Retroactive Public Goods Funding
The official Optimism Medium published "Retroactive Public Goods Funding", in which Vitalik Buterin detailed the mechanism in "How the retroactive public goods funding DAO works". This is considered the official first publication. September 10, 2021
Vitalik Buterin and Karl Floersch discuss RPGF as "an idea we've been warming to since the beginning of the year" on the podcast. o3.icon
Vitalik Buterin advocates "Retroactive Public Goods Funding (RPGF)" as a new method of public goods funding that "creates value first, and rewards it later. The key insight is that "it is easier to look back and build consensus on what has already worked than to predict future usefulness. This mechanism has been implemented in the Optimism Collective and others, and billions of yen in funds have actually been allocated. 1. conception and basic principles
1-1. "After the fact" is easier to agree upon
Conventional grants are reviewed on a "should be useful in the future" planning basis, which carries a high risk of information asymmetry and overestimation.
RPGF is reviewed and rewarded after results are achieved, so actual impact can be used as a measure and agreement is easier to reach.
1-2. minimum configuration of the mechanism
Fund Pool: accumulates foundation and protocol profits, donations, etc.
Results Submission: Developers, researchers, etc. declare "past contributions".
Impact evaluation: Badge holders (judges) weight the evaluation by voting, QFs, etc.
Token/Cash Allocation: Rewards are allocated on a weighted basis.
Vitalik describes this as "simply setting up a well-funded oracle a judging body can create a public goods market." Vitalik recommends a hybrid of "layered QF and RPGF, seeding first with QF and then heavily rewarding with RPGF as results are achieved."
5. current issues and challenges
Scalability of evaluation: 500+ cases were reviewed in Round 3, but man-hours spiked.
Quantification of Impact: The results of open source contributions, education, basic research, etc. are diverse, and uniform evaluation is difficult.
We need a mechanism to evaluate things that can't be evaluated by a uniform standard of evaluation.nishio.icon
Popularity Risk: The risk that large allocations will be skewed toward projects with high visibility.
Sustainable funding sources: Optimism is funded by fee revenue, but financial resource design is a challenge for other chain communities. summary
Retroactive Public Goods Funding is Vitalik's proposal to streamline public goods support by "distributing funds after seeing results" and is being implemented on a large scale in RetroPGF in Optimism. Expansion of the evaluation regime and standardization of indicators are the next challenges, but in combination with QF and other incentive designs, it is becoming the key to raising the bar for public goods sustainability in the entire Web3 ecosystem. /emoji/twitter.icon . @optimismPBC and @VitalikButerin came up with the idea of "Retroactive Public Goods Funding" as a way to manage OSS in a sustainable way. Public Goods]" here is the concept of assets that have positive externalities due to the fact that their source code is publicly available. ---
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