Foundation Mission Request: Analysis of S6 Growth Grants [DATA]

[opjulian]

Foundation Mission Request - S6 Growth Grant Analysis

Proposed Foundation Mission Request: Analysis of S6 Growth Grants

S6 [Intent](https://gov.optimism.io/t/collective-intents-season-5/6883): Grow Application Developers on the Superchain

Proposal [Tier](https://gov.optimism.io/t/collective-trust-tiers/5877): Ember

Baseline grant amount: 10,000 OP

Should this Foundation Mission be fulfilled by one or multiple teams: One

OP Labs or Optimism Foundation Sponsor: Thomas (@thbialek)

Submit by: September 23rd

Selection by: October 21st

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How will this Foundation Mission Request help accomplish the above Intent?

Growth grants are an essential building block of ecosystem development in the Collective, empowering projects to supercharge their growth campaigns, bootstrap impactful initiatives, and branch out into new opportunities. The proposed Foundation Mission Request for analyzing the performance of growth grants in Season 6 contributes to the Collective’s Intent #3 by growing application developers in a much more resource-efficient manner.

1. Performance Evaluation: The retrospective analysis will assist the Foundation in fostering greater transparency in the evaluation of Season 6 growth grants by quantifying performance in a comparable, standardized, and publicly available fashion. Partnering with the community to progress toward a more data-informed performance evaluation framework for growth grants will provide valuable insights.
2. Impact Measurement: Instead of having to rely on subjective guesswork or a mishmash of incoherent metrics, the Grants Council will be in a position to assess grant performance based on measurable metrics that capture progress toward the Collective’s Intents. This kick-off analysis will act as a steppingstone to a more meritocratic and extensive impact measurement system that is capable of widening the the lens beyond its initial scope.
3. Resource Efficiency: A metrics-driven approach for calculating impact and measuring performance will separate signal from noise in the myriad of programs that have been buttressed by growth grants in Season 6. As a result, this will allow the Collective to unearth insights about how effectively S6 growth grants have been distributed among applicants while streamlining the grant allocation process in the future, ultimately equipping the Grants Council with better tools to identify high-impact projects.

Taken together, the three positive externalities outlined above will make the previously rather vague concepts of “impact” and “performance” in the context of growth grants more tangible. This will promote a much more deliberate performance assessment process for S6 grants — one that is geared toward harnessing the power of growth grants to grow application developers on the Superchain by standardizing their performance assessment.

What is required to execute this Foundation Mission Request?

Problem Statement

Due to the enormous wealth of talented builders working on important problems facing the Collective, a plethora of growth grants has been awarded to numerous initiatives with the goal of rallying the community to move the needle on our Intents.

However, despite the abundance of growth grants given to builders, there has been a notable scarcity of analyses measuring their effectiveness. Consequently, we are currently in the dark about how individual growth grants have performed, which growth grants have fared better than others, and which verticals have been the main beneficiaries of this resource stream.

In the past, the Collective has embarked on various isolated endeavors to study the performance of growth grants, resulting in fragmented deep dives devoid of a cohesive and scalable system. Thus, the absence of standardization has been the Achilles heel of these scattered efforts.

Against this backdrop, the desired outcome of this Mission Request is a detailed, metrics-driven assessment of all growth grants issued in Season 6.

Suggested Solution

In the quest for a systematic performance analysis of growth grants, multiple approaches have emerged over time. In this vein, applicants are free to synthesize and draw inspiration from previous attempts at applying a methodical approach to measuring the performance of growth grants, such as [this assessment](https://gov.optimism.io/t/may-2023-governance-call-op-rewards-analytics-update/5974) carried out by the data team at OP Labs.

In general, there are always tradeoffs between standardization and customization when conceiving a performance measurement system that takes many variables, such as industry vertical, incentivization period, and type of program, into consideration, but the goal is to strike a healthy balance between these two factors.

Although the scope of this Mission Request is limited to growth grants in Season 6, the analysis should already be designed with long-term scalability and a broader scope in mind. The success of this Mission Request will depend on how well it helps us answer the fundamental questions sketched out below.

Questions the analysis should try to answer:

• Allocation Patterns: How (un)evenly have growth grants been allocated across projects, verticals, and types of incentive programs in Season 6? Where have been our blind spots in terms of areas we have under-allocated to in Season 6?
• Utilization: What have been the most common patterns in terms of scope and purpose of the tokens deployed by the grantees?
• Success Metrics: Is it possible to establish baseline values for the success metrics to benchmark against in future Seasons? Can we identify any notable differences for these metrics between grants, projects, and verticals?
• Impact: How much impact has been generated by each growth grant? Can we observe a significant uplift in key metrics during the incentivization period compared to a control group?
• Scalability: Can we design the analysis to be easily replicable for future Seasons? How can we structure the analysis be to be highly composable and to easily facilitate additional follow-up analyses?
• Normalization: How can we normalize growth grant performance by the amount of OP tokens received and the length of the incentivization period? How can we make this normalized view comparable across projects and verticals?
• Causality: Can we infer a causal relationship between the executed growth grants and changes in success metrics from this analysis?

Definition of Done

• Analysis: The analysis should be based on the Foundation’s [suggested success metrics](https://gov.optimism.io/t/season-6-suggested-mission-requests/8107) and focus on all growth grants in Season 6. The findings of the analysis should be presented in a short written report that highlights the most important learnings.
• Dashboard: The analyzed success metrics should be made publicly available in the form of a Dune dashboard to showcase the results in a transparent manner.

What milestones will help the Collective track progress towards completion of this Foundation Mission (RFP)?

1. Specification: The grantee will specify and describe the methodology for the analysis in a structured document, detailing a step-by-step guide for carrying out the analysis.
2. Feedback Session: The Foundation will set up a dedicated feedback session to discuss the proposed methodology and will approve the proposal.
3. Implementation: The grantee will execute the agreed upon analysis. The deliverables should be captured in a written report, a Dune dashboard, and public GitHub repositories (if applicable). Overall, the results of the analysis should be easily digestible and actionable in order to pave the way for the Grants Council to incorporate gained insights into its performance evaluation process for growth grants.

How should Badgeholders measure impact upon completion of this Mission (RFP)?

• Ideally, this analysis should get adopted by the Grants Council in Season 6 and form a crucial cornerstone of the success evaluation process for growth grants in future Seasons.
• Owing to the built-in modularity and the general-purpose nature of the analysis, other OP Chains should adopt this framework for their own growth grant programs, driving more consistency across grant programs in the Superchain.
• The grantee’s work should function as a tool for facilitating a more effective grant allocation process that ultimately should lead to the selection of more impactful growth grants in future Seasons.

Application Instructions

To apply for this Foundation Mission, please complete the form in the expandable section below and leave your response as a comment on this issue thread. Submissions will be open until [insert submit by date], at which time the Foundation will review all submissions and select [inset number of team eligible for selection] individual/team to complete the work defined here.

Application Instructions

To apply for this Foundation Mission, please complete the form in the expandable section below and leave your response as a comment on this issue thread. Submissions will be open until August 16th, at which time the Foundation will review all submissions and select 1 individual/team to complete the work defined here.

Submission Form

Copy the entire application below and leave a comment on this issue with your answers completed. A representative from the Optimism Foundation may reach out using the contact info provided to request more information as necessary.

Foundation Mission Application

Submission form

Please verify that you meet the qualifications for submitting at the above [Tier](https://gov.optimism.io/t/collective-trust-tiers/5877/2)

• Project Lead: Please specify the best point of contact for your team
• Contact info:
• L2 recipient address:

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What makes your Team best-suited to execute this Mission?

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Please describe your proposed solution based on the above Solution Criteria (if applicable):

• [...]
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Please outline your step-by-step plan to execute this Mission, including expected deadlines to complete each peice of work:

• [...]
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Please define the [critical milestone(s)](https://gov.optimism.io/t/grant-policies/5833) that should be used to determine whether you’ve executed on this proposal:

• [...]
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Please list any additional support your team would require to execute this mission (financial, technical, etc.):

• [...]
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Grants are awarded in OP, locked for one year.

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Please check the following to make sure you understand the terms of the Optimism Foundation RFP program:

• I understand my grant for completing this RFP will be locked for one year from the date of proposal acceptance.
• I understand that I will be required to provide additional KYC information to the Optimism Foundation to receive this grant
• I understand my locked grant may be clawed back for failure to execute on critical milestones, as outlined in the [Operating Manual](https://github.com/ethereum-optimism/OPerating-manual/blob/main/manual.md#valid-proposal-types)
• I confirm that I have read and understand the [grant policies](https://gov.optimism.io/t/token-house-grant-policies/5833)
• I understand that I will be expected to following the public grant reporting requirements outlined [here](https://gov.optimism.io/t/suggested-public-reporting-requirements-for-grantees/4176)

[chain-l]

Hi,

Would the execution of this Mission Request get delayed as S6 ends in December and many growth grant recipient of S6 may start their incentive rollout later?
Why not have this analysis for S5 growth grant recipients as we do not have any study on them and those are completed as well? Just a thought.

Thanks for being active over here.

[opjulian]

@thbialek ^^

[thbialek]

Hey @chain-l,

Thanks for your great questions! Yes, the execution phase of this Mission Request would not start until after the end of S6. We wanted to give the grantee enough lead time to think about how they want to structure and design the analysis, which is why we already published it now.

Regarding your second question, we intentionally decided to focus on growth grants in S6, because additional initiatives, which function synergistically with this Mission Request, were also kicked off in S6, making the results of this analysis much more insightful.

Please let me know if there are any other questions!

[Tim00x]

Hi @thbialek, Hi @opjulian in this issue it is stated that application for this closes 16th of August, but was opened not earlier than that, does this mean I can still apply for this?

[opjulian]

@Etimfon007 thanks for your question! the application will close on September 23

[Marcos-Stablelab]

Hi @opjulian @thbialek

Find below our Application Form to fulfill this mission. Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns. Thanks!

Forse's Application Form

Forse's Application Form

• Project Lead: Marcos Miranda
• Contact info: [email protected]
• L2 recipient address: 0x9c489E4efba90A67299C1097a8628e233C33BB7B

What makes your Team best-suited to execute this Mission?

Forse by StableLab is a data and intelligence platform for DAOs to analyze the impact of governance decisions on protocol growth, key performance metrics, and governance operations. StableLab is the leading provider of governance products and solutions for decentralized protocols. We work with various projects, from the ones just starting their journey to decentralization to the most prominent DeFi protocols.

StableLab has a rich history with Optimism, as a delegate, grants council member, badgeholder (Bobby and Mel), and Anti-Capture Commission member. We’re deeply familiar with the protocols governance and strategic outlook. StableLab has played its part in making the Optimism vision a reality and wants to expand its contribution through data-driven insights and impact analysis.

By providing an in-depth analysis of S5 and S6 Growth Grants, Forse can help Optimism allocate funds to the most effective strategies based on program-specific KPIs. This approach helps foster efficient growth within the Optimism ecosystem.

Please describe your proposed solution based on the above Solution Criteria (if applicable):

Provided we get the necessary data, Forse can make interactive public dashboards, Forse Terminals, tailored to the analysis of S5 and S6 Growth Grants. The Optimism community will obtain interactive analytical components to understand and assess the performance and impact of these grant programs. Forse Terminals will shed light onto the following topics:

• Whether the allocated OP tokens by the grantees were immediately sold or not (for S5 and S6 Growth Grants).
• On-chain impact of Growth Grants on Total Transactions, Total Value Locked, Total Value Transacted, Unique Users, and Daily New Users on Optimism (for S5 Growth Grants only).
• Whether the selected Growth Grants had impacted the behavior of the final recipients of the distributed incentives when concerning user segmentation and on-chain activity patterns (for S5 and partially for S6 Growth Grants).

Our proposed solution covers both S5 and S6 Growth Grants as having only S6 Growth Grants in the dataset would limit Forse’s ability to produce on-chain impact measurements. By including S5 in the analysis, we ensure that there’s enough on-chain data to be able to produce such analysis while providing operational metrics and insights.

It also includes the development of any custom integrations and connectors to data sources (on-chain and off-chain) required to conduct the analysis, as well as ongoing support and maintenance for a term of 3 months. After this period, the terminal will remain live, but will not be further improved on.

Please outline your step-by-step plan to execute this Mission, including expected deadlines to complete each piece of work:

Phase 1: Data Gathering

• Identification of required Data Sources and Securing Access
• Data Validation and Initial Data Collection

Expected deadline: end of Week 2 after project kickoff

Phase 2: Data Analysis and Wireframing of Terminal

• Data Analysis
• Designing and Wireframing of Forse Terminal
• Definition of Front-End Specifications

Expected deadline: End of Week 4 after project kickoff

Phase 3: Development of Analysis Endpoints and Initial UI Integration

• Development of Backend Infrastructure to support Terminal operations
• Development of Frontend and integration with Backend

Expected deadline: End of Week 7 after project kickoff

Phase 4: Polishing, Testing, and Launch of Public Forse Terminal

• Final Testing and QA
• Launch

Expected deadline: End of Week 8 after project kickoff

Please define the critical milestone(s) should be used to determine whether you’ve executed on this proposal:

Milestone 1: Completion of Data Gathering and Validation

For milestone 1, we will compose a forum post containing a detail of the types of data secured, how it will be used, and a high-level overview of the data pipeline.

• Deliverable: Forum post detailing data sources and validation process.
• Due: End of Week 2 after project kickoff

Milestone 2: Completion of Terminal wireframe and design mockups

For Milestone 2, we will be providing a Figma public link to the Forse Terminal wireframes and design mockups.

• Deliverable: Public Figma link to wireframes and design mockups of Forse Terminal.
• Due: End of Week 4 after project kickoff

Milestone 3: Completion of Backend Development and Front-End Integration

For Milestone 3, we will be providing access to a demo/PoC of the Forse Terminal, so it can be reviewed by Optimism stakeholders, allowing interaction with a preliminary version of the Terminal.

• Deliverable: A publicly accessible demo via Vercel, shared with the Optimism community.
• Due: End of Week 7 after project kickoff

Milestone 4: Successful Public Launch of Forse Terminal

As a final Milestone, we will fully launch the Forse Terminal for S6 Growth Grants, which will be publicly accessible.

• Deliverable: Link to Forse Terminal in production.
• Due: End of Week 8 after project kickoff

Please list any additional support your team would require to execute this mission (financial, technical, etc.):

In order to boost the insight generation capabilities of our modules and increase the value that can be gained from the analyses, our team would need access to:

• Relevant off-chain information referred to the execution of S5 and S6 Growth grants
• List of Grant Recipients and their on-chain activity
• Collaboration from grant recipients into product and other performance metrics (if available) to effectively assess the impact of the grants.

Please check the following to make sure you understand the terms of the Optimism Foundation RFP program:

• I understand my grant for completing this RFP will be locked for one year from the date of proposal acceptance.
• I understand that I will be required to provide additional KYC information to the Optimism Foundation to receive this grant
• I understand my locked grant may be clawed back for failure to execute on critical milestones, as outlined in the [Operating Manual](https://github.com/ethereum-optimism/OPerating-manual/blob/main/manual.md#valid-proposal-types)
• I confirm that I have read and understand the [grant policies](https://gov.optimism.io/t/token-house-grant-policies/5833)
• I understand that I will be expected to following the public grant reporting requirements outlined [here](https://gov.optimism.io/t/suggested-public-reporting-requirements-for-grantees/4176)

[Euphoria702]

Hey @opjulian @thbialek,

Below is our Application Form to execute this mission. Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns regarding our application. Thank you!

Euphoria and Team

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• Project Lead: Euphoria
• Contact info: Telegram (eupho7)
• L2 recipient address: 0xA2D590FEe197C0b614Fe7c3E10303327F38C0dc3

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Team Details -

@Euphoria702 is a management postgraduate from a Tier 1 institute, specializing in data and analysis, project management, and marketing. He excels in data visualization and analysis, leveraging his expertise to derive insightful conclusions from complex datasets. With a strong background in project management, Euphoria is adept at coordinating team efforts and ensuring seamless execution of research initiatives. Euphoria is an active member of Optimism and Arbitrum ecosystems and contributes actively in both ecosystems.

• Twitter Profile

@chain-l  - has 4 years of experience in the blockchain industry, Chain-L has developed and built various projects across multiple ecosystems. He deeply understands the underlying technologies and has worked extensively with Layer 2 solutions. He is proficient in evaluating and modifying economic metrics to assess complex blockchain governance structures. He enjoys contributing to the Collective in various capacities building experimental projects on applications layers or identifying the need and developing a dashboard for Season 5 Missions.

• Twitter Profile
• Dework Profile (20 tasks - numbaNERDs)

@ARDev097 - is skilled in data warehousing, ETL processes, and database management systems like MySQL and PostgreSQL. He is proficient in using blockchain data analysis tools like Dune Analytics, and creating interactive Dune Dashboards. He is proficient in quantitative analysis and integrating advanced metrics into data dashboards. He also has a strong background in analyzing the efficiency of governance mechanisms and economic models within blockchain networks.

• Twitter Profile
• Dework Profile (18 tasks - numbaNERDs)

Dhruvi - Gold medalist in Bachelor of Science in Information Technology and Master of Science in Data Science, Dhruvi specializes in data visualization and reporting. She is an expert in creating visualizations using tools like Tableau, Power BI, and Matplotlib. She excels in translating complex data into easy-to-understand dashboards and reports. She has strong skills in storytelling with data to drive business decisions and is knowledgeable in front-end development for creating custom visual analytics solutions. She is proficient in developing temporal visualizations to track changes and trends.

• LinkedIn Profile

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What makes your Team best-suited to execute this Mission?

Together, Euphoria, Chain-L, ARDev and Dhruvi form a well-rounded team with complementary skills essential for this mission.

Euphoria's expertise in data visualization and analysis will enable the team to derive insightful conclusions from complex datasets, ensuring a thorough evaluation of growth grants. His strong project management skills will facilitate effective coordination among team members and communication with the community and the council, leading to the seamless execution of the mission.

Together, Chain-L and ARDev have actively participated in the numbaNERDs community, demonstrating their capability to handle complex tasks effectively. Chain-L's extensive engagement with the Optimism Collective (343 days visited, ~5.5k posts read) provides us with essential insights into governance within decentralized organizations, which is crucial for this analysis. ARDev’s expertise will facilitate the collection and analysis of data needed to assess the performance of growth grants effectively. Meanwhile, Dhruvi’s skills in data visualization will ensure that our findings are presented clearly through a public dashboard.

Additionally, we have recently completed other foundation mission requests, such as the Badgeholder Onchain Analysis and Measuring the Concentration of Power in the Collective. This demonstrates our active contributions to the Optimism ecosystem and showcases our capability to tackle this mission. Here is the link to our Previous Work for the Optimism collective.

We are also currently working on Arbitrum's Long Term Incentive Pilot Program (LTIPP) Research Bounties, which involves a similar analysis for the protocols receiving grants under the LTIPP program. Our focus there includes conducting a comprehensive analysis of incentive program effectiveness and value generation, as well as examining the effects of growth incentives on non-recipient protocols. This experience further proves our ability to carry out similar research for the Season 6 growth grants in the Optimism Collective. Here is the link to our Previous Work for the Arbitrum Ecosystem.

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Please describe your proposed solution based on the above Solution Criteria (if applicable):

We propose to conduct a structured, data-driven analysis to evaluate the effectiveness of Season 6 Growth Grants. Our solution will provide the Grants Council and the Optimism community with comprehensive insights into how these grants have contributed to ecosystem growth and user engagement. The following key areas will be addressed in our analysis:

• Grant Allocation and Distribution Patterns: We will identify how grants were allocated across different projects, sectors, and verticals, ensuring a clear understanding of resource distribution within the Optimism ecosystem.
• Core Success Metrics Analysis: Our evaluation will focus on metrics such as Daily Active Users (DAU), Monthly Active Users (MAU), Total Value Locked (TVL), user retention rates, protocol fees, transaction volumes, and Layer 2 (L2) fees. This will enable us to measure the impact of grants on driving user engagement, liquidity, and overall protocol growth.
• Token Utilization and Deployment Strategies: We will examine how grantees utilized their OP tokens, identifying patterns in token deployment to assess whether they were effectively used to achieve the desired outcomes.
• Performance Impact Evaluation: We will compare pre-incentive and during-incentive metrics to assess the true impact of each grant on ecosystem activity. This comparison will help us identify significant improvements or trends resulting from the incentivization period.
• Identification of Under-Allocated Areas: Through our analysis, we will detect any underfunded areas or blind spots in grant distribution, providing recommendations for optimizing future grant allocation strategies.

Our approach ensures that projects with different grant sizes and durations are compared fairly, allowing for accurate insights into the effectiveness of the grants.

A detailed research report will be published on the Optimism forum, summarizing key findings from our analysis. In addition, we will create a public dashboard, leveraging tools like Dune Analytics, to present these results in a transparent and accessible manner. This dashboard will enable users to explore data across different sectors and use cases, gaining valuable insights into the performance of each grant.

Finally, we will open-source all datasets and methodologies on GitHub, ensuring transparency and encouraging further collaboration within the community. This will allow our evaluation approach to be adaptable and scalable for future grant seasons, supporting the long-term growth and sustainability of the Optimism ecosystem.

In conclusion, our proposal aims to deliver a comprehensive, metrics-driven evaluation that will help optimize resource allocation, enhance decision-making, and provide actionable insights for future grant distribution strategies.

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Please outline your step-by-step plan to execute this Mission, including expected deadlines to complete each peice of work:

Step 1: Data Collection

• Gather data on all growth grant protocols within the Optimism Collective.
• Collect recipient addresses for each grant and track their transaction history.
• Pull key success metrics from various sources such as Dune Analytics, blockchain explorers, and protocol-specific dashboards.

Step 2: Metric Identification

• Identify relevant success metrics such as DAU, MAU, TVL, user retention rates, protocol fees, and transaction volume.
• Normalize these metrics to account for differences in grant size, duration, and sector.

Step 3: Allocation & Utilization Analysis

• Analyze how grants have been allocated across different sectors, projects, and verticals.
• Identify any under-allocated areas or blind spots in grant distribution.
• Evaluate how grantees have utilized their tokens, looking at common patterns in token deployment.

Step 4: Evaluation of Key Metrics

• Analyze the collected data to evaluate the selected metrics (DAU, MAU, TVL, user retention rates, protocol fees, transaction volumes, and L2 fees).
• Assess the performance trends for each protocol and sector based on these metrics, ensuring accuracy and consistency in the analysis.

Step 5: Impact Evaluation

• Compare pre-incentive metrics with metrics observed during the grant period to assess performance impact.
• Conduct control-group comparisons to quantify the effectiveness of grants in driving ecosystem growth.
• Measure the uplift in key metrics such as user engagement and transaction activity during the incentivization period.

Step 6: Report Writing & Dashboard Development

• Compile findings into a detailed research report highlighting key insights from the analysis.
• Develop a public dashboard to visualize the performance of each grant.
• Ensure the dashboard allows users to explore and compare data across different sectors and projects.

Step 7: Publication & Open-Sourcing

• Publish the detailed report on the Optimism forum and make the Dune Analytics dashboard available to the community.
• Open-source all datasets, methodologies, and analysis tools on GitHub to promote transparency and enable further research.

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Please define the critical milestone(s) should be used to determine whether you’ve executed on this proposal:

Milestone 1: Initial Data Collection and Grant Recipient Identification

Description: Begin by gathering data for all growth grant recipient protocols within the Optimism Collective. This includes identifying the grantees, and recipient addresses, and tracking the allocation of OP tokens across various verticals.

Deliverable: A comprehensive dataset containing grant recipients, recipient addresses, and initial allocation data.

Timeline: End of  Week 1 after project commencement.

Milestone 2: Establishing Baseline Metrics for Evaluation

Description: Identify and develop key success metrics such as Daily Active Users (DAU), Monthly Active Users (MAU), Total Value Locked (TVL), user retention rates, protocol fees, transaction volume, and Layer 2 (L2) fees. Normalize these metrics to ensure comparability across different projects, grant sizes, and durations.

Deliverable: A dataset with established and normalized metrics for different grant sizes and sectors.

Timeline: End of Week 2 after project commencement.

Milestone 3: Analysis of Allocation and Utilization Patterns

Description: Conduct an in-depth analysis of how grants have been allocated across various sectors and verticals. Evaluate how recipients utilized the OP tokens and identify any underfunded areas or blind spots in Season 6 grant distribution.

Deliverable: A detailed summary of allocation and utilization patterns, including key findings and insights across different projects and sectors.

Timeline: End of  Week 4 after project commencement.

Milestone 4: Evaluation of Key Metrics

Description: Analyze the selected metrics (DAU, MAU, TVL, user retention rates, protocol fees, transaction volumes, and L2 fees) using the collected data. Assess the performance trends for each protocol and sector to ensure accurate and consistent analysis of the grant programs.

Deliverable: Updated visualizations and charts depicting the performance trends, uplifts, or significant changes in the analyzed metrics.

Timeline: End of Week 5 after project commencement.

Milestone 5: Performance Impact Assessment

Description: Compare pre-incentive and during-incentive performance using the evaluated metrics to determine the impact of each grant. Conduct control-group comparisons to measure the effectiveness of grants in driving ecosystem growth and analyze the significance of the observed results.

Deliverable: Interactive comparison dashboards showing the impact of incentives on key metrics.

Timeline: End of  Week 6 after project commencement.

Milestone 6: Development and Launch of Public Dashboard

Description: Build and launch a public dashboard to visualize the key metrics, performance data, and insights gained from the analysis. Ensure the dashboard offers user-friendly navigation and clear visualizations for grant performance across different projects and sectors.

Deliverable: A fully functional and publicly accessible dashboard that displays the analysis results.

Timeline: End of Week 7 after project commencement.

Milestone 7: Final Report, Open-Sourcing, and Community Publication

Description: Publish a detailed research report on Optimism forum summarizing all findings, along with the public dashboard. Open-source the dataset and methodologies on GitHub to ensure transparency and future scalability.

Deliverable: A final research report, a GitHub repository containing all data and methodologies, and the public dashboard made available to the community.

Timeline: End of Week 8 after project commencement.

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Please list any additional support your team would require to execute this mission (financial, technical, etc.):

To complete this mission effectively, we will need the following details:

1. A list of Season 6 Growth grant recipients.
2. Addresses of the grantees where they received the grants.
3. [IF POSSIBLE] Financial support for a subscription to Dune Analytics, which will provide access to on-chain activity data necessary for our analysis.

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Please check the following to make sure you understand the terms of the Optimism Foundation RFP program:

• I understand my grant for completing this RFP will be locked for one year from the date of proposal acceptance.
• I understand that I will be required to provide additional KYC information to the Optimism Foundation to receive this grant.
• I understand my locked grant may be clawed back for failure to execute on critical milestones, as outlined in the Operating Manual.
• I confirm that I have read and understand the grant policies.
• I understand that I will be expected to following the public grant reporting requirements outlined here.

[SHiNYA-MORi]

Hi @opjulian @thbialek , I have 4 questions.

1. You mean you'd likd us to make a KPI and / or metrics.
2. Is your value based on intent for Season 6?
3. What do you use our output after that?
4. Actually, what time should we submit our proposal by?

[ccerv1]

Open Source Observer Data Community

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Project Lead: Carl Cervone and Evan Meyer
Contact info: @ccerv1
L2 recipient address: 0xC5BFCe27e0e7A7d7731bC23B92eBC62B9Ed63B83

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What makes your Team best-suited to execute this Mission?

There are three reasons:

We are committed to building a thriving data community around the Superchain. This is not just an isolated grant for us; we are deeply invested in the long-term success of Optimism. Our team actively supports the Foundation and Citizens' House through Retro Funding initiatives, and we regularly publish insights and analyses on Optimism's grant effectiveness. Our focus and knowledge of Optimism is unique among data teams in the space. We aim to use this grant to expand the Superchain data community even further.

We have all the necessary data ready to go. We already index onchain and off-chain data for hundreds of projects building on the Superchain, and have metric models running in production for a variety of event types (contract interactions, funding activity, developer activity, social networking, etc). We regularly add new sources (for instance, we recently onboarded decoded Ethereum Attestation Service data) and work closely with other crypto data teams on efforts such as contract labeling and P2P trust graphs to enrich our existing datasets. See here for an overview of the public datasets we maintain.

Everything we build is fully open source and available to the community as a public good. Most crypto data companies keep their models and infrastructure stack private. We, on the other hand, maintain an entirely open pipeline for analysis and data science. We strongly believe that impact measurement should be fully transparent and verifiable. Even though it's harder, our choice to build everything in public brings about collaboration, trust, and accountability across the ecosystem. By openly sharing our methods and data, we invite the community to independently validate, extend, and innovate on top of our work, ensuring greater collective impact.

Please describe your proposed solution based on the above Solution Criteria (if applicable):

We will leverage our existing data infrastructure and expertise in tracking down project artifacts and linking these to onchain and off-chain event data. We also plan to use this as an opportunity to onboard fresh talent into the Superchain data community -- and have a new data scientist ready to work on this with us.

Here's a high-level plan of what our solution will consist of:

Enumerating S6 project artifacts into a "collection". The first step will be to review the S6 Growth Grants cohort and add/update projects in OSS Directory. Each project entry includes its deployers / contracts, GitHub repos, and other artifacts. We will integrate or reconcile any data already in the OP Atlas. Once projects' work artifacts have been mapped, our indexers will begin grabbing relevant event data from off- and onchain sources. Here is a flow chart of how this works. At the end of this stage, we will have a discrete "collection" of S6 projects ready for analysis.

Deriving impact metrics. We will model a suite of impact metrics for the S6 cohort, and analyze performance against these metrics both longitudinally (over an extended before/after time horizon) and relative to other grant cohorts / counterfactuals. As needed, we will normalize growth grant performance by factoring in variables such as the amount of OP tokens allocated and the duration of the incentivization period. This will allow us to create fair comparisons between projects and verticals. Many of the metrics included in the suggestions are already running in production on Open Source Observer, eg, gas fees, daily / monthly address activity, user retention, developer / deployer activity. That said, we will also implement more domain-specific impact metrics, eg, tracking DEX and lending efficiency, cross-chain liquidity, etc. Our data infrastructures makes it easy to test and iterate on impact metrics and get feedback from the community. We will work towards a goal of having 10-15 comparable metrics for the S6 cohort, which can be tracked longitudinally and relative to other cohorts.

Write-up and visualization of results. Once the modeling is complete, we will compile a report detailing our findings for the S6 cohort and recommendations for improving grant effectiveness. We will complement the report with an interactive dashboard (eg, on Dune, Hex, Streamlit, etc) and a repo of data science notebooks that allow community members to retrace and fork our work. Data will also be available about the S6 collection on our public website and dashboards (currently WIP). (The community can also access the metrics and underlying data from our free API and/or public data warehouse.) Finally, we will post an executive summary of our results on the governance forum for feedback and discussion.

Please outline your step-by-step plan to execute this Mission, including expected deadlines to complete each piece of work:

We are budgeting a total of 12 weeks for the work. The work will be carried out by Evan Meyer, a data scientist from the University of Illinois, with direct supervision from Carl Cervone. As a team, we generally work in two-week sprints, so we have divided the work into 6 two-week sprints.

1. Onboard Data Scientist (2 weeks)
   We have an up-and-coming data scientist -- Evan -- lined up to work on this project. In the first two weeks, we’ll focus on getting them fully oriented with our data infrastructure, models, and tools, and providing the context necessary to review the S6 projects.

2. Create S6 Project Collection (2 weeks)
   We will catalog the S6 Growth Grants cohort by adding/updating project entries in OSS Directory. We’ll gather key artifacts like deployer contracts, GitHub repositories, and integrate data with the OP Atlas. By the end of this stage, we’ll have a complete "collection" of S6 projects, fully indexed and ready for further analysis.

3. Iterate on Impact Metrics (2 weeks)
   Now that all relevant event data is available, we’ll define and refine impact metrics specific to the S6 cohort. We'll start with the existing ~80 metric models we have in production and implement new ones with feedback from the Foundation and data community. Ultimately, we aim to have 10-15 key metrics that can be tracked longitudinally and compared across projects and verticals.

4. Quantify ROI and Grant Impact (2 weeks)
   This stage involves analyzing project performance over time, comparing cohorts, and normalizing data by token allocation and incentive duration. We’ll explore various trends and assess correlations between grants and performance metrics. By the end, we’ll have a robust set of normalized success metrics for the S6 cohort.

5. Build Dashboards and Notebooks (2 weeks)
   We’ll then visualize the results through an interactive dashboard (eg, on Dune, Hex, Streamlit, etc) and provide a set of reproducible data science notebooks so the community can easily explore, validate, and extend our findings.

6. Finalize Report and Forum Post (2 weeks)
   We will compile a narrative report and post an executive summary on the Optimism governance forum. These will contain our key findings as well as recommendations for improving future grant cycles. They will be accompanied by links to the public dashboards and data science notebooks described above.

Please define the critical milestone(s) that should be used to determine whether you’ve executed on this proposal:

As we've scoped this as a 12-week project, we propose two milestones, one at the midpoint and one at the end of the project.

Milestone 1

• Timing: end of week 6
• Description: At the midpoint of the project, we will have created the S6 projects and collection, and enumerated all relevant artifacts associated with those projects. We will also have the first snapshot of impact metrics for those projects ready. This will be evidenced by a preliminary dashboard or data science notebook showing the data live in production.
• Deliverable: Live metrics for the S6 collection of projects

Milestone 2

• Timing: end of week 12
• Description: At the end of the project, we will submit a final report that includes a complete narrative and links to the public dashboard(s) and data science notebooks. We will also author a post on the governance forum linking to our work and inviting the community for discussion.
• Deliverable: Report, dashboard, GitHub directory, and forum post

Please list any additional support your team would require to execute this mission (financial, technical, etc.):

We don't need any additional support. We have the data and the people ready to go.

PS - If you choose to award another team, they are also welcome to collaborate with us and build on top of our datasets ✨

Please check the following to make sure you understand the terms of the Optimism Foundation RFP program:

• I understand my grant for completing this RFP will be locked for one year from the date of proposal acceptance.

• I understand that I will be required to provide additional KYC information to the Optimism Foundation to receive this grant

• I understand my locked grant may be clawed back for failure to execute on critical milestones, as outlined in the [Operating Manual](https://github.com/ethereum-optimism/OPerating-manual/blob/main/manual.md#valid-proposal-types)

• I confirm that I have read and understand the [grant policies](https://gov.optimism.io/t/token-house-grant-policies/5833)

• I understand that I will be expected to following the public grant reporting requirements outlined [here](https://gov.optimism.io/t/suggested-public-reporting-requirements-for-grantees/4176)

[thbialek]

Hey everyone — thanks so much for the excellent submissions for this Foundation Mission Request!

The Optimism Foundation has selected @ccerv1 to execute this mission request, and we will be reaching out to you directly with further details!

We really appreciate everyone taking the time to apply and encourage you to explore more ways to get involved by visiting http://contribute.optimism.io/ 🙏