alexander on Warpcast

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@wagmialexander

Retro Funding is at an inflection point and the decisions we make will set the incentives moving forward. Under consideration is the enabling of voters to exclude projects that permission the reuse of so much as a single line of contract code. A reductive view of openness. 👇

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@wagmialexander

TL;DR - This will be the Collective's fourth shot at Retro Funding and it is critical that it sends a strong message to app layer builders that on @Optimism impact = profit. Solidity file licenses are a poor prognostic for openness and should not be used as a binary filter.

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@wagmialexander

Retro Funding is core to Optimism’s Economics. It is designed to fuel a flywheel whereby builders/users create demand for block space, that demand drives sequencer revenues, and those revenues are shared as rewards to those creating the most impact. In short, impact = profit.

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@wagmialexander

Retro Funding has had two primary issues to date: 1) There are not enough revenues to sustain the program 2) Those generating the most revenues are under rewarded Simply, the Collective needs to incentivize orders of magnitude more impact to sustain RF. https://x.com/opmichael_eth/status/1726609910404903240

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@wagmialexander

And the results of the last round did not accomplish this. The top OP Stack application layer projects earned 5% of the total rewards. Forks with single digit TVL earned more funding than the projects they copied despite delivering 1% of their impact. https://x.com/carl_cervone/status/1750005488949903817

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@wagmialexander

The changes made to the latest round of Retro Funding seemed designed to change this, the message being: we need more impact, and we don’t care what you are or how you get there. Please come create demand for OP Stack blockspace however you see fit, and we’ll reward it.

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@wagmialexander

However, it is now being suggested that we should introduce tools that empower Badgeholders to systematically exclude some impact. Specifically, any that comes from projects who require any kind of permission to reuse so much as a single line of contract code.

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@wagmialexander

This is justified primarily in the fact that a commitment to "Open Source / Open Access" is one of the Collective's core values. Implicit to this is the idea that open systems can create more impact through the network effects of their reuse than closed ones.

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@wagmialexander

The issue is that whether or not a project requires permission for the reuse of a single solidity file doesn't actually tell us much about its relative openness or potential for positive network effects. It just risks (once again) over rewarding lower impact work.

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@wagmialexander

The relative open versus closed nature of a project cannot be distilled down to a single license in a single solidity repo. Tokenomics, value-accural, governance mechanisms, non-solidity code, product specs are all dimensions of openness left unconsidered and unrewarded here.

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