Playing the Cooperative Game, ♻️🔴✨Retroactively✨🔴♻️ with Ben Jones

all right y'all we're going to start we're going to try to start this talk I know it's late in the day I know we've had a lot of incredible incredible content ahead of us we're going to try to start this with a growth hack so I need y'all's help I need y'all's help in the audience with some claps are y'all ready yeah the [Music] well we didn't expect to have a Patricio but the legendary the one the only creator of poops just came up on St gave me a hug so that's great too give him a round of applause how we doing on the screen we still can't see the screen we'll get there we'll get there oh we might need a transfer the port or something we can switch it if we need oh I unplugged it did you switch it here try that oh you did all right how's the denber going so far good good can I get a thumbs up yeah all right I think our slides are working wow there we go all right y'all so uh I'm Ben I work for a project called optimism a collective called optimism a dow called optimism can I get a raise of hands if I if you've heard of this vaguely oh yeah that's what I like to see heck yeah okay so I'm going to talk about some public goods funding today who knows that who knew that optimism does public goods funding yeah okay that's good I like the percentages are pretty high there I like it okay so today I'm going to tell you guys a little bit about what's going on in the world of public goods and optimism then I'm going to talk about what it means to be a sustainable public goods project then I'm going to talk about some things that I think we could vastly improve as an industry as a community and then I'm going to talk a little bit about what optimism is doing to help solve those things sound good yeah okay so what's going on in the world of optimism and public goods a whole lot of stuff the op stack who's heard of the op stack yeah okay okay I'll take it all I'll take it the op stack is the most overpowered public good in the game as we like to say and it is basically the code that powers optimism it's modular evm equivalent blazing fast dirt cheap I don't why I left the bottom two is not their own bullets I don't know but three bullets are better than four the other thing that's going on is we are going not multi-chain but super chain so who heard about the base announcement last week yeah so that's running on the op stack my co-founder Carl will give a lot more incredible incredible content about what it means to go super chain what it means for us as a community to scale together not apart um but for now I'll just say it's happening it's exciting and go watch Carl's talk tomorrow same time as this one another huge thing that's going on in this world of the op stack is a public good is that there's a new new cordev which is coinbase that is a big deal that is very very very exciting can I get Applause for that yeah okay we're hyped for that for sure one of the things though that I think we need to acknowledge as a community and determine as a community is whether or not this public good stuff is just made up in a bunch of baloney or if it's really going to work this time why is crypto going to make public goods and open source software sustainable when historically it's been a very very different picture so is it real or are we just like a Feelgood Inc I guess I should have played the gorillas on the on the mic first because that's a great Gorilla song so honestly the bigger mic drop I think than coinbase launching L2 in many ways is that Bas will commit a portion of transaction fee Revenue back to the optimism Collective that is huge that is a Fortune 500 company committing a portion of Revenue to a dow for free and open source code that they could have just ran with on their own that is sustainable public goods in action so that's the real mic drop let me get an Applause for that yeah yeah hype hypee oh I love you guys thank you but what needs to be said about this is that sustainability and getting that to work means Focus this works because the collective is committed to funding the public goods which make the whole thing possible so I don't know if you've heard of our classic slogan if not optimism. iVision the impact to the collective should be rewarded by profit to the individual if we want to make the impact of public goods equal to the profit of the creators of public goods then we need to define the impact that we're talking about here very very very important it's about closing the loops we need that Focus fallen so far good yeah oh yeah okay okay now I want to talk about something that I think as a community we really really really need to improve which is related to all of this and that is the notor ious the famous the Twitter shill covering ecosystem map raise your have you ever seen one of these before not necessarly for optimism for some ecosystem yeah okay of course of course and they're really cool right they're really exciting let's see can I scroll here yeah we can look at the different Dows and nfts and on-ramps and optimism right okay and this is fantastic this is just something I pulled off of Twitter today um or I guess Google Images via Twitter that was just an unofficial thing that the community made and I really appreciate doing that but the reality is as I fix my zoom here whoa the reality is we can do so much better than that and I really think that we need to what is missing from this I mean at it's core the real problem here is it's just like a list of icons on a grid with no real meaning and interpretation and there's so much more richness to the crypto economies that we're building that we are completely completely neglecting when we create these kinds of diagrams right there's no notion of the relationships between the apps in this ecosystem right there's an nft bucket there's an nft exchange there's an nft project it makes sense that those things are close to each other but are they are are they as icons next to each other I don't think that's very useful secondly it does not talk at all about the economic interactions which are going down and what kind of ecosystem map that's trying to describe an ecosystem of cryptoeconomics isn't talking about this where is value being extracted where is value just being provided by impactful public goods and there's also no relationships between many of the connected categories that we see here right so the graph is a wonderful decentralized infrastructure project just about every well I shouldn't I don't know about every but many many many many many dabs use the graph an incredible developer tool why is it off in the corner and completely unrelated when you look at this landscape it just looks like it's icon it doesn't make sense we must do better following yeah makes sense yeah okay so how are we going to do that okay I have a dirty secret the traditional economics and Technology World actually has done some cool things here and it turns out that one of the things that they've done is figured out better ways to describe these systems so I hate to do it but I'm going to borrow a little bit from the traditional world of the old economy that we're going to replace in you know short order what we need is something that is not a map but is more akin to a value chain or even like a digital supply chain if we want to make impact equal profit we need to understand the relationships in our ecosystems between impact and between profit okay so that's what I'm going to now talk about the value chain it's not a new chain many optimism chains are coming this is not one of them it's chain is in Supply not is in block and it's actually shockingly shockingly simple okay here's all we have to do take two entities right these would have been apps or those little icons in that old diagram and connect the impact that one has on the other and the profit that one gives to the other okay incredibly simple not you know not rocket science but an incredibly valuable thing it turns out to do it gives you a lot more information a lot more insight than if you just throw up all the apps and their logos on a screen right okay so as an example here's a very simple example of this describing the relationship between Unis Swap and optimism right optimism clearly has an impact on Unis swap it affords cheap block space right because it's a rollup and Unis swap Returns value by providing transaction fees right those fees are much cheaper that's the point of optimism it's wonderful but there still are some there and we need to knowledge and talk about those relationships this because it's so generic can be expanded to a massive massive massive map over time right so here's one more zoomed out step right in addition to talking about Unis swap we can also introduce the concept of Traders on Unis Swap and liquidity providers on Unis swap right again there's impact and there's profit uniswap provides a great impact to Traders they get access to decentralized trades the Traders have a portion of of their fees on Unis swap going back to Unis swap liquidity providers are making LP fees and they're providing liquidity into uniswap itself okay so I I know that this is not as pretty it doesn't have the logos in place it doesn't have the cool gradient background that we started in the beginning but what it does have we I think is a lot more useful information about what is actually going on in these crypto systems okay now let's return to the original problem statement so I brought up the op stack in the beginning right the question is how do we put the op stack into this diagram well impact is pretty clear right the source code of the op stack which is an MIT licensed public good that is clearly having a huge impact on optimism we wouldn't be able to run a network unless we had the code to do so but what we're missing is any notion of profit back to the op stack how does the op stack make money on its own it's a public good it's just some code right we need to fix that more so this is true for all of the dependencies of the op stack so one of the huge efforts that we've made in building Bedrock the most recent release of the op stack upgrade to main coming soon is making it as ethereum equivalent as humanly possible what does that mean that means taking the incredible battle tested code that has been running and powering the ethereum network for a long time and making as few changes to it as possible in building optimism so not only is optim can you guys see that point yes not only is optimism uh benefiting in an in an unprofitable way from the source code of the op stack the same is true of G as one of the critical dependencies of the op stack so what do we do this ultimately is the focused deliberate goal that I would propose should be the the objective of the colle Ive in its public goods funding efforts the ultimate goal should be to fix the parts of the value chain where we see a purple impact but we don't see on its own a green profit right so we take that those transaction fees that were here right and we redirect them both to the op stack and the dependencies which made it possible based on the impact that we observe from The Source inheritance so this is the goal of public goods funding in a targeted sustainable manner it is to fix the value chain that the crypto economy that optimism represents uh does and I want to be clear this is a very small piece but these arrows of impact and profit are extremely generic right we could expand right if we go way back here right we could expand every one of these into I don't probably thousands I don't know how many things are there thousands of arrows and hundreds of applications and put them all together into one cohesive picture for optimism's crypto economy Every Chain in the super chain every app on those super chains every tool that the developers use and every fee that gets generated in the system this should be the goal and this is how we make public goods funding sustainable um okay this is a no shill space so very very quickly is this all talk no next week voting starts to distribute 10 million op tokens to over 300 potential uh nominations via the votes of 70 unique citizens optimism. retrop pgf I think that deserves a round of applause yeah wo so we're actually we're actually doing it it's actually going to happen next week okay I have no I have not looked at the time but I was hoping to get some questions in so uh come up to the front if you got some questions or raise your hand shout it out oh come on who's going to break the I know we've got questions I'm insane I must have said something wrong yep yeah so let me let me just repeat the question because it is loud AF in the incredible eth Denver so the question was um in this diagram that I had here who is advocating for the go ethereum node obviously there's a very loud purple colored person up here that's going to advocate for the op stack what about go ethereum um well a few things first of all I I think pretty much all of the um ethereum both consensus and execution clients are eligible and were nominated in the next round and the thing that I should stress is that while advocacy will clearly play a factor in the politics of voting and this sort of thing it is in the best interest of everybody in the collective to be fairly rewarding this value this is a competitive Advantage it's not a nice tab that's sort of the core Point here because if go ethereum contributed you know 90% of the L2 execution node in the op stack and it got 0% of the reward for that what we are doing is we are setting a bad precedent for the next go ethereum because crypto is going to take years to BU build out and scale an infrastructure so it's not about who's going to Advocate it's about how are we going to ensure that the collective sets the precedent to keep this going yeah yeah other questions I don't know how much time do we have should I play another song I would also take a song request we've got four minutes oh okay perfect come on I know someone else has a question shout it out yes yep yeah so the question was when this goes back to the op stack what does that actually mean right so this gets down into the mechanics of how we're going to go about our public goods funding rounds right and that's certainly going to iterate and change over time the way it exists today is basically a process of nominations of the public goods that we think that the citizen house should fund voting and then distrib tion and so really what it means to fund the the op stock it really I mean in reality what I should be doing here is like probably putting some core developers right like o like op labs for example and have the and have the arrow pointing to them ultimately of course you can't fund a code base you fund people that are developing the code base and again this is exactly the point of like having many levels of impact right because you could even imagine a purple Arrow here to like the go uh you know compression library or the go standard cryptography library and the same applies all the way down and in fact one of the things that we have in this next retr funding round is a collection that uh the citizens can can vote for that has all of the dependencies in the goang uh tree for the optimism monoo um aka the monor repo of the op sta yeah so at the end of the day what it means to fund the public goods of uh code is it means to fund the people that helped create that code yes last question is it possible oh my goodness is it possible to automate this in the future that was the question so for the optimism Collective it's very important to us that we Empower citizens the citizens house does public goods funding it's one person one vote so while it's possible to automate we want to start there but should we be automating yes I I probably think that we'll see this maybe not in the next year but what I'm am dying to see is a retr funding round that commits to a chat GPT prompt where you input output that says output the amount of impact that all of these pull requests had to the optimism stack and then you paste in all of the pull requests in the past year and then that outputs a bunch of numbers so that would be an example of Automation and at the end of the day if you want to see shockingly this is not the craziest talk I've ever given if you go to my Devcon talk from last year I will describe how in the long run it's possible that we should view the Citizen's house as basically a reward function for the global super intelligence that emerges instead of making capitalists uh get richer and richer and richer and richer from these AI so anyway that's even crazier stuff I think that's all the time that I got thank you all very much appreciate it