Season 3 - EP. 1 - It's Impact Season with Jonas, Carl, and Owocki

Transcript

[Music] welcome to the green pillow. network podcast if you're just joining us we're building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers focused on using crypto to bring positive some digital systems to the world this podcast features the people who are doing it and we publish it in seasons of five to 10 episodes every couple months this is the beginning of season 3 which is all about impact tracking how can we manifest the meme of impact equals profit what are the most interesting experiments in ideas in Impact tracking how can we build C cryptoeconomic systems that elevate impact fill Builders and how do we move from virtue signaling to cryptoeconomic proof of virtue these are

the themes of green pill impact season 2024 if you want to learn more you can visit our website at Green pill. Network where you can download the green pill book for free join the Discord and become a member of your local green pill. Network chapter my guests for this episode are car Carl carvone and Jonas from optimism and I am really excited to talk to them about the kickoff of green pill impact season Jonas is the lead for retroactive public goods funding at optimism which is Distributing about 20 to $30 million per season of funding for retroactive public goods funding in the optimism SE Eco system Carl Carone brings a career of impact tracking from

traditional impact tracking to working on hypers seerz and getcoin and optimism and now OS Observer is his new project and so in this episode we kind of put our thoughts together our ideas together and we talk about what impact tracking is going to look like as the uh as the ethereum ecosystem matures as we have gitcoin grants rounds as we have retroactive public goods funding rounds and um Carl is going to be joining me for the remainder of the Season as a co-host talking to various guests about what impact tracking will look like in 2024 in the ethereum and web 3 ecosystem I feel like we're on the precipice of

something huge and that's why we're doing our first thematic season for green pill on impact tracking there are for the first time standards that are coming online in the form of ethereum attestation service and hypers certs that are allowing different applications to modularize and track the impact that that they're creating and then consume impact that other applications are are um are producing we are bootstrapping demand for impact tracking with optimism retroactive public goods funding with gitcoin with gith with clear fund there is now tens of millions of dollars per year that is flowing into these markets and Carl teaches us during this episode

that impact tracking is a three-sided Market projects that are creating impact funders that are rewarding impact and people who are evaluating impact so a three-sided Market that is being bootstrapped by optimism and gitcoin so now that we have more data about which projects are actually creating impact we can move from a kesian beauty contest to actually rewarding the projects that truly have impact a kesian beauty contest is this idea where judges are rewarded for selecting the most popular faces across all of the um selection all of the selections as opposed to uh the the best the best participants so how do we move from a kesian beauty contest to actually impact tracking so I'm really excited about

green pill season 3 because I've got gigabrain here on this episode to help me kick off the season Carl will be co-hosting the episodes with us and um we're going to do a couple experiments in the formatting of the green pill podcast in that we're going to be dropping these thematic episodes we are also now doing collectible versions of each each episode so during season 3 we experimenting with pods. media so uh all episodes are going to be available on chain allowing the green pill Community to collect and own these episodes proceeds will go directly to support public goods and collectors can vote on future episodes and other fun perks for supporting green pill go to pods.

medgreen pill to find all those episodes and to start collecting there will be a link in the show notes so green pill season 3 kicks off right now we are talking about impact tracking without further Ado I give you you Jonas and Carl enjoy all righty what's up gentlemen Hey Kevin Hey Jonas what's upy great to have you here maybe we'll lead with a quick intro Carl you want to go first yeah so my name is Carl I'm working on a project called open source Observer uh co-founder of kba labs before that I was working on a protocol called hypers Sears which was being developed by protocol abs and previously before that I did a lot of things in the

kind of traditional world of impact measurement and looking at how to help for 500 companies measure impact helping governments and nonprofits measure impact so that's a lot where my background is and then been quite excited to get involved in the the new world of decentralized public goods funding thanks Carl join us you want to give a quick intro sure uh I'm Jonas I'm contributing to the optimism Collective and there I'm trying to make this thing called retroactive public goods funding happen which is super exciting we just closed the voting for the third round of it and we're hoping to do many more many more iteration Cycles so my my days are

kind of spent spent worrying and thinking about all the different all the different pieces that go into making retro pgf happen well I see a lot of reflections of what getcoins been doing in uh retroactive public goods funding so I probably have a lot of the same anxieties as you Jonas um I I want to talk about impact measurement in this episode I'm wondering if we can use gitcoin and rpgfan thread so um can you tell me big picture big picture what you want to do with rpgfan maybe back into impact tracking from there sure let let me try to find find the big big picture um the idea is essentially um we retroactively reward

people for the impact they had for the contributions they made to the optimism Collective and this could be all kinds of different impact that is rewarded here this could be everything from um building super useful tooling for developers contributing to the op stack onboarding new users Etc um this is what we want to do the end game of this looks like um that we're super accurate in um tracking and measuring impact and we get to um build a machine that becomes super reliable in rewarding this impact and so it becomes almost like a market likee Dynamic to create impact and if you create impact you know that you will receive these rewards based on um based

on the impact measurement uh and then the big future of this is we get like uh we have thousands tens of thousands of contributors being able to uh contribute to this great uh decentralized uh protocol called optimism and there's essentially and it's all done through like this Democratic voting system that decides on um the parameters of ret pgf so it feels like we're kind of trying to approach this meme of impact equals profit where the median participant in the optimism ecosystem knows that if they create impact they'll be rewarded at some point in the future for it is that true reductionist uh I think that is that like 100% what we're up to um I I think the larger point is like um how do we

build right the journey we're all on is like how do we build these reward mechanisms which are able to essentially allocate resources in a way um that it facilitates the development of a whole ecosystem so instead of like relying on like one Foundation let's say like the optimism Foundation or other foundations and other ecosystems to become a big Grant giving body um that facilitates L development and and um and finances it uh can we get to something where we build decentralized Democratic mechanisms that achieve the same goal and actually are more effective than any single entity could be Carl I know that you've been involved in rpgfan to add here one of the things that I think is

really incredible about what the the team at optimism has done is created this heartbeat around these retr pgf rounds that are that are happening and so not only are you able to get this signal that there's going to be funding for impact at at the same time you're starting to see what forms of impact the community cares most about and ideally that is going to really change the incentives so that people are going to be working on those things in anticipation of future retr bgf uh so the degree to which these experiments they become a signal for people to keep building in a certain direction and kind of Shifting what they work on because

they want to get right to pgf I think will really just change the incentive landscape for people yeah um the point that I that I that I heard there that I really want to dig in on is this idea that there's many different types of impact I've had Gregory landua on the show uh before and he talks about the eight different forms of capital and if I tried to Rattle them off their I think it's Financial Capital which I think is what crypto is sort of known for Spiritual Capital Social Capital material Capital intellectual Capital I'm I'm forgetting the other two or three but um you know I'm wondering if if if Carl in the work that you've done around impact measurement how you sort of think about the different types of of impact and

creating a taxonomy of them and and uh comparing and contrasting them with each other and then maybe also how that applies to rpgfan to go first yeah sure let me take that um so I think first off there's something which is very subjective about impact so on the one hand everybody is going to experience a public good and the way it interacts with in a different way and so we need to be able to capture that richness of experience um and so that's like the first challenge that we Face the second one is that typically impact measurement has really been the domain of like experts so experts are able to come up with complex ways of rating things and scoring it and it's very difficult to replicate that and so

I think the other challenge we face is how can we get experts to translate their views on what is a a good public good or something that is impactful into a framework or into some kind of rubric that others can actually build towards I think if we can find that sweet spot between the right amount of qualitative and the right amount of kind of predictable or quantitative impact measurement the more we can create a real signal for people to build towards and the other thing that I wanted to ask there is you know I know I know that decentralization is a meme in web 3 do you think that we'll always rely on on Experts I think that experts certainly have like a really valuable role to play just given that they've spent so many years either studying a problem or working on it directly and so I don't

want to throw the baby out with the bath water on the other hand I think that if we if we believe that experts are the only ones that are qualified to assess something that we're never going to be able to bring in New Perspectives uh so I really hope that the the experts view their role as kind of creating a ladder for others to climb up as opposed to being the first ones to figure something out and then pulling up the ladder so that others aren't able to follow in their footsteps Jus anything to add here uh might be might be kind of a rabbit hole take here uh but I I think the most or the the more complex uh a kind of impact evaluation methodology is doesn't make it necessarily be uh a better

method to achieve the goal uh so I think one one counterintuitive thing that um I stumbled upon and at some point was we already live in a world where we use a bunch of simple measurements to do a bunch of resource allocation and so like one of my favorite examples is something like um Spotify pays artists based on the number of streams right which is a super simple way to evaluate impact and it's probably not like the best one right but this is like the current system uh how this current system simply functions uh and I think I think to this point rather it's like um so the the our goal is not necessarily to be like the

most exhaustive in uh creating a thousand or a million different measurements and take boxes for experts to check uh I think our goal is actually to find something simple that can that has super high signal uh and so I think like Carl has specifically explored this landscape super well and trying to understand like with the existing data for instance that we have today um how can we come up with like simple signals that describe the impact and the really interesting the really interesting observation here is um the better we do this and the more we we evolve from this I think the more we can move away from like heavily expert relying um Reliance systems um but as as Carl said right

like uh we're we're very early in doing this so um a kind of uh dual approach of like expert-based evaluation and like pre-existing data from other sources makes a lot of sense I think that's a profound framework for me to think about Spotify rewarding artists based off the number of streams as retro uh as retro funding based off of impact I hadn't thought of it that way before um I wonder if there's other simple examples out there of of sort of impact funding based off of simple metrics like that Simplicity feels like a it's a feature here not a bug because simple means comprehensible by anyone yeah I I think what you certainly want

to see is people having a very clear idea of what impact is and that'll be reward but it can actually be very difficult to attain so the fact that you get paid based on views or you get paid based on listens doesn't mean that it's straightforward to crack that algorithm and to find a way to get lots of people to listen to your music or watch your video uh so I think that's the that's really the you know the difficult problem space here is figuring out metrics that are motivating and simple but at the same time difficult to game yeah in that difficult to game thing I feel like we're packing a lot in in there as well um the example that's coming to mind for me and maybe this isn't quite impact measurement but uh it

sort of reminds me of of how food has evolved over the last 100 years and uh as we've do done more and more food science we've invented Snickers bars and AirHeads and these things that are over optimized for sugar because that's what we've been evolved to uh to to seek but in the in the process we've removed all the nutritious content a lot of uh out of the food Jonas you're in Europe I'm in America we might have a slightly different situation over here but uh that's kind of what's coming uh to mind for me when I think about overfitting on a metric that uh maybe isn't the most nutritious pun intended it seems like we're this problem space is essentially like a needle in the haast stack type thing where there's like a thousand ways to

get it wrong and I think right like there are endless Tales of like setting the wrong incentives uh even right like even with good intentions it's like very easy to end up in a space where you set the wrong where you set the wrong incentives and now everybody's eating like um over sugar over sugared food all of a sudden um and I think we're we're very much in this in this um in this space which makes it a super interesting problem but a super super hard one I think we already touched about like on complexities of like gam ability of metrics right and then like what do these metrics mean if we do them in a very like repeated game um style environment and so the I think the way

to approach this really is we have to we have to be really comfortable with making mistakes and learning from these mistakes um be the likelihood is um it will take us a lot of iterations to get this right so there will be like a lot of essentially a lot of bad incentives along the way which we we will need to learn from yeah that's one point that I just want to make sure that listeners here is that retroactive public goods funding is a repeated evolutionary game in which each rpgfinal which is too reductionist but I view as impact equals profit and then you sort of go through this UDA Loop Where You observe the results and you design the next experiment and you iterate forward and this is always how I've i' I've viewed getcoin as well is

that it's protop and that it gets better every Epoch than it was the previous Epoch uh getcoin done 19 rounds now and I guess maybe there's a couple that have been two steps forward and one or uh two steps back and then one step forward but um know that's the kind of thing that you that that happens when you try to have this iterative evolutionary game and you try to improve in in the iterative experiment so um that's one thing I would encourage listeners to think about is that uh it's not about any one experiment it's about the line of the experiments and what you're learning from from each of them Jonas anything to add to that that point yes I think we're very much like on the same Journey here we want to iterate on this a lot I think the most reductionist way

to describe this problem that probably a lot of people understand is you can think of this as like we're doing eardrops right and instead of the airdrop criteria being whatever criteria uh is set like transacting addresses or if people delegated a tokens or uh if people ever donated to gitcoin round we try to come up with essentially more High signal criteria for these air drops in which we say these types of contributions with this type of impact should receive uh this this amount and so I think if you only think about the air drop problem uh and then you you try to essentially do really sophisticated air drops um intuitively you get a pretty good understanding of of what

we're what impact measurement uh is is about and like all the pitfalls uh we can run into yeah I think the thing that I'd like to advocate for both in like the context of what gitcoin has done and what optimism is doing as well is the idea of actually kind of setting out with some hypothesis that you want to test through the through the experiment uh so it's one thing doing things that uh you really want to test and see the outcome is another thing just trying a bunch of approaches blindly and not really knowing which one is going to work uh so the degree to which we can figure out what exactly do we want to test and see if we're able to instrument a better outcome will be really helpful in kind of improving the velocity of

learning that we do here yeah and that's one point I want to focus on here is learning velocity uh Jonas uh you had an idea while we're at Dev connect that you shared with me I'm wondering if you want to share it now that pertains to learning velocity yes uh at at um an ebol during def connect I I found my new my new passion which is pushing for like radical radical open open learning and iteration um this is something that we we're trying to do uh with retro pgf we're very aware this is like a long-term hard problem to solve and so we're trying to take a super iterative experimental approach where for each round we have some hypotheses uh we test these hypotheses we learn from the round

which leads us to like what we prioritize in the next iteration and what we're trying to do is um that this is super easily um super easily accessible to people to understand what were the hypotheses that we made what were the design decisions that came out of this what have we learned from the round and one big unlock here was if we're all iterating towards future it's really high leverage if we all share these learnings uh and we all become very public and open about the experiments that we've run and what we've learned from them so we kind of build this Collective Collective knowledge and Collective expertise of running these um running these rounds so I'm I'm I'm I think what we're what we're getting to

here is that we're getting all these different experiments uh be this gcon or be this hypers curs or um be this drips or a bunch of other mechanisms together and building kind of this this uh Collective knowledge base of how to approach different problems within impact measurement and um Grant uh grant funding mechanisms and programs in general I I think it's really great that you've been pushing for that uh I've actually just authored a post on the getcoin govs for gov forums entitled learning in public and instituting a culture in which if we spend more than 20K on a round maybe we should be writing up a post about what we learned from that round and um you know as

someone who's been involved in the space for six years it kind of feels I I'm realizing natural for me to build in public to learn in public I don't mind making mistakes in public but I think that there's a lot of when people are new to the space and they're used to being closed off and protective of Trade Secrets From closed Source organizations there's a little bit of unlearning that you have to do in order to be vulnerable enough to learn in public and I think that uh by by watching prominent people in the space do do it together it makes it safe for other people to to join that movement so uh hope to push uh increasing our learning velocity together forward with you I'm super excited super stoked about this I think a big part here is like being vulnerable especially if you're in

an environment where we talk about um a lot of tokens that flow through these programs and being vulnerable in an environment which which has a lot of aspects of um big public facing communities and platforms like Twitter that are really good at like prioritizing and serving outrage um it sometimes be feels overwhelming um to individuals or to projects to be very vulnerable and open about their mistakes and uh be radical in the experiments that they're running and I think if we can foster or or I think if we can just extend the kind of public learning culture that we have already that will allow us to run many more fast-paced experiments than if we have a culture

that is like very risk averse I I totally agree and um you know I think the profound Point here is that if we're going to run these rounds every quarter or every six months in perpetuity then over time the faster the learning velocity is the faster we're going to achieve that that approaching the global Maxima of impact equals profit or or funding public goods and so adjusting our learn learning velocity now when it's only 20123 is going to make a big difference assuming that this this ecosystem continues into 2027 and in 2020 in 2030 small adjustments to the learning velocity can compound a lot over time all right well it feels like we're sort of uh at the end of that uh that threat of conversation I'm

wondering if I can take a quick pivot and we can re-anchor on you Carl um your career I see as uh doing impact measurement in the traditional world and then you've been a getcoin steward and then you've done hypers Sears and you've done rpgfan kind of take me take me from Impact measurement in the old world into impact measurement in web 3 what are some themes that you've that you've seen what do you think web 3 has to learn from the old world and um you know if we're gonna what should we not throw the baby out with the bath water with respect to impact measurement and with what you learned in the old world if you could just tell us a little bit about that progression that'd be great yeah sure so I think the the thing that gets me most excited about the space that

we're creating right now is that we can all see public goods that are important in our everyday lives in the world around us and at the same time we have this new construct of digital public goods which right now we don't really have good governance for them we don't really have recurring funding models and yet as our digital lives grow more important these forms of digital public goods are going to become increasingly as important if not more important than the role that like physical public goods play in our everyday life so the question that I'm most preoccupied with is how do we actually take the good things from the Legacy world and bring some of those forward and create like a digital equivalent of those and not have to go through the same thousand years of

History where we learned all the things that didn't work and we don't have to go through those same kind of mistakes we can actually speedrun a lot of that learning uh so some of things that you already mentioned here like learning in public and being willing to experiment quickly throw something away without there being any ego or sense of Pride associated with that and move on to the next thing are so important and I think even though decentralization makes everything harder like it is so much more difficult to do a grants round in the way that gitcoin does it or in the way that optimism does it because you have so many stakeholders that need to be brought into the process if you turn the thing on and no one shows up then it didn't you know it failed to

serve its purpose uh so there's so much more community building and I guess stakeholder alignment which is required along the way way but once you're able to do that then number one you've created legitimacy along the way number two you've kind of created a buyin for the entire thing that you're doing and number three all these people now actually really care deeply about it being successful and so you see that take shape in so many different forms which I think are completely unique uh about how we're going about funding digital public goods uh one example which which I love is that because during retor pgf everything was being built on top of attestations if someone didn't like the front end if someone

didn't know where to go for data they could just go directly to the source they could build their own front end they could you know do their own thing with the attestation data which was sitting there for anybody to uh to access and so and if you kind of contrast that with the traditional world where these things aren't only kind of locked up or hard to access but they're actually viewed as like proprietary or things that you don't want other people to look at um you get a completely different type of building and way that people are actually supporting each other and and collaborating and so I think that right now even though again this makes everything a bit more difficult to get going I think it is the

most powerful mode that we can create around these these funding structures and these communities for funding digital public goods uh and so seeing that now take root in a number of different ecosystems and being something where each one of learning from the next one and uh trying to take those lessons that were learned to getcoin and take some of that and bring new ideas through retrop pgf and then as other ecosystems try and do their own version of retr pgf figure out which part they want to borrow which part they want to innovate on it's just so powerful uh so I I really hope that more institutions that are kind of in the traditional Legacy world are able to look at this and see some source of inspiration and at the same time I hope we have the humility to

look at a few things that we like from the Legacy world and pick those up and try and Implement our own version as we fund digital public goods thanks Carl Jon us you want to react to that yes I just want to just want to I think I think Carl Carl's writing uh is probably phenomenon phenomenon that um he's your your favorite Region's favorite regen kind of thing um I've gotten a lot of I've gotten a lot of like um a lot from from going through um what what Carl has published over the last few months I would be curious KL right like you went through essentially um building hypers certs together with the hypers certs team which is essentially this kind of contribution tracking tool um and now

now you're on the Forefront of gathering a lot of data for impact measurement could you maybe talk a bit about like what is this impact measurement problem and and you've worked on this a lot over the past past few months past year past past career what are like the most interesting challenging aspects you found going into this robbit hole yeah so when it comes to impact measurement I used to like in my previous life I sat in the privileged role of having very specialized knowledge that would allow me to approach a company or an organization in charge of premium for that service I could go in I could look at what they were doing and then

basically find a way to measure impact and get them to respond to that in a way that would uh you know effectively result in them spending a lot of money uh so it's basically a specialized set of skills that allows you to come in measure impact and then get someone to respond and change course based on your assessment and so I think in the in this world the the problems I think are most interesting are are number one how do you expand that opportunity so as many people as possible can participate so as many people as possible can look at what a project is doing review the work come up with an assessment as to whether they think that work is impactful or legitimate or credible or whatever

metric you want to apply against it and then at the same time use that information to inform voting or funding decisions um effectively any impact assessment is a way of saying I think this work is good and therefore I think there should be more funding or more people working towards it um right now we are we are used to experts telling us what are the most important things to fund uh we are used to not having access to the information or the data that would allow you to make your own assessment I think it's going to take time before more people build that instinct where they can feel comfortable

going in and trying to do that kind of bottomup impact measurement but I think that that's that's really the end goal here is if we're able to make it so that people who are affected by various forms of public goods feel that they have a governance role by rating the impact of these things by deciding which ones they think should have more funding um and you know more attention then that is one of the most important things that you can express and so uh I I think that we're starting to build out some of the some of the tools that we can use in the form of attestations in the form of a culture where everybody is working in public where everybody is doing things open source uh and the more can do that the more entirely new possibilities open up

like being able to trace the impact of say a a a a software Library all the way Downstream to every app that is using it and every user that is interacting with that uh those are things that uh are possible uniquely in the world of digital public goods but historically were very very difficult to do in traditional Supply chains even though some of the Dynamics are similar I just want to say what a treat it is to been reading your medium posts and your gov posts about uh retro pgf uh the first thing that Drew me in was the beautiful charts and visualizations the data porn uh but now having this background knowing that this was actually a specialized skill set that you were

using in order to pull in probably multi-million dollar contracts and I'm just getting it for free by reading the getcoin gov forum and the optimism gov forum is really special so uh we'll have a link to some of your posts in the in in the show notes Carl join us I don't know if you wanted to react to anything Carl said uh I might I might throw out throw out like uh a weird example um of where I think what what Carl what Carl is doing what Carl is describing in terms of impact measurement um really changes how we can set incentives so so one example of like we often discuss um in the end I think like a good quote here was uh ethereum is kind of this economic test net where we can test new stuff before we actually ship it to the real world before we ship

it to to governments and and and other entities uh that could use what we're building and um one example that I sometimes think about is the the state funded media in Germany so there's essentially uh everyone in Germany that uh is registered here for each apartment you have to pay a monthly subscription to the state media it's not voluntary you have to pay it um and then there's this big resource allocation mechanism where there's essentially a bunch of committees which are elected by Parliament um deciding on which media programs which entertainment is funded and which is not this leads to and it's all proactive funding so it leads sometimes to like weird situations so for instance I as a

consumer of that media realize that a lot of it is produced for like older Generations who watch TV right um the movies that I'm getting are not really for my for my kind of audience group the movies sometimes have weird incentives because the Committees are localized they go to like e each local committee and get buying from them which means all of a sudden the plot of the movie is taking place in like four or five different regions so they can get the grand funding of all the different Regional committees and this is essentially a problem because you're you're not great at measuring what is the actual impact of all this media that we're producing right there is no there's no way for me actually to Signal well if I like a show if I don't like a show uh it's pretty

much like an expert committee that is sitting there and like thinking about how they assess this impact and a really interesting switch would be if you think about it is like can we have bottom up impact measurement in the system where the people consuming the media can actively signal if they value this piece of media that they consume or not uh and how important it is to them uh and then you could switch this around to like ENT all the Committees uh and all the like most of the media is just retr funded um now just thrown out a really really weird Rabbit Hole example but I think the switch the switch from going to something where consumers essentially of these public goods um actively get to

Signal what they value and what they don't value and all the allocation like the the resource allocation decisions are made based on this is a really powerful change from what Cole describes as a very like expert top- down driven driven system yeah let me actually um continue that thetic I think it's it's very interesting one of the things that we're now able to do is look at an ecosystem like gitcoin and see the products are funded there and then look an ecosystem like optimism RBF and see the overlap of products that are also receiving funding from optimism and it'll be very interesting to kind of compare which products are viewed as more or less

popular impactful worthy of funding in those two ecosystems and I think like you described there's is going to be different ways of number one looking at the same thing but assessing the value differently based on the context in the case of gitcoin it might be you know more broad impact on the ethereum ecosystem whereas in the case of optimism it's supposed to be more focused on impact brought to the optimism Collective separately you have a different set of Voters and stakeholders who are looking at that in gitcoin it's the whole world and optimism it's 150 badge holders and so increasingly as we can start to take the same project but experiment on different pools of funding different voters or

different ways of deciding what to reward and then different game mechanics as well we're going to see very very different outcomes uh so I think that we're going to be learning much more about what people view as impactful and at the same time how to fund those things to produce more of them it feels like we're at the precipice of this being a really nent but but also potentially very important design space in the future um not only are there tens of millions of dollars going through retroactive public goods funding quadratic funding funding experiments in web 3 but now we have Primitives like EAS and hypers Sears and getcoin grants protocol um and these beautiful front

ends that optimism has commissioned for rpgfan all start to be interoperable with each other and we can start to to Really build movement for around rewarding the things that actually have have impact and and it feels like 2024 could be the year of of impact tracking that's why I wanted to do the the impact season th this season of of green pill so um Carl really excited to have you co-hosting a couple episodes with me this season and um I think that there's there's a lot of potential there I'm wondering if if you could both rattle off some things that you're excited about with how the whole ecosystem is coming together around building this vision of impact equals profit and

impact tracking and what are some things that that that you want to look for Carl you want to go first yeah sure uh so with any impact Market what you're trying to do is create a three-sided Marketplace so on the one hand you have projects on the other hand you have funding and then ideally you have some role for however you're deciding how to measure impact or to evaluate uh the types of impact that you want to see uh and so I think a lot of people have tried to do this it's been very difficult to pull off and I think the part that we're now seeing real kind of real traction um is marketplaces where you have solved both the project and the funding side optimism retrop GF is the best example of this because they have

brought significant new funding for impact and while they're still trying to work out how to do the accounting of what is impact and what is an appropriate way of of paying for that impact um the what what they have done is created a very very clear demand signal that if you have impact on our ecosystem you are going to get compensated for it uh so I think that anybody who is interested in exploring the space should be looking very closely at what is happening an optimism because that is a place right now where there's a a good amount of money that is going towards this very problem the part that obviously I'm most interested in is figing out okay well given that there's

funding and given that there's projects how do you actually measure impact how do you see if any of this funding is making a difference because I think the worst outcome would be to realize that actually you might as well just distribute all of the money equally or you might as well use some silly metric like the size of the team or the number of GitHub stars and just distribute all of your money that way uh if we don't learn anything that's better than that um then I think we'll all be disappointed uh so now that you are seeing real economic experiments that are happening I think the next level of thinking is going to be brought about by getting smarter at understanding what types of impact are most valued and using that to create really clear signals for projects if you build in

this direction you are more likely to get rewarded and what I think is so cool is that we have these composable funding mechanisms where this can be happening every six months or every four months with optimism and at the same time you can be running smaller more concentric experiments at gitcoin and those two systems are actually strengthening each other um you're building a very very clear signal of what products are high quality going into say a larger optimism retr pgf round by having a giton a gitcoin round right before that um and then separately uh coming out of it these projects the most impactful ones are going to be better funded so what are they going to do what are they going to invest in I wouldn't be surprised if some actually

do their own version of retop pgf where they take that funding and they look at the contributors or the other uh actors in their ecosystem that have been most helpful to them and do their own version of it um so I really think there's going to be a huge amount of learning and acceleration in this area over the next year and kind of impact measurement is kind of the least sexy part but to me it's the Lynch pin there's this um this idea vitalic actually taught me this term kesian beauty contest and it it means a beauty contest where judges are rewarded for the most popular faces uh instead of like the best ones and uh we one of this is one of the problems that we've always had with quadratic funding over time is

that it kind of sucks for the most popular projects instead of the most impactful so something like something that's very visible and has a prominent founder and a lot of Twitter followers will receive more funding than something that's down beneath the infrastructure that's has a lot of impact but it's it's in the plumbing um when we R in a qf round for this this Beach vacation that I was on with 30 other web 3 people the example of this was the bartenders got way more funding than the people who are washing the dishes in the back or like the janitors and stuff like that so um it might be too reductionist but it feels like we can move from kesian beauty contests down to impact equals profit with with the less visible public goods there Jonas same question to you what are you excited about in Impact

season what should we look for uh what are you excited about just riffing on uh what what Cole said I think it's super exciting to be in in an environment where we have a lot of pressure to board solving a problem uh at least I feel like that is the case um I think we we've been in this space where this retroactive funding idea has been floating around since forever we may have pushed this forward like a few years back when we outlined this kind of retroactive public goods funding idea in a block post but really if you think about it how we we haven't it took us um we haven't made a whole like uh insane amount of progress progress on um on

solving this problem because we didn't run rounds and we didn't run rounds fast enough so it was like essentially optimism did one experiment um uh in 2021 and then in 2020 um 20123 we now did two rounds and you can really see as soon as you do experiments uh and you you actively run them how it puts pressure on the whole system to solve different aspects of this problem and so I think uh agreeing with K here right like the impact measurement is kind of the the the big the big thing to to strive for and that is actually a problem with a bunch of different facets this this goes from

everything of like what data are you collecting to measure impact um what data do you then actually use in your your impact measurement calculations how do you let the voters shape what they think is impactful and what they think is less impactful um so there is it's essentially becomes a very multifaceted problem that you can approach over like with a variety of of designs in mind and I think what's really interesting that we will hopefully see come together over the next like half year year is a bunch of collaborations and experiments that touch that essentially explore the whole Space of um how these rounds are run and run like a very much integrated approach

so I think one aspect that we've seen here uh that was touched on before is is for optimism Vetra pgf we had a bunch of different voting tools and data analytics tools some of which were like commissioned by um via an RFP from the optimism Foundation but the majority were were essentially Community built uh and supported by um by like grant grant funding um mechanisms and this really shows I think what the interesting aspect behind this is the the scope of experimentation can be really large because anybody can just rock up and create a different voting interface that reflects kind of De thinking on the problem uh and I think this combination

of putting a bunch of pressure to solve a problem having a community that is really really willing to experiment and having a really flexible way to run these experiments by allowing anybody to essentially add different tools and parts to the process um is is something where I hope we see a really like crazy experimental ideas that people um that people experiment with I think uh AI to to your point of of um beauty contest like um like Dynamics we're now really diving into um into impact measurement and I think what quadratic funding is actually pretty

good at is like getting the impact measurement of a particular crowd uh and they vote with their dollars um what is the I think taking the a slight step back and like why are we so hyped about now trying to measure impact in this in this much more kind of um data data driven way that goes outside of uh just asking people to vote like why why why are you so bullish on this walkie um it feels like a area where gitcoin and optimism can collaborate so if we both align on a common standard whether it's EAS or hypers certs or something else then it realizes the vision of retroactive public goods funding

changing other types of funding um it it's an opportunity for us to build the data uh together and both and receive the data in in both types of prod uh projects uh quadratic funding getcoin grants and also optimism R pgf so just like the whole Unix philosophy of each ecosystem doing one thing and doing it well um but to together because they're interoperable with each other they create more value than each individual part can like that that kind of gets realized it's a super modular ecosystem in in that the the sum of it is worth is worth more than its parts and I think it also solves the kesian beauty contest problem of of people just funding what

they recognize uh it we could create a long taale of unsexy public goods that don't have that don't make a lot of noise don't have a lot of Twitter followers that don't shell badge holders and they'll still get funded because they show up in the data so to me it feels like a new frontier and it's one that because it's a new frontier lots of people can contribute to shaping it and to make sure that it happens and Ed it kind of all starts with education so that's why we're doing the the green pill season together so I don't know that's that's that's my off the cuff on on on why I'm excited about it I'm I'm curious if that Trigg is anything for each of you uh I I think kind of yeah diing into the long long tale of of public goods

meme I yeah you want to explain what that is real quick Carl for those of us who don't follow you on Twitter hopefully by the time this podcast comes out we're going to have done more of a write up on it but but the basic idea is that you have uh kind of a a power law distribution and on one end you have things that are very popular and well known and that's the short tale and then on the other end you have this very long taale of kind of Niche obscure more Community focused public goods um so a short taale public good might be an airport a longtail public good might be um your local PTA trying to raise funding to build a new basketball court and so increasingly what we're able to

do through mechanisms like quadratic funding is give things on the long tail global distribution and reach and so the more you're able to do that the more there's a chance that they can get not only funding but signal that they matter and that they're able to move from from the long end of the tail up the curve and what we've seen actually is that there's a number of examples of projects that started out probably all projects that are now well known in the ethereum ecosystem started out as longtail public goods and because they were able to build and over time get recurring funding and generate signal they were actually able to move and now become the types of things that we refer to as household public goods in the ethereum ecosystem and so I think the more that

we're able to use mechanisms like quadratic funding and then have that be a a ladder to uh things like retrop pgf then the more people are actually going to be able to focus on building public goods as opposed to and and that's where that's where I I I kind of want to end and I'm actually embarrassed that it took us to the end of the episode to actually get here when the median new entrance to the ecosystem can make more by creating an open source public good project or any other sort of public good then they can by joining a private good or an Ico dogcoin meme coin then we've really shifted the landscape in a way that is profound and so it starts and ends with the the participants in

the ecosystem the agents in the ecosystem being monetarily rewarded for contributing to public goods being able to pay for their health care for their education for their child care whatever it is that they need in their lives by contributing to public goods I I think is where it starts and it ends for me and and everything else is just sort of a means to that end if you were to take it humanitarian lens lend on that so that's that's for me what impact equals profit what it means for everyday members of the ecosystem and and where it gets me jazzed about it just riing riffing on this totally totally agree one aspect uh one kind of kind of picture to frame here uh that I think go goes goes even Beyond this is um this is a quote from somebody from the protocol guild at in

some discussion which was we should normalize the GU Dev spying Lambo from retroactive rewards this is really important at the end of the year there should be there should be like somebody doing really weird online bracks with like their their Lambo saying I got this from from retroactive funding why that is important culturally is currently we look at essentially public goods funding as this donation donation style way to reward certain Behavior or certain contri and this often leads to the space where we think about it as essentially like charity which rewards people that that

need it the most right and it gets us to this space where where people that come into this space or walking what you're talking on and they think about like should I build this open source public good or should I jump into this exciting defi project the upside in the defi project is super high right like the the maximum the maximum return they could have on this contribution is super high while if they focus on the open source uh open source project that is like some some developer tooling the upset is probably much much lower because if they would get anything above a certain amount everybody would say okay we don't need to give more to this open source project because they obviously have enough to cover their

costs in building this and I think what we want to normalize is if you create a lot of impact that should be super profitable right if you're if you're building gu um that should be and it has like this big impact on all of us in this big ecosystem that should be super profitable I think this is something we need to get uh I think this just this meme of like normalize normalize uh uh buy buying a Lambo for for your work on an ethereum execution client is something we should really hone in on because um we need to shift we we the playing field should be essentially equal where it's as profitable to work on gu as it is to start start like the next uh def project and I think this switch in the landscape is something I'm

I'm super excited about and I will I will have a big I will definitely have a big celebration once I see the first ethereum core def post post this Lambo pick um okay well maybe that's a meme that that uh we can try to propagate out there you get Lambos for working on public goods not just for launching a defi project let's see uh I think that we're well we're pretty much out of time we're at 30 P the hour anything I didn't ask that y'all want to say Carl go to you first I'm good I think we covered everything yep everything good for us s okay well thank you for helping me kick off green pill impact season huge fans of you both and the impact that you've had on the space and uh the impact that you've had on impact in the space

getting meta here so thanks for doing this episode with me and see you in [Music] 2024