Optimism Unveils $40M Public Goods Funding Round

Optimism, Ethereum’s second-largest Layer 2 network with $2.2B in value locked, has announced a third “RetroPGF” round to reward ecosystem contributors for their past contributions to the network.

Starting in September, the program will distribute 30M OP tokens to builders, creators, and educators. OP is up nearly 20% today but remains down 15% over the past month.

Optimism’s RetroPGF rounds offer an alternative to venture capital funding. Developers that ship code benefiting the Optimism ecosystem can receive financial remuneration later, encouraging open repos and a collaborative development environment.

“RetroPGF makes it easier to focus on providing maximal value without worrying as much about monetization,” said 0xKofi, a web3 developer.

Revoke Cash, a tool helping users manage their wallet permissions, added that Optimism’s RetroPGF enabled them to begin working on public goods without needing to secure funding from investors first.

Retroactive Funding

Optimism said it distributed funding to hundreds of developers contributing public goods to the Optimism ecosystem in its first two RetroPGF rounds. The second round awarded grants to 195 projects and individuals.

The third RetroPGF round aims to deliver several improvements over previous campaigns, including a revamped user interface for voting and opening grant nominations to the community.

“This means, between now and then, you should build stuff,” the announcement said.

Nominees fall under one of four categories, including providing contributions to the OP Stack, Optimism’s governance systems or ecosystem, network adoption, or improving the end-user experience.

Bedrock

The grants program comes two weeks after Optimism launched its long-awaited Bedrock upgrade.

OP Labs told The Defiant that most users are paying 55% less for transaction fees following the upgrade, while contract deployments are 33% cheaper. “We’ve also seen an influx of projects, including Sound.xyz, Manifold, and Axelar announce their OP Mainnet deployments,” OP Labs said.

Alongside performance upgrades, Bedrock included the open-sourcing of the OP Stack, the core tech stack underpinning Optimism. The OP Stack is modular, meaning devs are free to modify the code and swap out fraud of validity proofs.

Future upgrades will allow OP Stack-based networks to merge into a symbiotic “Superchain.”