Optimism, an Ethereum layer 2 scaling network, has earmarked $3.3 billion worth of Optimism (OP) tokens to support its community and finance projects or individuals deemed significant contributors to the blockchain ecosystem.
The Optimism Collective, responsible for the chain's governance and community, announced on March 26 that a portion of the 850 million OP tokens will be distributed over four rounds starting in May and continuing until 2024.
Bobby Dresser, the COO of the Optimism Foundation, revealed that 850 million OP tokens, constituting 20% of the initial OP token supply, have been allocated for funding purposes. In the previous three rounds, 40 million OP tokens, valued at approximately $158 million, have already been allocated.
The fourth round of Optimism's Retroactive Public Goods Financing (RPGF), also known as retroactive financing, will be initiated by on-chain builders. This process involves community voting to determine which projects demonstrating value will receive tokens.
Rounds five through seven will focus on rewarding contributors involved in infrastructure, governance, and development tools, aiming to incentivize efforts to enhance optimism across the board. The final round is scheduled to conclude in mid-November.
Public goods in the cryptocurrency realm refer to services or contributions provided to the blockchain or crypto community free of charge. Retro funds serve to reward such contributors, who often struggle to secure funding through conventional means like venture capital due to the non-profitable nature of their contributions.
During the most recent funding round in January, a portion of the 30 million OP tokens available were granted to various recipients, including data aggregators like DefiLlama and L2Beat, token approval revocation tool Revoke.cash, and blockchain analyst ZachXBT, among numerous others.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin expressed his admiration for Optimism's commitment to funding public goods in a post following the funding round, stating that he was "very impressed" and hoped to witness more projects adopting quadratic financing (QF) and RPGF rounds in the future.
