Optimism, the Ethereum layer 2 network, is distributing 850 million OP tokens valued at approximately $3 billion to its builders, as revealed in a recent announcement on X. These tokens, representing 20% of Optimism’s initial total supply, will be dispersed across four funding rounds scheduled throughout 2024.
Today we’re introducing a new era of clarity for Retro Funding!
The Collective has allocated a total of 850M OP to incentivize impactful work across the @Optimism Collective and the Superchain. pic.twitter.com/DfMeLLogQi
— Optimism (@Optimism) March 26, 2024
The first round will target on-chain builders to incentivise the adoption of Optimism. Subsequent rounds will focus on OP Stack, Governance, and Dev Tooling, rewarding contributions to infrastructure, governance, and development tools. The final round is slated in mid-November of this year.
Optimism’s funding initiative aims to empower individuals and projects dedicated to improving the protocol’s infrastructure, supporting both individual developers and key projects crucial to Optimism’s progress.
This funding strategy is part of the Retroactive Public Goods Funding (RPGF) program, one of the most significant in the crypto space, designed to reward those who have made meaningful contributions to Optimism across various domains, including OP Stack, Administration, Ecosystem, and User Experience and Adoption.
In the recent funding round in January 2024, Optimism distributed a portion of its 30 million OP tokens to hundreds of developers, including notable data aggregators like DeFiLlama and Covalent.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has praised Optimism’s commitment to community-driven product funding, expressing anticipation for more projects to adopt Quadratic Funding (QF) and RPGF in the future:
“Really impressed to see their ongoing commitment to funding public goods, helping devs and others contribute to Ethereum even if they lack a business model.
Hope to see more projects doing QF and RPGF rounds in the future!”