Optimism, the Ethereum layer-2 scaling network, has set aside $3.3 billion worth of its Optimism (OP) token to be granted to important contributors in the blockchain’s ecosystem. The Optimism Collective, the chain’s governance and community arm, announced that 850 million OP tokens will be distributed over four rounds starting in May and continuing until 2024. Bobby Dresser, the Chief Operating Officer of the Optimism Foundation, stated that 20% of the initial OP token supply, or 850 million OP tokens, has been allocated for funding. So far, 40 million OP tokens have already been distributed in three previous rounds. The fourth round will focus on retroactive public goods funding (RPGF), where the community votes on which projects receive tokens based on their value. Rounds five to seven will reward infrastructure, governance, and development tooling contributors, making anyone who contributes to improving Optimism eligible for the funds. The final round will conclude in mid-November. Retro funding is a funding source for service projects or individuals who contribute to the blockchain or crypto community for free and are typically unable to raise capital from other means. In the previous round, data aggregators DefiLlama and L2Beat, token approval revoking tool Revoke.cash, and blockchain investigator ZachXBT were among the recipients of the 30 million OP tokens. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin expressed his admiration for Optimism’s commitment to public goods funding and hopes to see more projects adopt quadratic funding (QF) and RPGF rounds in the future.
$3B allocated by Optimism to support grants for its blockchain developers