S6. Ep. 3 - Metrics-Driven Incentives: The SUNNYs and Beyond W/ Carl, Chris, Binji

Transcript

welcome to the green pill. network podcast in September green pill will be hosted by the cartographers a high context community of individuals and teams dedicated to advancing the web 3 grants ecosystem they'll explore the web3 grants ecosystem with topics ranging from novel funding mechanisms Grant councils and governance to emerging trends like Ai and direct to contract incentives this series seeks to bridge theory and practice by examining real world examples and featuring discussions with those who are closest to the action the next voice you hear will be Sav who contributes at getcoin and founded the cartographers sa will be hosting this entire season and I think that it's going to be a great season because Sav brings deep experience in web 3 grants

and capital allocation I'm excited for you to hear some of the perspectives from him and his guests without further Ado the next voice you'll hear is Sav enjoy what's up coordination s here want to introduce you to the third episode in the cartographers green pill season takeover this episode focuses on the sunny Awards the sunnies is a collaboration between gitcoin where I contribute open source Observer charm firste and then the optimism Collective to launch a first ofit kind Awards program it looks at the ways that metrics can drive incentives and some interesting new approaches that we're just starting to explore I'm excited for

you to listen to this episode and hopefully you get something from it so let's jump into some introductions first uh Carl as the Elder Statesman of green pill I'll start with you hey it's great to be back on the green pill podcast uh as some of you know my name is Carl I work on open source Observer and we're building technology to measure impact in the open and we're so excited to be doing that with the optimism community on the sunny Awards to Chris yeah great to be here everyone my name is Chris carella I'm the head of product at Charmers and the co-founder of the Scout game I'm also a member of the optimism citizens house and just generally involved in in the ious initiatives happening around optimism and so chumber has built the software to register your project for the sunny Awards and so've

been just a part of this great collaboration and looking forward to driving to the Finish Line hey all I'm Benji I have been a contributor to the optimism Collective for two and a half years um starting initiate op Labs I'm currently at optimism unlimited helping growth within the super chain and of the super chin itself um and it's an honor to be here so thanks for having nice well let's jump into it you know the first question I will actually turn over to you Benji the sunnies for me started as a DM from you and slack around I've got this idea you know and we've been excited for some time to figure out some ways so we can collaborate with this group you know from a gitcoin perspective so maybe introduce us just to the concept of the sunnies you know what the vision was for that and you

know where we are today with yeah so if you look at what Builders want in the space and you also look at what users want in the space sometimes it doesn't always directly overlap over the idea that that we all want the space to grow right so let's Zone in on Builders like we initially started with this um plan for helping base out on onchain summer and being a part of this like broader movement to like bring really strong Collective energy for the super chain and like for everyone involved who's building in crypto over this summer so we first run down to the build of track it's like okay Builders one they want good Tech reliable technology awesome right we're very fortunate to built like the OB stack which is resilient which is Reliant is being used by Fortune 500s and all the types developers like um and

it's growing more and more into the Super chain so that's one that's say that's covered two is they want sustainability right they want to find grants programs like how can I go and like build something in in the crypto space like how do I sustain myself maybe I want to make my thing open source so that's two we do have grants programs right that it does exist there's multiple grants programs in crypto I think there's billions of dollars worth of Grants programs in crypto today across all these different chains so that's two three is what I think is hard part that has not necessarily been designed for to a large extent and is one thing that the Sunny's kind of wanted to lead with which is marketing and visibility and promotion for these projects you know you can have good Tech you can have Brands but after that you

build your thing and it's like okay how do I actually get promoted how do I actually get recognition how do I get visibility so the Sunny's putting all three together is it's almost a grants program with marketing built in at the Forefront it's a promotion campaign as much as it is a grants campaign so how can we kind of align both of those incentives and kind of create a one siiz fits-all approach for any Builder that's applying to something like the sunnies where they can potentially get some op they can also potentially get some recognition some visibility some users and on the user side you can actually culminate this in a fun award show that anyone may want to come and enjoy regardless if they're a builder or not nice yeah I know it's been exciting to see it getting spun up um for sure so

there's kind of two parts that I want to dig into here as well one you know that Builder experience you know what does that look like and two how are we actually verifying you know impact and and what do those systems look like so maybe I'll pop it over to you Chris maybe talking through um the profil some of the work that charm ver has done and kind of like what that front-end Builder experience looks like you know for the sunnies yeah so signing up for the sunnies is actually very easy um you can sign in with your warcast account or sign in with your wallet and just apply for your project it's like not a lot of information like parant programs typically asked for it's like a name a short description and just that you know maybe your social accounts uh so the user experience there is actually very

straightforward the interesting thing behind it is um we sort of got started on this because we've been doing a bunch of work with optimism on uh their identity Solutions and their attestations and so if you want to apply for retr pgf now or even if you want to apply for optimism grants Council you're required to have a forecaster account and um optimism is treating your forecaster account or your FID as kind of your Universal identi and it has the benefits your FID has connected wallets to it and so if you need to rotate your wallets or a wallet gets compromised you can reconnect a new wallet but your FID is the same it also has the benefits of like very simple email based account recovery and so

these are pain points that many grants programs and and optimism has based over the years where you know if you lose access to your wallet that can be a problem if you need to rotate your wallet the foundation is planning on on sending your Grant to the initial wallet you need to contact someone there's like a lot of human intervention involved to make sure the right wallet is going to get paid out and so they move to this notion of braster IDs as your identity and then a series of attestations on top of it and so the sues just use this entire system and when you do create a project uh in fact once you create an account you're now sort of in the optimism Builder registry and the super chain Builder registry um where they can start to piece together of your

activities in the space But as soon as you apply as a project you now have a project attestation and that project attestation then becomes portable across the optimism ecosystem so if you do apply for retr pgf or if you do apply for the grants councils program you sign in with your warcast account and you just have this project uh that you can easily pull in and not redup all the information and furthermore it starts earing attestations and so your project can win a semi award it can win an OP Grant it can win a retro pgf Grant and now there are attestations against those projects so that we can sort of track your projects across the ecosystem yeah no interesting and Carl obviously I'll I'll turn it over to you from here to

talk a little bit about what's the potential that that unlocks as we look at you know those things happening on chain and and how does that you know start to give more possibilities for Builders and even Grant programs and capturing profile information in this way and being able to verify impact those kinds of things yeah building on a couple things both Chris and and bji said I think first off we really wanted the signup process to be as easy and as frictionless as possible you don't want projects hitting a wall of questions and then giving up because it just takes too much time or there's information they don't have and they need to come back and forget about it Etc uh so one of the the goals was that it should be again as easy as possible to sign up and then the information that we'd get about the

project in order to track different types of metrics would all come from a contract or a series of contracts linked to that project great thing about any impact that is on the super chain is that we should be able to look at the contracts and identify everything that they've deployed all the different user activity um because a lot of the projects are focused on users that are on forecaster you're also able to link you know forecast IDs and identify a rich set of metrics based on um just you know one or two pieces of information from the project so it's a pretty cool experiment you know there are many different categories that we're trying to reward projects in some are really well established like defi some are entirely kind of new and coming and so

again like thinking of the Oscars where you know the goal of a ceremony like the Oscars is not only to recognize each of the films but also to celebrate the film industry and all of the the hard work and oftentimes the visible work that goes into that uh we really wanted to recognize as many different categories and make it so that if you wanted to kind of understand the impact that a product had you could in the same way that you might watch a film you could actually identify just one or two things about that project and then everything there is verifiable it's open at open source Observer we try and make sense of all that data uh so I would say that making it easy for products to sign on and sign up um has meant that we have to do a bit more kind of you know reviewing

and eligibility checks to make sure that everybody's signed up for the right category and so on but just you know already a few weeks in the outpouring has been pretty huge tons of projects coming in lots of interesting categories represented so very excited to see how it all shakes out nice I just wanted to maybe speak to the challenges of doing onchain metrics which something I've learned the most here and I'll just say that I first collaborated with Carl on Retro pgf 3 when I was just a voter and he was like Hey I have the data for all of the projects and so I was first just using his Google Sheets Retro 3 to sort of help inform my evaluation op Retro 4 was metric based and so that was the first time I really got to see um Carl cook and then now I get to be like much

closer to to the metal here and watching it happen and um and I feel pretty Crypton native and have a pretty good handle on how these things work and then it's like incredibly challenging to actually use metrics as people structure their smart contracts in so many different ways and including ways where like you may have a thousand smart contracts Downstream that we need to be looking at and so I would just tell everyone it sounds really simple like it's metrics based it probably is the right way we do this right it eliminates a lot of bias sees um eliminates the popularity contest aspect of it so we love the metric based stuff but I just caution The Listener that it actually way more complicated than I have anticipated and certainly way more complicated than the way you would do

this in web to um would love to add something on this of like I think what we're seeing here is like a series of very like novel ways to look at crypto data generally I think the start of foraster adds an entire new variable to the idea of like what is how do you identify who someone is in crypto like what what is the reputation of someone is like the second question that leads to personally I have like a very biased kind of understanding SL like Vision that I I abide to which is like reputation is the ultimate cryptocurrency and I don't think we're there yet in the span of blockchains I don't think we're like able to kind of like dive into the nitty that much but the experimentation the work that's

being done for things like the sunnies where it's like let's like really dive into contracts let's see all the various different types of rewards these contracts can get like who are the Builders of these contracts what's their forecaster IDs like creating this really open net um where you can really start building on top of this idea of reputation which I think as I said is like the ultimate currency what that leads to down the line is obviously like one it leads to work for the optimism Collective sure like and um other teams involved as well are like getting out of stations on it but I think broadly it's like a step forward into what crypto research can be in terms of like how do we actually like look at all this onchain data and actually prescribe like an award or superlative or like some sort of like qualitative determinant on

on top of the data that exists that's more on the qu side course but I think it's like really cool step forward and it's really exciting to have all these peritos to work with it's early and like massive massive Kudos like all the work that Carl and Chris are doing like that is I've seen those spreadsheets that is a lot of lot of numbers wow Carl and Chris definitely cook you know yes for sure um one thing I wanted to you know dive into a little bit more with you Benji was like some of the comments there around how do you consider factors beyond just like pure numbers right like when you look at like you know qualitative you know evidence of contributions and Builders you know I think sometimes we can look at metrics like daily active users tvl like all these things that we know are gameable

but it's kind of just like the best that we have at this point what have you learned through this process around you know some of those those softer you know factors around just you know beyond just pure numbers right yeah so I think I mean cr critically in crypto I think there's a a lot of cases where we put the cart before the horse where it's like this is the thing and then like the horse just Rams into the car right like I think what this sunnies kind of does is like let's get as much of this data as people are like can share right like let's get these contract addresses and everything and then let's award a variety of awards not just top TBL but maybe fastest growing TBL for example or something around that side like let's

not silo to just like seeing TBL as one metric like TBL is there sure but it doesn't have to be top TBL it could be like fastest growing the TBL with the most users all these different things and these are things that we're working on so I can't like make can't make any promises directly on like what those Awards will be and don't want to spoil it but like it is kind of this idea that we shouldn't necessarily think of these as like you're the winner of TBL like that itself has so much Nuance um so we're looking at it in ter sort of like not putting the car before the horse by saying this is the award that we're going to have but actually like getting the metric data in and being able to see like Trends and different things that help award a variety of Builders not

just like the top ones on a volume perspective I think in crypto it's very important to do that in an industry that's prep pmf we keep rewarding the same thing on a metric that we ourselves are not fully convinced on then it will just lead to like a self-fulfilling prophecy where we miss out on a ton of other builders building a ton of New Primitives we're so early in this space that we should not reward people who are just doing the best on one metric we should reward people who are showing up and like pushing the the Frontiers as well equally as much and encourage them as much as possible just building on what bji said I think there's a very cool way that data is going to enrich the experience of like choosing categories and choosing projects but at the same time it's not going to be

deterministic uh so what I mean by that is the goal here is really to reward a whole range of different types of contributions different categories products that are well established ones that are up and coming and so you know the metrics if anything they will be used as a way of kind of filtering and informing those kind of categories and the awards within a given category but ultimately when you're at the scale where you have hundreds potentially thousands of projects that are applying you need some heris stics and some way of categorizing things hopefully what we'll see is that there's you know a huge number of projects the number one thing they get out of this is kind of the marketing the support hopefully this leads to as V you was saying some kind of continuous funding or on ramping to

getting other grants programs but right now if we can put the net out get as many products as possible and then find different ways of categorizing them and rewarding different things that they're uniquely contributing to it's a you know it's really big step forward would like to add one part here as well is like one of the biggest things in the Suns I think that I I'm just like I'm really happy that like to be a movement that has done this is the free access to analytics that teams and projects have got what that leads to is like different chains that because there's so so many different data points like everyone focuses on tvl everyone focus on like one or two things but there's like a whole variety of data points right making those accessible across these projects can not only help the projects

one realize and like further analyze okay how am I doing but it could also let other ecosystems that may want to do their own grants programs actually leverage this so for example some chains through the optim collective recently got grants right so these are like op given to chains for them to run their own grants programs now they can actually like see from their ecosystem like who actually went to the sunnies see all this data and potentially even like start thinking about who work on a variety of metrics instead of siling into one and I think the reproducibility of that is really powerful I think furthermore like working with gitcoin and doing using e easy retro pgf for this is also another system of like okay like we have used this system it works we battle tested it like with the sunnes now there's all these other folks in the

collective and perhaps even outside the collective would also like Leverage this toolkit leverage this system and run their own versions of this I think a big success success case is that like people do this on their own as well like many R ones or like whatever but I do think it's a really interesting way to push in like this new idea of what grants can be where you're not just rewarding the people who are at the top but you're rewarding people who are there who are showing up who are doing new things across a variety of different metrics absolutely and you could be targeted around you know certain types of Builders um before we jump into the decision-making part you know Chris I wanted to get your perspective as a Creator as someone who subscribes to your Hy sub and loves the work that you

do how do you look at this right because I think often times when it comes to educational content you know art like creative you know qualitative um type work it's been more challenging in the past to reward that there haven't been as many incentive programs around it and that I view that as like a huge opportunity here with you know farcaster really lifting up a lot of those types of creators like yourself um how do you view the opportunity with the sunnies and maybe even like some of those next order Grant programs that could come from it yeah so maybe two lenses one is that I have not applied with any of my personal stuff um just because I'm working on it although I have no say in decision making process but it just feels like I should not be applying for it uh but I do have fomo from not

applying and I would say it's like you know there's like a cool forecaster frame when you apply there's a cool forecaster frame around your metrics like the awards show is going to be really cool I would love for my projects to be up there so on one hand I have like the fomo of some of the marketing around it but I think kind of the juicy part of the question is how do we evaluate onchain metrics for artists and creators which certainly is much harder and I think that the long-term answer for a lot of this stuff is to have grants programs focused on artists you know know bingi Le we love the art a few months ago that that was like an example Opie had the prer airdrop which was a good example but it was very hard when you're like you know my most successful

mft which by the way this is like I I just crushed them all one of these mfts I got 20,000 mints but it's still like very hard to compare my impact of 20,000 mints against like aerodromes 300,000 defi users you know and so I think like in the big picture having Arvest competing against other applications can be challenging I see this across many grants ecosystems I think for us here we're like looking at the art category and the artist separate than the defi stuff and so it is not going to be Apples to Apples culture does have a huge impact it's not always as verifiable on chain but I think you know trying to keep things metric baced even for creators means that you have some demonstrable impact on shame and you

know a great one for RS is onboarding new people onto chain you know like my favorite metric in all of this stuff across all of the grants programs is how many qualified users do you onboard um into a chain which is a hard metric because you know I don't want to count bots in there I want to count qualified users um and so that's a tricky heris stic itself um but that's a that's kind of what I always think is like how many people can I on into a new chain when I'm doing a new piece of work I'm a new piece of chain or um you know what is my demonstrable onchain impact I'm an onchain artist so that's where I'm trying to make my impact Goosebumps absolutely I think you mentioned we love the art and like one of the things that I remember from that was amount of

evangelism that we were able to like get from artists and also like really like learn from artists and and like almost help make this contest that was like on blockchain on a blockchain but it wasn't necessarily like restricted by it we love the art ended up being like one of the largest mobile accessible art contests ever you know it's not regionally defined anyone could have applied and I think that sort of stuff is really powerful and I I it did beg the question we had a lot of these focus groups on how can blockchains actually help artists like what does that mean that's a very separate conversation from how can a blockchain help a defi person but if we evaluate both of those like in the same metric you kind of like end up in this redundant state where like it doesn't necessarily may not necessarily

reward the entire Collective which I think is pretty powerful uh and important to do especially in this pre era I actually I love like this Einstein quote which is everybody is a genius but if you judge a fish by its ability to clim climb a tree it would live its entire life believing that it's stupid and like everybody is contributing to the crypto economy but if you judge everyone off of this one thing that even we like just then we're kind of shooting ourselves in the foot because there's so much more that's expansive and like can grow out side of that and we should be welcoming to everyone who comes in to contribute who has a good heart who has like good intentions in mind and who actually cares about like the mission itself so I think is like if you have that like if you have enough people that

care in my opinion you want to a large degree um that's oftentimes the hardest part let's jump in a little bit to decision making right so as we were talking about a little bit before we collect record on the show um I view the sunnies as kind of like one layer above direct contract incentives right so for the audience direct contract incentives are you're encoding those incentiv at a contract layer and if certain criteria is met those incentives are kind of like automatically paid out I think right now there's excitement around the opportunity with direct contract incentives but also some hesitation because you know those could be gameable you know and you could find yourself in a situation that that could get out of control quick here you're you get the benefit of gathering all that onchain

data but then there's human decision- making that happens at the end of that process in terms of actually rewarding and paying out the in incen so maybe Carl we'll start with you like talk us through from your side what that process looks like like once we have the data you know how does decision making occur with the Suns first off I guess we we don't have all the data yet and we're not sure how the decision making is going to occur so that's still very much a work in progress and it's going to evolve based on which categories have more products in them and what types of metrics we discuss and think are most useful but like I level what I'd say is that actually coming back to the point that Chris made earlier it's not really fair to compare an nft project with a

payment project with a with a D5 project but where I think the opportunity is is that you could take a platform for artists like Zora and they could say right now we have a campaign which is really all about onboarding new artists and so what we want to do is focus zoom in on that domain and identify just the subset of projects that are having a lot of impact there and maybe offer some kind of continuous funding or their own version of grant program at the same time maybe another partner like base they could say we care a lot about payments right now and specifically we care about payments that are going into markets that are not well supported by banking sector and so they could be very specific and using the same data and customizing their parameters and what

they want to reward so in terms of like what we're actually going to do I think we're going to be really scratching the surface in terms of how these metrics and how these categories might inform future Grant making but the benefit is by having you know a pretty large registry of products that are signed up that have gotten some recognition that have gotten some motivation to this I think there's be lots of opportunities for others to pile on and help F these projects more I know bingi I know that you're probably scheming about what the what the evaluations are going to look like uh what what are your thoughts what do you think is going to happen yeah I think what I like I mean in term I'm trying here is this idea of an impact Mosaic like you know how mosaics are just like distinct pieces but they all

fit together as one big thing I think that's what a collective is that's what a community is that's what a country is that's like all that and impact Mosaic kind of allows like these various different different types of people to like get an award for this get an award for that those happen in silos today right like that happens in let's say we did we love the art that was just artists and mainly the art community and that's it we didn't have def people tuning in on that right with that just was separated I think with the sunnies it's an we're creating an impact Mosaic where everyone's going to come into this live stream everyone's going to come into this one umbrella the Sunny's umbrella and they're going to get like one person made one an artist may get a certain award which is like you are the

most minted artist another artist may get another award which is like you are the most up andc coming artist potentially like these are the sort of like different types of Mosaic items that will um most likely come into play and it's one of those things where like as we get this data coming in we we need to like see patterns and Trends to then like add on to the Mosaic itself but I think we have a very expansive set of information that we could Leed with generally and there's various ways to kind of push into that things that there still need to be worked out for sure it's really exciting to see like the outpouring of I my gosh like 2,000 plus projects or something like coming in right now forget what number we're at exactly but it's it's a lot for sure and these are projects like not even like an

individual building these are just fully startups and pro nft projects as well um so it's really exciting to see I think largely it's whatever best fits the broader impact Mosaic itself will be what I think will be eligible for awards but it the awards will be very eclectic for sure I imagine that like it it's definitely not just going to be siloed within a couple things I imagine they be pretty expensive yeah just kind of thinking ahe there there's there's all sorts of different ways you could go about this on the one hand you have more than I think more than 12 chains that are participating some are very well established like base and op Manet Zora some are really up and coming this might be the first time the products building on those chains are going to get any funding for that so there's the whole

element of what chain are you on and how much activity is there and you know are you kind of on on The Cutting Edge of whatever is happening on that chain then there's the 20 or so categories that we have and then like you said there's all sorts of different angles that you can look at so on the one hand you can look at pure kind of economic metrics you can look at things that are related to users I don't know how it'll shake out but my guess is there's probably G to be like more than 50 potentially 100 different types of awards that that will come through yeah and and one thing that's exciting about this is like okay we' expand the scope of what is award dead right like it's like let's say in the past like programs Etc are like we're going to war the team that does the most

transactions and then it just goes towards that and it gets very topheavy in that world in this world we could be like transactions one metric within the metric of transactions there can be multiple Awards you could be the top transacting team you can be the transacting team with the most user recurring transactions daily like you can be transa the team that is like grown the most there's various different ways to take this one metric and like have it about multiple Awards versus just one award that's just purely volume based um what that does is if we kind of normalize that within the collective and we normalize that within crypto it like fixes the problem not okay that's far but it works towards fixing this problem SL like gives an entertaining solution

to this idea of sustainable consistent funding how can a collective consistently fund everyone that's like within it one of the things that I've heard a lot of people why people wouldn't want to do that and like have streams running constantly is that like it'll get end up too topheavy some team might get too big and like they just consistently receive funding and like smaller up and cominging teams have no no funding whatsoever but you have these just diverse awards that are giving funding out to like teams that are growing really fast teams that have grown teams that are doing different things over time as that gets more and more like as I get strengthened you could imagine a world where it's just an automatic stre drip stream to people achieving certain like metrics under these awards that we already have definitely far out there but I do think

it sets the foundations of like how can we expand the scope of what is award and reward in crypto great segue into my next question which I'll turn to Chris first how do you view kind of like these types of incentives reshaping you know grants and incentives as we move forward you know and maybe a little bit of a plug for the work that you guys are doing around the Scout game I could definitely see where you know like being able to identify those Builders and almost creating markets for those types of Builders um could be really interesting so what are your thoughts on that Chris yes so I think to maybe roll back and think about why do ecosystems have grants programs and a lot of it is to incentivize development in their ecosystem and from that way you can think about there's one end there's like

very expensive grants programs uh which can be really great retroactive is easier because you're measuring previous impact proactive grant funding is difficult and it's almost like being a VC so it's a pretty expensive thing to do and you'll have some hits and you'll have some misses and then on the far end of that other side of that it's like you may use hackathons for the same thing where you're trying to get new developers interested in building in the chain right and so I think what we're all talking about in various ways and what we're trying to do with the Scout game to is like what is that middle ground where based on metrics we can determine your impact and reward you for your everyday work not your um apply for this grant every three months and one of the kind of amazing effects for this is

just stability of income and so it can be really hard if you're a project working off of Grants and then you're crushing it you kind of expect you're going to get a grand and then for whatever reason you don't like maybe your category wasn't chosen this time or the metrics were chosen in a different way and then you have like this very spiky way of trying to run a project or a company and so the more work we can do around metrics and on chain data and the more work we can do around continuous grants and um you know direct contract incentives I think the more we can like stabilize the life of a lot of projects and so they just know what to expect this year and what to expect next year just say in the in the nouns ecosystem

they're also experimenting with that just streaming grants and so there's a bucket of money and people vote where they want their part of the money to be streamed to and so then rather than like and it's continuous and so a new project comes up today and I decide the project that I directed my stream to last week doesn't need it anymore I can like change my stream towards this new project and give them a boost and so but uh tldr I think there's a lot of ways to Spur activity in the ecosystem there's a lot of ways to reward people's impact and I think we're all together as an industry getting a little bit better at this towards kind of smoother revenue for teams and more predictable outcomes based on their data how do you think about that Carl what are some of the

possibilities you see I think about a lot obviously the thing that I certainly worry about and others have said we even had I think a whole episode on on the green pill podcast about this is just that once you put a metric out there it becomes a Target and everybody's working towards object they've turned that into an objective they're gamifying it they're really just trying to to maximize that number so the metrics that are used they have to be evolutionary they have to respond based on what the market is doing and what how others in the environment are are responding the thing that's like hopefully a big unlock through this and work that will will come afterwards is that right now standing at the GRS program has so much overhead it just takes ton of work to figure out the design how much funding

you're allocate how you get all the projects in how you organize them how you have the whole operations about you know vetting their activity improving their reputation Etc and then you know all of that is necessary before you can even start coming up with ways of categorizing and ranking the projects so there's a huge amount of work that goes into it and for most people that work is not the fun part that is not the uh the high value part it's just the necessary work that has to get done in order to decide how you're going allocate the funding so what I'd like to see is that ideally we get to a place where things like the Builder registry is ready to go things like that the proof of work and the proof of impact is already baked in and so governance and the people that

are administering the grant program they can spend all of their time on trying to look at how the different actors have responded and tweaking the funding I want there to be predictable funding for projects that are having an impact I don't want Grant programs to have to spend tons of hours Gathering all this data because the impact should be there it should be provable it should be verifiable the thing where they you know really need to spend their attention is making sure that over time as products are changing as the incentives are changing they're reflecting the way that they reward things to always stay ahead of the curve hopefully again with things like what we're building right now so much more of like the human part is going to be kind of looking at the you know overall how products are responding and tweaking things to make sure that

those that are still having the most impact are getting rewarded the most what do you see that way in terms of AI llm you know maybe talk us through like is there any is ailm used today an open source Observer and you know with the sunnies you know do you see possibilities where that could kind of help you know take the human workload and those types of things and improve it in the future when designing AI systems there's you a concept of uh you know reinforcement Lear learning through human feedback and I think in the case of allocating Grand funding that human feedback is really really important especially in determining you know does this reward function actually make sense given what we care about I think the values and you know what what the ecosystem stands for that's you know the foreseeable future that's still going to

be set by humans that's going to be set by the community and making sure that you have a good pulse on on what the Community Values but certainly as you get more and more projects more data about those um AI models are going to be very helpful in trying to curate and predict which things are likely to have the most impact on our end we've only started to scratch the surface with that because a lot of the work right now is really just kind of labeling and processing and cleaning up the data hopefully you know we're going get to the other side of that that pretty soon but I would be cautious about running too fast towards trying to take out that that valuable role that humans play I think right now as bji said a number of times we're still you know pre-product Market fit as a sector we don't know why

users are here we don't know what's going to make them stay we don't really know which apps if they get you know a certain amount of grand funding are going to continue building and focusing on the ecosystem so all of that's going to take a lot of trial and error and experiments let's use llms and models to help make our work easier but I think we still have to put in the hard to figure out what we actually want to value and they buildt up a proov point so that we can actually fund these things effectively Benji maybe I'll let you kind of close us out right um maybe let us know kind of the current state of the sunnies can people still apply you know how do they find information on that when are we thinking that you know we might be announcing you know some of the

applicants and then maybe share with us you've already have kind of through this conversation but just vision for the future that way in terms of what this could mean to The Wider super chain yeah awesome so Sunny's are still open you could go to sunward awards. fun and apply please do so as soon as possible we will be monitoring the data assigning Awards based off the objective data that uh teams provide te provide like everything in tune if you ever have a question there's like a ticket masters channel on telegram you can come in hop in there and ask any questions um that you may have as you go on and apply we will end things with the live stream and I'm very excited about that so how can we make like an the actual Oscars come to be right like actually like a full

live stream like you coming in you present you like receive an award you give a little speech things like that um that's collaborating on across all of our different partners we're getting more Partners involved in that I've had some really cool conversations with some very cool people who are interested in doing skits there so um please keep on the look out there the handle and all the other handles um that are involved in the Suns will be giving you updates on like when to RSVP and such as that moves on I think broadly like there's a couple parts here so one is the way that the sunnies has been built is something that we're all very excited by because there's about eight teams who' never worked together directly with each other who collaborated and made this possible

across a variety of different segments right like there's marketing there's product there's data there's everything in between there's grants there's delivery all these sort of things and I think it's a testament to how we can do this whole thing like we can do this whole crypto thing if we work together and we can do it way faster than any one of us could do it alone and I'm looking forward to seeing more and more of such collaborations emerge like on the super chain in different parts of the crypto economy like it is very powerful um and the fact that we're able to do this itself is like an absolute honor I think the execution of it has been like very exciting to see we have like thousands of projects already registered we're doing all these like advancements in

like data we can think even beginning to think about ways that we can like change Grant systems and like have marketing built in on those gret systems and reward people for various different things that they do based on objective onchain data that on its own feels like its own like entire world that it'll emerge into and then on the other side it's just also like helping people get learn about the super chain helping people learn about what we're trying to do here um creating a fun moment like we've been we work so much in this industry about different things we're trying out different things that we don't always have a time to rest like take a step back and actually look at all the stuff that we've done right and like we don't get to do that all together like imagine every single person in this industry for one or two

hours on this live stream listening to all the accomplishments that's brought crypto this far from like a forum post that Satoshi made to what it is today and it's I think it's really really impressive in Testament to like the space as a whole um I'm looking forward for the celebration for sure and yeah I think last last thing to say uh I saw someone tweet today that like founder Le marketing founder Le um DD founder Le community and the challenge that I think the sunny poses that's very different to that is like the best way to not best way to do it is actually like user-led Community user Le marketing user Le BD and like we've seen that with the entire Collective common rally behind this concept teams that have really helped us like go really far in marketing This and like talking about it within their

communities and it happens naturally when you can enable a whole Collective to go behind a program versus giving um just like giving it to them like it's much better to do it together and make people feel like we are evolving as one um versus a The Silo well think you you summed it up really well as the guy that I'm filling in for on the show for this season often says it's always coordination and always has been and I think that that's definitely what we've seen with the sunnies so I definitely appreciate you guys jumping on you know today and talking through this uh looking forward to this episode releasing and um looking forward to seeing as many applications come in as we can and closing strong and being there for uh the final ceremonies so thanks everyone appreciate the time thanks s thank you guys so coordination

hope you like the show was a lot of fun to talk with those guests they're doing some pretty cool stuff with the sunny Awards so definitely go check out the sunnies you'll be able to see that in the call notes where you can register and apply and definitely keep tabs on some of the work that that group of individuals and teams is doing because there's definitely more to come that way if you're interested in learning more about you know some of the things that are happening across the optimism Collective you're in luck we actually have more of those shows coming up on the green pill podcast for the Cartographer season takeover the next episode I'm going to be doing actually explores Downstream Grant programs from the optimism Collective tune into to that and then in a later show we'll even be diving in with the optimism grants

Council which I'm a member of to start to look at the process kind of mission intents you know and everything that goes into uh the work that that Grant Council does so again I'm glad you're here hope you're enjoying the season so far and there's more to come stay tuned [Music]