By “it’s easier to agree on what was useful than what will be useful.” Vitalik Buterin
What are public goods?
Examples of public goods include libraries, roads, open-source software (like ether.js).
Public goods are paid for by the community – funded thru taxes, for example.
Public goods benefit everyone using the ecosystem.
In the Optimism ecosystem, there is this idea of “retroactive public goods funding”
The goal of this initiative is to reward and incentivize people to build things that help out the rest of the community.
If people did something positive, community can vote to allocate money / rewards for building useful things.
As Bodo said on the recent Twitter space, public goods solve the market inequality of positive externalities.
Ways to Fund Public Goods
Gitcoin
Explore grants that Gitcoin has funded here.
- VitaDAO has helped raise and contribute to longevity research.
- Daily Gwei Podcast by Anthony Sassano helps educate people on Ethereum and blockchain, and more.
Optimism
Optimism Governance Fund Phase 0 Proposals: learn more here
Vitalik put together a review of Optimism’s first round of public goods funding here, including over $51,000 towards ethers.js library.
Nominate a project for funding here.
Aave Grants
https://aavegrants.org/what-is-this-program
Voting – a framework to decide which Public Goods to vote for
In the OptiPunks Discord, Bodo and Platocrat discussed a way that voters can use to decide which public goods to vote for:
who needs money * how much of a public good a project was
Based on the framework above, the two factors that individuals should consider when voting are need as well as public value generated by the project.
For example, if a project that has been well-funded via venture capitalis flushed with capital, it doesn’t need to receive funding as much, so users should be less apt to vote for this project.
NFT Projects on Optimism help fund public goods
OptiPunks
Original NFT on optimism. 100% of mint went to public goods funding. 50% of secondary went to public goods. Royalties on secondary is 2.5%
The OptiPunks community voted to decide which project funds would go towards.
Voting for public goods went live on March 25.
Optimistic Apes
Another project available on Quixotic… Sounded like a lot of us on the call minted or purchased some. The artist is still a mystery!
Circular art
Generative art platform designed to fund public goods. The first collection, called “Octavas”, generated 24 ETH to fund public goods.
An overview of the Circular Arts grants, which uses Snapshot to enable the community to vote on which projects should receive funding.
Results of the Octavas project funds were covered on their Twitter, see below.
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