On Speculation and Optimism's Recent $100m Retroactive Public Goods Grants
Also: Private Passenger Rail in the USA, Aphantasia, and Amapiano
While the mainstream news in the crypto space this week was the approval US Bitcoin spot ETFs, another more interesting thing happened. In a difficult time where a lot of tech businesses are laying off workers, Optimism’s 3rd Retroactive Public Goods Funding Round (RetroPGF) funded 501 projects to a tune of over ~$100m dollars (30m $OP). Optimism, a scaling solution for Ethereum, is increasingly setting the tone for how we might envision the funding of work and the ecosystems around it without resorting to traditional business models or current expectations on how to monetize open source work.
In the previous two rounds, 10m OP and $1m was rewarded.
The idea behind retroactive funding is simple: reward that which was useful instead of predicting what will be successful. In Optimism (for now), it does this by allocating a portion of its initial token supply to these “funding rounds”. What projects should receive how much is dictated by a simple equation: “impact = profit”. Thus, for now, VC-funded projects are also allowed (which is/was contentious) as long as it trends towards positive impact for the Optimism ecosystem. The sustainability of this system is dependent on some of these projects building on the network in order to generate future revenue in fees for the protocol. And then the fly-wheel can hopefully continue.
What’s interesting is that although it’s focused on Optimism as a technology, it also acknowledges the wider community that makes it all work. With round 3, you had a wide variety of projects being funded. From pop-up cities (Zuzalu), to the most-used open source software in the ecosystem, to influencers that spread the message. Full list here.
The governance of this process is done by one of the two “governing” houses of Optimism: The Citizen’s House vs the Token House. They try to balance the two incentives: economic and short-term (tokens) vs long-term and human-focused (badgeholders).
While these kinds of governance experiments in the blockchain space isn’t new (it’s evolved substantially since TheDAO in 2016), what I feel it gets right is precisely the necessary introduction of a bicameral house and a focus on retroactive funding.
The bicameral house mediates the concerns of allocating resources effectively and trying to resist capture. I’ve always been an advocate of experimenting with additional houses of governance. For example, my favourite is still the principle of introducing a section of legislature that’s based on sortition. It’s size is determined by the disillusionment of the existing political parties.
Retroactive funding works well because it divorces the goal of a project from how it’s done. Most work today, for it to be sustainable, need to fit into an existing mode of capitalism/distribution to be successful. Wanting to tell stories, for example, can take the forms of: self-publishing, trad funding, do a kickstarter, sell merch, paywalls, physical, digital, film, comics, books, etc. But with retroactive funding, how it’s done is then up to the choice of the creator, not what’s necessary to get it made in the first place. In addition, when retroactive funding is predicated on verifiably stored actions in ledgers, the possibilities are even more grand as *any future* can reward *any past*.
As I wrote previously:
This has interesting implications, especially when there’s compounding network effects: the more it happens, the more it will happen. The longer it goes, the more it will happen and the more opportunity there will be to reward past transactions. There’s a continuous reward system that incentivises more and more users to interact with protocols, not for a known speculative reward, but a hypothetical reward. It’s not akin to traditional speculation (buy something and hope it goes up), but rather a way to bet on any unknown futures. All becomes possible and to receive these future, hypothetical rewards, the sooner you interact, the better. The more traces you immutably record and leave behind, the more likely it could be that you could be rewarded.
Along with the initial supply of tokens, continued revenue can come from any source of goods and services provided in a network. It’s a voluntary tax system where the transparency of it is visible to all participants involved (as is the case with a blockchain). An example of such a variation is Zora’s network where users voluntarily pay fees to the network and its curators. In 2023, it earned around ~$1.9m of these rewards (above and beyond the actual price of the works being supported by fans).
What about a system that focuses on climate change, local communities worldwide, or just literally stands up a deliberative house that through sortition represents a global citizens assembly?
While these systems always comes with caveats and expectations of failure, the fact that innovation in economics and social systems continue unabated is promising. Lessons are being learned along the way.
It could fail in bootstrapping revenue before the 20% allocation is given out. Currently, it’s far from where it needs to be.
I still don’t know what happens to protocol revenue when the sequencer is decentralized?
The governance experiment (the bicameral house) could still become captured and ineffectively allocate its resources.
…and many other modes of failure.
But, the fact that teams are receiving enough money to keep supporting themselves for producing open source work for another year or two, that’s exciting. It’s all kind of slowly but surely… *working* as scale continues to grow.
Blockchains always represented a sandbox for imagining how we might organise in the 21st century and Optimism is currently a shining beacon in this domain. As with most innovation like this, the first generation of attempts are often skeuomorphic, made to mimic aspects from the old world until the medium’s native benefits changes how we do it. In Optimism, it’s explicitly aiming for a house of the economy and a house of the people/users.
I’ve often oscillated on the point of speculation in building out these systems. Some days, it is a superpower. A necessary component that sometimes draws in scrupulous actors, but still manages to build an economy that’s now worth almost $2T in 15 years. On some days, it feels vile and sinister. That only a handful of people are actually smart enough to not lose money in a system where speculation is necessary.
But, over time, the undeniable power of speculation in a crypto network is that it’s a multi-party contract about the future. If a traditional legal contract attempts to ensure that it’s costly to defect within the bounds of an agreement, then a crypto network is a contract that makes it beneficial to behave collectively into the future. Underneath it all is a ledger that reduces the cost to coordinate over some domains. Even when they fail, it leaves behind coral reefs of open source cryptography, new research in economics, and the friends we made along the way.
As time goes on it drastically feels like the world needs different forms of coordination, and some day I hope we arrive there with something new like Optimism as one part of a larger set of change.
Bonus Content!
Hey friends. I’ve mostly spent time coding and making more art this week. If you followed me on socials you would’ve seen the art I made. I’m refraining of sharing it here until the sister project is also done. :)
I’ve been craving snow too. Living on the US East Coast when I grew up in sunny South Africa, you wish that the dark winters will bring some reprieve in the form of snow. Holding out for it down here in DC!
Private Passenger Rail in the US: Brightline
I’ve often been fascinated how countries can and can’t do things that other countries can do easily for various reasons. The lack of high speed rail in the US is a prime example. It’s thus no surprise that the recent shining example of passenger rail is a *private rail company. I’ve enjoyed reading up on how it works and how they did it.
This one from B1M:
And this one from Wendover Productions:
The Wendover Productions video is interesting as it talks about something I didn’t know that existed in the US: Tax-Free Private Activity Bonds. If private bond issuance is deemed to be in public interest, it can be made tax free. Pretty awesome.
2024 Elections
2024 will be the biggest electoral year in human history, with an estimated 49% of humanity going to the polls. I’m following quite a few. This video gives some good breakdowns on lesser known elections.
The World’s Biggest Office
I didn’t know that more than 80% of the world’s diamonds are cut and polished in Surat. And they built the biggest office in the world. Pretty amazing.
The New York Times + OpenAI Lawsuit
TechnoLlama gives his take on the NYT + OpenAI lawsuit.
The end result is that this case is likely to be decided separately based on the inputs and the outputs. It’s possible that the inputs may be deemed fair use (following precedents like Google Books), while the outputs could be considered infringing. Alternatively, the inputs could be found infringing, but the outputs might be seen as non-infringing, especially if they are mostly the result of very specific prompts that the public cannot use. It’s also possible that everything could be ruled as infringing, or all as fair use. Anyone claiming to know the exact outcome is likely overconfident.
It’s definitely going to be interesting to follow. I hope it’s ultimately not just a negotiating tactic and that we get actual court outcomes.
An interesting factor I hadn’t considered was the ‘secondary uses’ argument.
This case may bring to the forefront a legal argument already evident in the Getty Images suit in England: the non-infringing uses theory. This draws from the Sony doctrine in the US and the Amstrad case in the UK, suggesting that if a technology has substantial non-infringing uses, it cannot be deemed as secondary infringement, even if it can be used for that purpose (think DVD recorders). This could be a compelling argument, especially for secondary liability claims.
Aphantasia & Experience.Computer
Experience.Computer is a great new show from Jay Springett. After he discovered he had aphantasia (inability to form images in your mind’s eye), he wanted to interview other creators about how they experience reality and the creative process. It’s fun to listen along and think about how oneself experiences the world around us. We’re more unique in that way than we imagine. For example, I realised that I have quite a vivid imagination when reading. I see almost everything in quite vivid detail as I read. I’m re-reading a book I read in high school and I realised that almost all of what I imagined about it stayed the same. As if the world objectively exists and I just came back to it.
Davido - Unavailable ft. Musa Keys
I’ve been delving deeper into recent amapiano and afrobeats and Davido’s amapiano hit Unavailable has been on constant repeat this week. The way the log drum is used in amapiano with its intricate rhythms is reminiscent of progressive music but in the form danceable pop/house/lounge music. Once the song gets under your skin, the unique drums and sub-bass of each amapiano becomes a rail of music to follow along with. It’s super fun. I’m also just generally excited about culture coming out from Africa. It’s young, it’s optimistic, and a part of a culture that believes the best of the world is still in front of us. As
rightly says, the next few decades is all about Africa. Afrofuturism is just futurism after all.Have a great sunset friends! See you next week!
Simon