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The US$50 million funding plan was accused of "unfair distribution", and OP's third round of RPGF attracted doubts from the developer community

Sharon

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"Are projects with a certain profit model considered public welfare projects?"

Table of Contents:

· Optimism's third round of RetroPGF funding exceeds $50 million

· Developer community: Large projects are consuming funds that should belong to small projects

· zachXBT: Projects ranked high in voting do not necessarily have public welfare attributes

Recently, the third round of RetroPGF initiated by Optimism has caused increasing controversy in the developer community. The core of the controversy is that many projects that should have sufficient funds are occupying the space that small projects in urgent need of funds should have in the participating projects.

If we use a vivid metaphor to illustrate the opinions of developers, it would be "the wealthy are competing with the truly impoverished for poverty scholarships."

On December 4th, Nick Johnson, the founder of Ethereum Web3 domain leader ENS (@nicksdjohnson), pointed out in a social media post: "I believe that projects funded by venture capital should not be eligible for RPGF funding. Once you accept venture capital and imply an expectation of financial return, you are no longer a public good."

Optimism Third Round RetroPGF Funding Exceeds $50 Million

RetroPGF is the "Retrospective Public Goods Funding" program of Optimism, which aims to provide financial support to some public welfare projects.

November 7th, Optimism officially announced on the X platform that the third round of RetroPGF public product funding (RetroPGF) voting has officially begun and will end on December 7th. 643 contributors in the Optimism ecosystem will be allocated 30 million OP tokens (valued at over $53 million at the current price of $1.771 per OP). The results and token distribution will be announced in early January 2024.

Developer Community: Large projects are consuming funds that should belong to small projects

Regarding the allocation of RPGF in this round, an increasing number of ecological participants have expressed dissatisfaction.

During this time, Nick also stated that large-scale projects that are already self-sustaining should not apply for grants that would have a greater impact on supporting smaller and newer projects. ENS is definitely eligible to participate in RPGF, but should definitely not apply.

Rotkiapp founder Lefteris Karapetsas (@LefterisJP) also stated that some venture capital-funded projects have created truly open-source and publicly available products that help them with marketing, but this does not change the fact that they should not play the same game as small projects that rely on this funding to survive.

Because this is purely greed, I believe it is evil, as they intentionally use their marketing and brand awareness to dominate the financing round and not let funds flow to small players.

The community builder @feristahigelse also questioned: "Does a project with a certain profit model and belonging to a company (causing market competition) belong to public goods?"

zachXBT: The projects ranked high in the voting do not necessarily have public welfare attributes

Famous on-chain detective ZachXBT previously revealed some controversial situations during the third round of RetroPGF in the Optimism ecosystem.

ZachXBT stated that many of the top-ranked projects in the current RetroPGF governance vote are not truly public welfare projects. Some of these projects have either received large amounts of VC financing or have not yet been open-sourced. This may result in truly public welfare projects such as OtterScan, BlockScout, Revoke Cash, Defillama, and Rotki not receiving the support they deserve.

ZachXBT also compiled a list of the top 100 voted projects and identified which ones have received VC investments. It was found that some of these projects have received funding of tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars, and some have already issued tokens:

Gelato (raised $11 million in funding and has issued coins);

Rainbow (raised $18 million in funding);

ImmunFi (raised over $24 million in funding);

Mirror (raised over 10 million US dollars in funding);

Zora (raised over $50 million in funding);

Synthetix (a nine-figure treasury with issued tokens);

Hop (raised $2 million in funding and has issued coins);

Tenderly (raised $40 million in funding);

Snapshot (raised over 4 million US dollars in funding);

OpenZeppelin (raised $23 million through Forta financing);

Socket (raised $5.5 million in funding);

Alchemy (raised $545 million in funding);