sort of really came into its own yeah and captured like a really good mechanism for doing that so for us it was matter of coming back to retroactive funding at the time that yeah we thought it could really be implemented in a way that was um was great for Pock yes I think that's really interesting it's definitely one of the things that we've seen with some of the other ecosystems uh in terms of improving the Community member grantee like retroactive grantee experience precisely because this this mechanism is

really based on generating incentives for people to continue building right for people to continue contributing and focus more on what is the impact and the value that I'm generating for the ecosystem because and focus on that because I know that I will be getting rewarded so it's also very interesting to see like how this okay let's retry rro after having had some of it in the ecosystem in a way that as you mentioned might like only pushes for people I'm guessing that might be very thick skinned to continue trying it so super interesting to hear more as well in terms of did you see any difference in

Behavior like after or did you received feedback from the people that have participated in this last round in terms of like how their experience was in comparison to what retroactive funding had they been before in the pocket ecosystem yeah so so I think like I had examples from the past that people that had sort of got burned by the previous sort of retroactive process who said I'm not going to put myself through that again yeah those people often just continued to build for pocket in the hope that they could monetize what they were doing or that eventually we would sort of

solve this challenge so um actually they participated in the round which I think was like um yeah an amazing sort of thing for people to say never using the Dow again I hate the Dow Dow stupid um uh to come back and actually go hey I believe in this program I'm going to put my name in there and and people can assess me against sort of my peers and and other projects that are creating impct so um so that was great I think the thing that brought us back to retroactive funding and something you touched on at the start is is um that it really is like a talent attraction and retention engine the way that I think about it is like humans love certainty

yeah if I have more certainty I'm going to move in that direction yep retroactive funding sort of gives you certainty that like if you create impact there's going to be some funding there there's going to be some mechanism for you so for us it was always something we were going to come back to for that reason you know may not be the best way to get people started yet may not be the best way to get people focused on exactly what you want to deliver as an ecosystem but I think it is definitely the right type of mechanism to give people certainty that ultimately they will be rewarded in a way that reflects the impact that they're creating over the longer term which um yeah I just see as a huge differentiator that doesn't

exist in a lot of ecosystems a lot of people come in I want to do this thing get the bad news they're off to the next one um which is pretty sustainable to have everyone sort of on that merry go around so I think this is something that yeah starts to create a gravity which um yeah we were hoping to say it pocket and I think um I think any organization that's using retroactive funding will continue to say that yeah this is something really exciting and really interesting I think for most of the ecosystems that have ran this first round it's really important that they as you said this is the first this is part of a larger incentive mechanism that reinforces itself the more rounds there

are so we also hope to see more rounds within the pocket ecosystem and going precisely into how you make this mechanism more robust I think the design process is one of the most creative and complex phes of the round and we know that the pocket team that you were leading brought several changes into the initial way in which optimism had designed it and ran their own round can you tell us more on how the team how you approached developing and designing this new round working what was also really interesting is pocket made this complete new Fork of the platform uh to enable more changes for how people were

choosing the projects were reviewing what what kind of information they were reviewing can you tell us a little bit more about how this design process went out yeah I I think and process was was two parts one was to like come up with the objectives y of the program and and to really try and think about those and then the second one was how do we want to try and make it better which is really just like what experiments are we going to try in our round so when we think about the objectives um our design process was around how do we stimulate activity that increases the connection of pocket to other ecosystem that it's working with and because pocket is sort of like a a

public good in a way providing like um yeah node infrastructure for different ecosystems um we receive funds within pocket we receive grants from other ecosystems so we had received grants from arbitrum um we received Grant from optimism for retroactive uh round three um so for us it was about how do we sort of maybe redistribute those funds through our program um in the hope that um yeah optimism arbitrum other ecosystems sort of become like the first Domino yeah and we continue that to get back to the impact creators within our

ecosystem it makes no sense for pocket to keep all these funds in its own treasury yeah it should be making sure that same as we get those funds as impact creators it gets down to the the individuals or teams involved in creating that so so there was a big objective of the the design process was to um yeah figure out how it could create stronger connections with other ecosystems we're building with but yeah when when we get into like the the experiments of how we can make the program better I think our observations were that the voting assessment and sort of ranking process is is quite difficult one reason for that I think is everyone has different context it would be beautiful if I could understand who the

600 projects in the optimism ecosystem were and and use my knowledge to uh to vote on them effectively can't you know so how do I actually get that Knowledge from other people was was one part and the experiment we decided to create around that was just to give people the ability to share their context you know we created a a feedback and comments section that the community could contribute into I love this project y this is great this has done nothing whatever it happens to be yeah we wanted to create that and then for voters to have that information as well of like I think this is one of the best projects here are the reasons that I think this this is the metric that really jumps out to me so that um yeah when s or law comes in behind me they actually have

that context which shouldn't necessarily influence their decision but should give them more things to think about when they're they're trying to yeah to use that information so um that was one part I think the rubric was a second part to that which is to then just think about yeah how you consider impact what are the dimensions of it what are the characteristics how do you start to think about what might be higher Impact versus lower impact and how could you find a common way to sort of talk about that and then the last one was yeah something that we were really excited about which is I think it's sort of pretty easy for somebody who is is um considerate and knowledgeable to say

this is high impact yeah and this is low impact y what's much harder is to go what is that worth yeah and what is this worth yeah you got to be a finance expert you got to be like a VC or something you know it's probably a little bit too much to ask of Voters I think so um we created these impact tiers yep so that you simply had highest high medium low or no impact put something into a tier yep and we have like a point system or an algorithm that sat behind that that would work out the distribution um uh that created lots of edge cases and lots of things I could probably talk about the um algorithm until we all go crazy but ultimately it

did make it a lot easier for people to just think okay here are the highest impact things here are the low impact things I've done my job I'll move on I'm sure it's all going to balance out in the way that we like yeah which was which was really successful so yeah I think our design was really around what do we want the program to do and then how can we contribute something back into the broader knowledge around yeah public goods you know there are so many things that I've been now thinking like first huge Kos to the team that you know they decided to use the funding that they received from optimism right and arbital right I think that sets such a great example of how do you you know make connections with the ecosystems and let give forward right I think there is

something there and I really hope that more and more ecosystems you know consider doing it right like in this go I know like lip to PE other ecosystem which actually did this right so uh I think that is uh yeah that's just so great to see I also think you know before coming to like getting deeper into the impact te and Drew bre like you mentioned I really like the fact that the comment section I know it's a you know it's may not be the you know the biggest thing but it was so helpful like for full you know disclosure like I in LA namu were also batch holders in this round and it was like Wow every like it gave so much context and it just helped

in so many ways like it helped us to evaluate better and you know have that background right which also I think is a great way to have other folks as batch holders like because there's no expectation it's not like you need to have all the context and you need to know all the details right yes team is there who will help you provide context and then you use your you know um to just evaluate and everything so it was great like I went in there and yeah yes I think this is particularly one of the things that for example the optimism ecosystem has been talking about more as well in terms of how do we bring the knowledge of more of the people that are really interacting with the contributions and ensure that badge

holders get a chance to hear from those that are firsthand used the tools benefiting from the contributions so that those voices are also heard it's one of the things that has come up repeatedly now with badge holders in the optimism ecosystem sort of like we should like yes we are badge holders because we care about where the ecosystem is going but as we're looking to reward specific tools specific uh research projects that we might not be directly benefiting from so we don't have a larger overview of who all is using these tools how do we Source more of that information so as

Cel mentioned it was one of the greatest additions to be quite honest as I was going through the voting and sort of like comparing it with my experience as well as a an optimist in bacheler is like oh I have so much more data that is not only what is the project presenting and what is the narrative that they want me to look at and hear but I'm also getting to hear and read from the experiences of others on oh okay this project is selling itself in this way but I'm also able to understand how is the actual user experience or developer experience for a particular contribution so that was a great great addition that's great I think there's this

natural tendency as well of like um you know there's the wisdom of the crowd yeah and then eventually someone says oh we need experts to do it you know crowd stupid um let's just have five people decide you know because they're the smartest they're the most knowledgeable which I mean there somewhere in between of course is the right answer but but that tends to become politicized then you know it's like you got to Curry favor with the five people you know you got to make sure the five people can see what you're doing so actually like mechanisms that you're try and give more people context so you can have more participation um uh I think if we're continuing to move in that direction then that's um yeah that's correct yeah I think it definitely served the purpose

and uh so you you mentioned about the rubric you know I just want to like go back a little bit and would love to you know know more a bit about the batch holder selection process that happened right like how did you go about um you know selecting batch holders or you know what was the thought process behind who should be these people right and then just want to get a little bit deeper on like how was the rubric developed or who developed it like you know what was that process like right pocket has a really interesting governance system it's like a reputational one person one vote so um people complete a bunch of quests or demonstrate their knowledge uh and

participation in the ecosystem and then essentially they become a a dow voter who who were our badge holders um for this so I guess it's a little bit like the citizens house in optimism and that are citizens of pocket but but out people had earned that there was sort of like a common um understanding of how you earn your vote that way um uh we added to that we had a few members of the foundation like myself and and then you guys of course to just add like a deeper Dimension around knowledge of retroactive funding the broader web 3 ecosystem this this sort of stuff so I think it was a really good balance to sort of have 75% badge holders that are just our community our Del voters and

then this other 25% that um yeah are more knowledgeable or context on perhaps things that can add to um add to the voting pool and what that looks like the rubric was great I wish FS was here and could talk about it she would do a much better job than me but we had three sort of categories yeah protocol we had an ecosystem we sort of had a community uh Dimension and because sort of everything was in one pool yeah it was always going to be like incredibly difficult to like balance those up yeah I'm a developer I think protocols most important all the protocol projects are like the highest

impact yeah create a lot of problems for yourself if you go down that path so the rubric was like I think an essential part of helping the categories sort of normalize in in some way find um find a better balance between that but also just allow people to think about the different Dimensions you can have something that changes I think the nature of the ecosystem yeah like we had one contribution which essentially um changed some of the protocol parameters that would allow you to change like how much each relay or how much each like unit is rewarded

which basically Made pocket available to like AI inference or other use cases that are a lot more expensive than like blockchain RPC so that like fundamentally changed like what pocket is in a way yeah do most people know about that like is it driving more users today yeah did it get a lot of buzz on social media no so you do actually need to have ways that you think about yeah those those different dimensions um and the work that FES did was great because it was um sort of so comprehensive in a way that it it um allowed people to be I think a bit more

objective with the process you know you could fill out the rubric you could get a score you could think about that score and stack rank everything if you want yeah I think I think that was like a really useful mechanism for people to use as they went through the voting process probably going back to the design question there was the rubric and then there was where you voted and what happened in between those two bits yep I don't know yep and we probably should try and Shrink that Gap so there's a much better connection between the two but um yeah I I think it was really good to have that and I'm I'm a little bit worried about what what might have happened if we didn't yeah I think this is a really

good point and it was definitely a really nice addition I think there's like from what I've seen both in optimism and other rounds there are certain steps in terms of how involved some of the foundations or designing teams get into how the decisions are made by the participants May sometimes I think it starts in a very loose way I think that's how optimism started and it's been evolving in in a sense of let's give more let's put more rails on what people are deciding on and in the first experiments and similar with as you mentioned in round three where it's like okay these are the projects look at that tells how much money we should be giving them it becomes uh quite an overload in

terms of like a cognitive overload of thinking of like okay I will read through the projects and then there are categories how do I compare projects within the same category and then how much I you brought it up before as well it's like how much how do I turn that into money and like I ran some of the of the workshops for badge holders in that round and it was one of the processes that we were that we were looking at and experimenting through like okay let's just look at projects within the same one are there questions that we can generate so that we compare them and then what can we think of how do we turn now this point system into money or like what are some of the aspects that we think that we can think about on how do

we price this and that was one of the biggest barriers so I think this abstraction that you uh enabled through the rubric on okay if you you gave them this many points that how do you compare them against each other within the within that category and then you it's easier to go from there into okay if I gave them like if I have this many with this many points or like if this is the one that got score the most then I can equate that into high impact or this one I can equate it into low impact I do think that it made that process of jumping from the points into the tiar uh a lot easier and then I also really like

how there were this questions pre-selected or yeah like pre-selected within the rubric within this different questions for each of the categories which I think also enabled us to think more not only on our oh this is what we think is good for the ecosystem but also what are some of the things that are relevant from I would say like the foundation perspective or like the Dow plus Foundation perspective and not only from the voter perspective which again it adds I think having those two pictures really adds value into what

ends up being decided and I know that for some people it might be like oh but this is like centralization and like they are the ones that dictate this but at the end of the day it's it's more tools that enable you to make a better job when you're making these decisions it reduces sort of like how much information has to be on your head I know that for example for optimism was like well we have the batch holder manual and then one of the things was like we're actually not sure how many people are reading through the whole badge holder manual there's a lot of good information there but do we know if people are reading through the whole thing do we know if people are using the whole thing and I think by having this rubric it really brought it up to like

oh it's not only making my life easier but it's also enabling me to understand from a different perspective or like information that I might have not been aware of otherwise how do I bring it into my decision making process so I definitely think that these additional tools that are created sometimes either by community members and like in this instance for example by one of the other dowo members to make this process easier also just as as a badge holder you want to participate in the experiment it produces like how much time you think or feel it's going to take so that you really want to get engaged with like oh okay go through these questions look at

the projects I totally agree um and and one thing that I think all of this does is it reduces the number of outliers too right probably makes it a little bit quicker yeah um helps people sort through it helps them make better decisions but it just like stops the extremee ones and that was probably one of the things that I think was really good about their impact te yep is it was very rare that you saw something that was marked Low by a lot of people y also ranked highest or High by people you know it did sort of start to normalize around that impact here so I think I think that's great like if that's

happening you're sort of moving people are moving in the common Direction and you're reducing those outliers which um yeah I think just makes a huge difference yeah you know one of the things that I feel is that optimism has laid this Foundation where others can um learn and build on it right like understand and see what their learnings have been and this seems to be something like that should be added to the you know that common knowledge base right like this is absolutely something that is going to be handy it's going to be really useful for the other ecosystems right that job right so do you do you see that you know this can this can be added and how do you see that other ecosystems you know can also use this

and just you know make it U maybe just yeah integrate in their process and design anyone who's using the easy retro pgf platform um can access our repos and get the uh impact tiers for voting they can get the comment section um all of that's open and can be shared I'm not sure if there's show notes but we can um we can make sure we find find those links for anyone that wants that I do think that's like a really important part of this and and sort of one of the challenges at the moment right now I think um I think pioneering stuff is often it's taking 80 or 90% of what someone else has got and just like making a small change yeah it's a brand

new thing you know because it has all of these new interactions within it so yeah I think it's really important that people make that commitment to like open source that we get really well structured around how we build that common knowledge that common infrastructure for people to access and then I think we need to make it a little bit easier as well one of my concerns at the moment is it feels like everything is bespoke what I mean by that is like yes an ecosystem sort of iterates on what they've created in the past and and they get better but anyone else that wants to pick that up and sort of follow along is often left to start at the

start you know how do I integrate those three tools to do what optimism's doing or what pocket's doing you know I've sort of got to start from the start with that whereas I think it would be much better if I can mostly pick that up yep and there's more modularity around it so I can change where I want to without sort of um yeah creating a lot of headaches for myself um so yeah I just think this is like a super important part of what we need to be doing here which is um yeah thinking about how we are building common open source infrastructure around these Grant programs in the same way we hope people are building them around the the protocols that we supporting yes I think this is such an important piece that

we've been talking with some of like in some of the other episodes as well with the fcoin team and with the Macy team is like how do we make sure that we are sharing all of the mistakes the things that went well like I think most often we see Grand programs and their different iterations sharing like this is what was really successful but we we missing we miss out on the opportunity as well to share well this part didn't work so well and so we would suggest others to do it in this different way or this is where we got stuck and we got stock here so we made this other decisions so that we're not only seeing the what went well what didn't go well

but the logic is well behind decisions that happened afterwards so that others can understand okay if is this something that could also happen in my ecosystem if I'm using this mechanism or is this something that wouldn't happen in this sense what are some of the things that you would like to share that it wasn't how it didn't go as it was planned so we would suggest going through this other route or we were able to fix it in this way that others could learn from it's going to be a long episode now as I explain all the things we did wrong I think two things sort of come to mind for me uh one was with the impact tiers yeah it it did a really good job of

making it easy for voters but it sort of forced a distribution right which is not actually a problem itself it happens in lots of things lots of corporates sort of operate with a sort of standard distribution or normal distrib tion for um pay and salaries and rewards and bonuses all that sort of stuff it's not necessarily a problem but what we found was yeah to solve the edge cases not make not allow people to like make everything highest impact Y where I just vote for three things and I forget everyone else I don't care and warp the results that way um yeah we we created a distribution which meant we sort of had a longer tale of like low impact projects that got rewards which I actually personally would have liked to

see more of that low impact may be eliminated yep and more of that go to the highest impact things to like keep encouraging them and and maybe Inspire the low impact to strive to to get up to that highest impact sort of level so I think that was one thing that maybe didn't work perfectly was just how the results got distributed we need to to tweak the algorithm a little bit the the other one is just um like full rookie era we got excited about the objectives of the program got excited about the experiments we probably didn't um step by step from the user perspective enough so the worst part I think of our program was the application form and process

yeah which we s to just picked up yep and we're like okay you just apply yep we don't have to do too much there yep it captures all the details we're all good yeah it does capture most of the details but it misses quite a few too and it doesn't sort of force people to capture the right metrics yep and hold them to account if they don't and you definitely need markup so you don't get like a wall of text that people are like looking into the screen trying to read so I think another mistake that yeah we made was probably not that user perspective like following it through end to end and and maybe focusing too much on the shiny things and not the nuts and bolts of like just the basics

the fundamentals um but yeah there's there's a lot more to I think um yeah they're two two reasonable examples though of um how we change things if we had our time again we really hope that there's going to be a write up like as I know you sh like oh this is just a little bit of it but and it's also one of the things that we're asking from several of the other ecosystems uh we know that for example filecoin already shared theirs in terms of like what were some of the learnings uh we'd love to see or I I don't know if other people but I would definitely love to see it as it's it's one of the things that now as we keep iterating the product the easy Reacher pgf product and understanding okay how is it useful what

didn't work well we've been doing several retrospective with others so uh with those teams that we W working so close with it's definitely valuable to to understand as well like oh what were we were all using the same tool what were some of these uh frictions that they they noticed as well for sure yeah we we should definitely do that I think um with a few changes going on um yeah we probably gone a bit slower on that but I know fames was working on that so I think we should get back together and yeah make sure we share that out we are almost towards the end of the episode I always think that you know with every ecosystem it can be a series of episodes right because there's so much that has

went into you know designing the whole round and so many things you know which are new but you know Ben if you know if I ask you like looking ahead right how do you see retroactive funding evolve in the public goods space right like any you know any particular Trends or maybe innovations that you are excited about or that you would like to see maybe right so yeah I would love to know more about that the part that I'm excited about is what gets people into the retroactive funding rounds yep and what I mean by that is like there's sort of a pathway yep um and it's that pocket example of like I've got an idea I think it's going to

create impact yeah how do I drive that idea yeah forward to a point where I can demonstrate the impact and then I can be rewarded by um yeah retro pgf program so I think it's probably just extending it out a little bit maybe figuring out what the proactive funding aspect is and how we sort of balance those two I think that's going to be like a really exciting one because um yeah there's a big funnel of talent there but um it is still a barrier to expect people to go some distance into the future in Hope

because yeah often they're just not sure themselves you know like it's really hard uh what AM I going to be doing in three months I'm not sure yep but if I can figure that out yep then it's a lot easier for me to see that hey in three months that retroactive round is going to be there and and things are going to work out sweet for me um so yeah I think I think that's what I'm probably most interested in then I think the other one is yeah just these mechanisms around how the decisions are made um it feels to me like um yeah there's a world of experimentation that can sort of go on in in that space and perhaps make

decisions perhaps we have yeah some points or mechanisms that can tell us more of that sort of stuff but um yeah I'm just excited to see all of it to be honest I think this is something like I said that um yeah is a huge Innovation for the space it it I think will be around as long as crypto is around retroactive funding so there's going to be a lot of innovation I'm sure yes and I think it's really exciting as you've mentioned to see I think for for quite some time in the web 3p it was like okay we've got proactive grants that are might have different forms either direct grants either uh rfps and then we've got qf and and

that's that's those are the two flavors in our ecosystem and by bringing retroactive funding I think we're we're not only opening the door to more these Loops of how retro interacts with proactive and how they can balance each other in terms of driving more of these incentives that we want to have more like what kind of behaviors do we want to see more people exhibiting in the different ecosystems uh but also opening the door to if these two are already interacting with one another which other uh mechanisms are out there that can also enhance this formula that we have maybe the formula is not only two mechanisms maybe the formula is better the more either the more mechanisms we

have maybe having more actually reduces the complexity for decision- making and allocating the capital to the different contributors so I think I I completely agree with you and I'm also really excited to see how this mechanism continues to evolve and then also how this seeing participants in like seeing ecosystem participants such bucket just optimism Salo trying out and testing new mechanisms how does that encourage others to T even more or just go out there and get more creative and using some of the E mechanisms that people

have put out there and include them into their into their grand options yeah I I think you know that's that's the beauty of the space it just makes me so excited like you know it's such a wild it's a wild west and you know you just go all in and there are so many different decision points so many you know points where if there was a mechanism or a do you know that can help make people's lives easy it would be great and it can just you know probably help us achieve our objectives faster right so I'm really excited to see you know what next and it perfectly aligns with you know git coin's Mission as well which is now we're going multimechanism world where we want to Iden identify the areas you

know the different uh decision points where we need a mechanism or which can be coupled with existing mechanism right because one mechanism is not perfect right so it's a you know it's like I said it's a wild west and I'm so excited that we are all in this journey together and Ben thank you so much for joining us today and um yeah really looking forward to continuing these discussions with you and you know probably figure out ways to you know make things happen together awesome yeah um really enjoy catching up um always excited to talk about this sort of stuff um yeah and great to see you both again so um yeah thanks for having me yeah no thanks a lot for sharing with us I think uh really Kos uh and would

love to encourage more of PE of the teams running their own Ral rounds and their different Grand programs to share what are the learnings that have come out for their program so that we can all continue to improve how we are conducting Capital allocation in the web 3 space we don't need to all make the same mistakes over and over again we can all benefit from what others have have failed in so that we are collectively improving how we're allocating funding so thanks a lot Ben for sharing your learnings with us 100% thank you thanks guys so we just heard from Ben who led the Retro around with pocket you know

pocket around has been quite interesting because of the different things they experimented with right so two things you know that I um I found really interesting and I am also excited about is that the you know the badge holder selection process and the whole process that the the rubric that badge holders you know used right I think the fact that pocket had other folks outside of their ecosystem as well as batch holders you know uh without really getting into the expertise rather enabling them to you know have context and support the projects was quite interesting so like I also mentioned for disclosure I and La

now move our badge holders in the pocket round and we can attest that the rubric was great and the whole process was really helpful and gave us a lot of context and I'm also excited about how every ecosystem is seeing you know this common knowledge the learnings as a public good and really looking forward to see how we can actually bring these learnings together which we talk about right I know L you have more thoughts on it would love to know what is that you like and most excited about um you know from the from pocket there were two things that I really enjoyed hearing more from Ben the first one was I was already aware that there were some

retroactive funding happening in the pocket ecosystem but learning about how this tool actually enabled them to generate a better grantee experience was super interesting I think it's a big space for improvement that most Grant programs have the relationship that they have with their grantees so seeing how they thought of this leverage this platform to improve that and see how this is going to affect the ecosystem overall is really fascinating the second one is I'm on a mission to have more people share what didn't go well in the rounds so hearing from Ben as well what he would be doing differently in an

upcoming round and what were some of these learnings is really interesting I think other ecosystems that are running rounds or tiptoeing their feet and seeing would this be something that we could do in my ecosystem get a lot of valuable insights from what benur great U please leave any feedback that you may have and tell us about you know how you you what you think about the episode and what would you like to see more of you can reach out to us on Twitter and you know um yeah uh wait for the next episode [Music]