Season 3 - Ep. 11 - GreenPill S3 Wrap Up Episode

Transcript

[Music] welcome to the green pill. network podcast if you're just joining us we are 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 in this podcast we feature the people who are doing it and we publish a season of episodes five to 10 episodes every couple months this season is impact season how can we manifest the meme of impact equals profit what are the most interesting EXP experiments and ideas in Impact tracking how can we build cryptoeconomic systems that elevate impactful Builders and move from virtue signaling to cryptoeconomic proof of virtue these are the themes of green pill impact season 2024 one other special thing we are doing for impact

season is allowing you to collect this episode you can go to pods. medgreen pill to find all the episodes from this season and to start collecting 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 disc court and become a member of your local green pill. Network chapter all right the show today is with my co-curators for impact season Carl Carone from OS Observer and hypers seerz and Jonas from optimism retr pgf round three in this episode we talk about impact season we talk about gg9 getcoin grants 19 which happened during impact season and we talk about retroactive public goods funding round three which

released a record amount of funding op based funding for builders in the ethereum and optimism ecosystem and we do a review of impact season talk about this meme of impact equals profit we talk about the summoning of ether's Phoenix which is sort of the uh Marvel Avengers style way of talking about impact equals profit what if it could Manifest this deity that connected impact equals profit across the world and that's what that's what the optimism ecosystem kind of thinks of with with uh with ether's Phoenix and uh this episode was a fun one for me because I think that Carl and Jonas are some of the deeper deepest thinkers most skilled and better best

positioned people in the ecosystem to talk about the meme of impact equals profit to review impact season with me and to talk about where we're are and where where we are where we are and what's next with respect to reaching this meme of impact equals profit so in this episode we talk about all the things impact season we wrap up impact season we tied it we put a bow on it and um I think it was just a really fun episode because Jonas and Carl are helping to co-curate this episode with me and um I've come to come to regard them as friends and colleagues in creating creating this movement with me so without further Ado I give you the impact season wrap-up episode enjoy coordination what's up Jonas what's up

Carl Hey Kevin Hey Jonas what's up what impact season it has been um Carl uh would love to start by talking to you uh what are some of your takeaways about rpgfan during impact season yeah I mean it's been a while since we first discussed retr pgf it feels like since then a lot has happened so number one we got the results which are cool and let's discuss those number two there's been a pretty nice pump in the in the markets and so I think everybody's riding that wave and feeling a bit better perhaps and they were say September October when the round was getting started I think in addition there's just been a lot of action and activity which feels that we finally

been able to move on from 2022 and all the bad stuff that happened and there's a lot of optimism uh pun partly intended coming out of that the sound bite was that $100 million worth of tokens is going to these 500 projects that have contributed to the optimism ecosystem and so that was like a very eye-catching number I think for a lot of people biggest ever I think in web 3 public goods funding yeah exactly I mean earlier in the year we were talking about the goal of trying to get to $100 million in annual funding and all of a sudden this one round shatters that number so that was that was very exciting I think that that caught a lot of people uh who might not have been

following it closely by surprise uh going like a bit deeper into some of the things that I think anybody who who looked into it would would have observed is that um a huge amount of funding actually just went to open source software projects and that is not something that typically would get funded I think people would imagine that there would be kind of a um you know smaller coherer projects that are getting a large amount of funding what actually happened is that a huge number of Open Source software projects everything from developer libraries to kind of core protocol research to things that are focused on onboarding new developers they received really significant allocations and I think the

the message coming out of that was that if you do good work in the ecosystem it's going to get noticed and that is such a powerful message to be sending so coming out of it I know that everybody was uh you know immediately thinking about retrop 4 and what kind of impact they should be having between now and then to best set themselves up for success I don't know what were your impressions Jonas oh the the results I feel like um announc think the results has this nice small moment of Celebration uh of what we're doing here right um it's it creates this kind of we have this whole wave right on Twitter with everybody sharing what they received my whole timeline was made of this so like for

for a day I could really just dive in and enjoying enjoying the celebration um I think it set a very strong signal to to what we're going for uh with retop pgf uh and that these rounds will keep on coming I think in the aftermath of the results we learned a lot of great things that are important to consider as we continue down this road uh Carl I know you've you've written a lengthy nice blog post about this um I think a few things that that people touched upon is um the variance was too low so projects that were like highly

impactful extreme impactful uh didn't get like proportionally more than projects that were like medium impact uh this was like a very very clear Point uh another point that people started raising right is um why are the people that are generating sequence of Revenue which is used for retro pgf only getting around like 5% of the total tokens uh in this round um I think these were really really cool points Carl maybe you want to go and to also the kind of project versus individual comparison I think this was like something where where it became really clear as to some of the the the faults in this

allocation so one of the like main choices that you need to make is do you want to have a pretty flat distribution so basically any project is going to have a decent amount of confidence that they're going to get some funding and the ceiling is pretty low and the floor is pretty high so that's like what we call a peanut butter distribution you basically spread things pretty evenly across the whole mix and then there's a more traditional power law which you see in a lot of markets where you might have one winner that is getting 100x more than the next closest one and I think going into it there was probably an expectation that we were going to have more of a power law type distribution if you look at getcoin rounds if you look at even the past retrop pgf rounds it has had much more of that that shape one

of the things that happened during this round was that there was a big push in the fin hours to get as many projects over the line and there was a lot of cooperation among badge holders to try and identify projects that seem really good but might need an extra push at the same time just given the sheer number of projects that were in the round it was probably difficult for badge holders to do an initial allocation then step back and say actually does this make sense am I really funding things proportional to the amount of impact that I had it was just you know pretty labor intensive to go back in and update your ballot that way so those are probably just a couple things that that might have contributed to it but I think you know to to your point Jon is when people stepped back

and looked at the results there were some things that were a little bit surprising and the big one of course is that the whole engine of retop pgf is sequencer fees and so the projects are generating the most sequencer fees they you know probably should be getting a a decent share of of RoR pgf especially if they don't have any other way of of getting value capture and so my guess would be that if you were to set out at the beginning and basically come up with some saying maybe I think 20% or 30% should go towards these types of projects and maybe 20% should go towards education projects and then vote according to that kind of a framework versus let's just look at all these projects and then determine how much impact they've had and give them some

tokens you end up with a pretty different result so that was definitely one of the things that that came out of it optimism that's your impact and here's your profit like straight you get a piece of the economic pie because it's measurable and it is provably pushing the optimism L2 forward but then when you get into a little bit more human things things that aren't measurable things like education or or things like I'm building software in the optimism ecosystem that but that isn't directly connected to optimism that's when you get kind of get into this gradient of well optimism is ethereum and this is an ethereum public good uh and you and you start to kind of build these hypotheses of how this impact creates profit and and it becomes a little bit more of an

ex exercise and creating a hypothesis of of which you have assumptions and and that you're bridging a little bit and so what I'd be interested in in future rounds would just be like okay here's like you said here's an amount of of the retrop pgf round that will just go to to projects that have had sequencer fees and then here's another bucket for this type of impact and we can kind of sort of categorize these different hypotheses in in different ways and I'd be curious to see how that'll move the data around from the data that we have in R pgf 3 and if you have any reactions to that but that's where I could see it going 100 100% this feels like a nice segue to to talk a bit about like the major themes that we learned in running this experiment and I think one of them

is too broad of a scope um and and too many projects in this broad scope uh and so this resulted in a situation where everything gets put into the same bucket and you're trying to compare like um a contribution of somebody running a events uh to onboard new people to somebody that's like building something deep down in the stack right and it creates this um this cognitive overload in making your allocation um and I think the interesting thing about the about sequencer fees here is this was actually uh in the scope for retrop pgf so it was like if you went deep into the documentation it it was outlined as one of the things to reward one of the

things that is impactful to the optimism Collective but it's kind of the dma of if everything is in scope in a single round then kind of nothing is in scope right there is no Focus to reward these these things um and hand inand with that came kind of the inability to measure impact well based on like a subclass of projects um and I think the big learning here is what we're getting to and what I've kind of observed in different episodes is different types of impact have different types of measurements right and some impact is more subjective some impact can be measured in a much more like data driven way currently um we in in this application process we've

seen that it's been super hard to compare the impact of different projects due to the nature of like different metrics that were provided different sources of information here but what was very exciting I think was like Carl's Carl going deep on impact vectors and trying to focus on a subass of projects and evaluating them well uh Carl do you want to do you want to maybe give a brief Spiel on like what are impact vectors what did you do there in the reter pgf round sure let me show impact vectors basic idea is that there's some direction that you want to improve in so it could be getting more contributors to your project or getting more contributors to work on projects in the optimism ecosystem it could be driving

sequencer fees it could be onboarding your users the idea is you basically Define some kind of Direction and positive impact that you want to move in and then the important thing is you're actually able to find a number of projects that are all moving that direction and you can do some analysis about which ones are farthest ahead which ones are having more impact relatively so once you're able to like draw that lasso around a set of projects that are moving in the same direction then it becomes more of a statistics problem how do you actually want to determine what is really good what is uh an average you know set of results uh and then basically determine how want to let that uh feed feed in reward function and with uh the impact factors that we

looked at in retr pgf 3 what you actually saw was that there were some things which are pretty good predictors of popularity of project and then others which are much more aligned with say some of the impact goals that were stated in the user manual and that uh everybody felt they should be striving for I'm sorry to to interrupt you here Carl but I just wanted to note out that like um separating the reward distribution of these public goods projects from the popularity is like a white whale and I've been working on this for like four or five years we call this the kesian beauty contest it's where people just reward things that they recognize and are popular and it's like a white whale to to solve this so I just want to interject that at the fact

that you've you've pulled that thread out in the data I think is a major step forward I don't think we can we can solve it just yet because obviously products are popular for reason and you certainly saw here is that many of the most popular projects were ones that a lot of developers who were represented as badge holders or that were um you know really big pillars in the E ecosystem were contributing to so I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water but the important thing is that through these impact factors you can actually get signals about what products are having more impact in a particular domain and so even if you're only using them to say great let's find the 10 most impactful products that are driving sequenc or fees and let's compare that with the ones that have been around the long longest maybe I

combine those two data sets and say okay these are the ones that I want to make sure get an outsize reward because they've been around and they're contributing a lot to sequencer fees one of the things that I want to uh caution against is is having these impact vectors or any kind of objective function basically determine the allocation itself so you don't want to you you probably don't want to have just one vector and through that you're able to predict exactly how much reward you're going to get because then it becomes quite easy to game especially if it's not a very good indicator like like stars or downloads those are ones that if you really want to game it there's a pretty straightforward way to do that and obviously we don't want to create that kind of incentive and and coming back to the example of like sequencer fee generation

this is something we can measure very well today right um while while other contributions it's really hard to to measure to measure impact uh and I think the big or or one of the big takeaways at least for me personally for this round is if we split SP up the scope to be more specific run different rounds we can adjust the round design to the kind of state of how well we can measure impact within this scope um and I think this is really the step forward to not looking at this as like one big pile of problems but like separating the problems out into individual areas and then we can I think this is the biggest interesting shift go away from like popularity beauty contest Vibes um you

even though I would say like the the results were like very agreeable in around three at least for like the top 100 um move away from this and move to something that feels like measured impact based on kind of the values that the voters in the system are expressing right so we move away from like reviewing individual projects out of a big pool of projects but we get voters to express what do they think is impactful and what should be rewarded and how that's a good conversation to have because once you've decided roughly how much you want then the next question is okay which products we put in each of these buckets and then you can do the selection among the projects or figure out what types of impact matter most my immediate reaction is oh no more governance where we have to decide how

much goes in each bucket but I think it's going to make the badge holders job a a lot easier so be an interesting thing to try I I think um what has been very or what I was super impressed in with uh in this round is the the sheer commitment of batch holders to to try to do this job well and I think we've we've run surveys around like how many hours spent we've seen a lot of Engagement we've seen endless blog posts um we the the whole kind of discussion and conversation around round three is so broad um that this retrospective blog post which we're writing on the round is like an endless endless long paper on all the different important topics that we're covered and

uh really the trick here is we can make the voter's life like much easier um and really focus the discussion on something that's meaningful I think uh like if you see the outrage on Twitter around like this project received something or this project received something kind of picking and choosing out of a pool of 500 uh reflects the nature of the voting of individual reviews the conversation as you're saying Carl should be much more about like is this the right distribution that we want did this reward the types of impact that we want to see uh this is where we want to move things to I think of really a thing that um this round did very well compared to like previous rounds I I think taking taking a small Loop down down memory

lane three six months before round three we ran the second round of ret pgf and it was literally voting on 195 projects via one long form that didn't have uh that that didn't sum up your votes uh or that didn't like check that your inputs are correct I think aak you went you went through this experience so so you can probably Testament to like how much of a manual like MVP thing this was that we shipped uh and what I really loved about about run three what we saw is like this whole collection of Builders coming in building different tooling for the voters and it felt almost like a hackathon Vibe so we had like I think in total like six different teams building different components here um and one

cool thing is that we can now take this whole range of tools that we've built and make it a able to everyone and so what one of these is um for instance auk what we collaborated on with West that you're now shipping as easy retr pgf maybe you want to touch on that a bit one of the things that I'm really interested in is democratizing the tools that are used on the frontier by the people who are innovating new mechanisms to fund public goods obviously get coins known for quadratic funding um retroactive public goods funding I think optimism is pioneering and and one of the things that that we want to do is build a movement of more public goods funding and and funding for people who

are creating impact and and that creates a ground swell of cultural and technological artifacts that uh that support the movement and the momentum sort of compounds and um I saw an opportunity about halfway through the optimism the voting software one of one part of the voting software for optimism RPG retrop pgf 3 and and I came to you and a few others and flowed this idea of what if we white labeled it and we made it so that anyone could deploy it and run their own retrop pgf round um and and everyone seemed open to it and seemed to

to to see it as an opportunity to spread more retr pgf throughout the ecosystem and also I think you know there's maybe an OP opportunity here where if this becomes a public good for the ecosystem then if people PR new goodies into it then that comes back to optimism if you decide to use Easy retr pgf for one of the future optimism rounds and so there's kind of a loop a positive feedback loop here if we get it right anyway um if if anyone out there is listening and wants to run retr pgf for their ecosystem easy retrop pgf doxyz is the tool you can deploy it on your own you don't need me to do it you can just Fork it and deploy it on versal uh but if you want to kind of do it with training wheels then we're going to be offering a training

program that teaches people how to think about retro pgf and how to design a program optimism style and then we're going to have a cohort of people in March and April that are actually going to be running retr pgf rounds that are optimism style retro pgf rounds so it's a great joy for me to be at the frontier and be shipping the insights and software from the frontier back to the people who are busy with their day jobs of building their own ecosystem so that you know we can do we can we can give you the the train tracks and the train car to run retr pgf and you can just deploy it in your ecosystem so that's kind of two minutes on what we did I'm curious if you have any reactions to that Jonas love to love to see it um I know for instance the the um ma team is

is uh toying with like easy retop pgf um to see how we could have more or how how we could do like big improvements to the to the uh voting infrastructure that we're using so these are the kinds of the kinds of Loops that are s that are super fascinating to to observe I think the big the big theme here in in round three uh and just touching upon the nature of how we run retro pgf um is that we're truly trying to run this as a continuous experiment uh and I think the back the background on this is we run these rounds we learn a lot from them we write up these learnings and observations based on the feedback that we've received from the voters uh and then based on this we're making new

prioritizations of what we want to change in the next round I think this has been like my biggest um I think at the last conference we were at in ebol Def connect one of my biggest themes here was um we need to get better at like radical open learning uh we need to move away from an environment that feels like everybody's constantly celebrating themselves uh and the the greatness of their idea uh but never sharing what what goes wrong towards something where we are truly trying to learn together and iterate to towards summoning ether's Phoenix right um and so I think um I think we've seen a lot of valuable

feedback in this round both from voters as well as the BR Community uh sometimes this goes into like territory that feels like very pessimistic right it's trying to like discredit the nature of the program itself but I I think the the nice message to send out here right is like if um the optimism Collective can make these mistakes and learn from them uh anybody that's running these experiments can do the same uh so I think if if we do one thing in this round which is set the example to ship and iterate um and take this very seriously and others can learn from that I think we achieved a lot and we're going to see many more um many more people do run experiments that are like

very ious and audacious uh and less concerns about getting it right and being be being fine with with uh uh seeing a bit of the heat go around what you do one thing that is definitely happening right now and maybe you've seen some of this as well is that projects that were recipients are now thinking how can we do our own version of retr pgf so maybe they'll be using easy retr pgf maybe they will just find a way to look at their own contributors and do their own form of that but I think that the idea like the meme of retrop pgf has spread everywhere and even in web 2 ecosystems they're thinking ah like we could probably do this as well there's uh yeah Jonas and I have have talked a little bit about this

but um you know this idea of of public goods funding where it kind of starts to resemble like a series of veins or like aqueducts where you have like a major stream of funding picturing in the in the top left and it comes down and it breaks into three or four streams of funding and then those break into three or four streams of funding each um I'm really interested in this idea that people who could take their retro pgf rewards and then distribute them further in their communities from there using easy retr pgf or getcoin gr stack or you could do it in air table if you wanted to um and and what I think the value compounds there because each time one of these funds is distributed it builds the

meme of of public goods funding and impact equals profit but I also think that there's some valuable stuff here in that each there's this principle of subsidiarity where each Community kind of knows which contributor within that Community is pulling the most weight and so you want to have that locality of Distributing the funds locally according to who's having the most weight and you and if if at the top level you tried to solve that all at once you would just overwhelm everyone and and so what I'm really interested in doing is breaking down the problem in such a way that we can have Bottoms Up signals of what's what's providing value and also like top down bigger aqueducts of funding and and that's where I think it gets really interesting when this movement compounds at scale a good good example of this

might have been um in the retrop pgf round we saw a lot of um foraster related infrastructure apply obviously the forecaster Community is is probably way um way more qualified to judge which which piece of forecaster infrastructure has generated how much impact they notice much better than the Bolder the optimism citizens who are not necessarily users of forecaster and so if we can create a system as you said aukee where we we from like for like bottom up curation that solves this problem and I think um a lot of cool initiatives as you said I've heard from the pock team they're looking to run around uh just saw today the whacky team

uh starting their own stream via drips to their dependencies uh and so it will be really great to see if this this gets us to run more experiments yeah just to add on the example of of drips and wagy drips is also funding wagy so there's a a a co-funding stream where they're both dripping to each other um one thing I would love to touch on is Regen learnings doxyz to go back to your point about learning in public Jonas um I think that there's a huge opportunity for people who are writing these programs or involved in these programs to share their learning publicly and together that knowledge sort of

compounds the momentum across the ecosystem um and and so Carl and I launched this thing called regen learnings doxyz which is basically a way for us to bring other data scientists program designers a prior theorists to the table and just ship learnings from their ecosystems to each other and and so if you go to region learnings doxyz we're starting to just list out the learnings that different ecosystems have published maybe once we have enough of them we'll throw them into an llm and you'll just be able to ask the llm you know what's the difference between RPG F3 and RPG F7 uh one day but the main thing I'm looking for also is to connect people who have similar skill sets to each

other so like data scientists uh we have this data scientist in the getcoin ecosystem named Umar Umar what's up if you're listening uh and and like Umar is working out of this data source that we've built in the gitcoin ecosystem and Carl's working in this data source called OS Observer and we could join those together and and they can both withdraw from each other and then I think there's also an opportunity for data scientists to get connected to program designers and they have complimentary skill sets and they can provide value back and forth to each other so another result of impact season has just been democratizing the kind of conversations that I guess the three of us would have really um in in our DMS into regen learning so that more people can be at the table and be adding value to learning and it's just this dopamine

Rush when you a post like Carl you and I have shipped maybe two or three medium posts together and just democratizing that dopamine Rush of having a learning and having insight and giving it out to the ecosystem is is is part of what we're doing there anything to add there Carl 100% um nothing really to add one thing that I will say that I'm that that I that came up in one of our other podcasts is the idea that weaving is a public good the idea of being able to look across a landscape identify who's doing what bring them together and help them find meaning right now we're at the state where most of this is pretty hard to decipher unless you're you you're spending 100% of your time in the space so just knowing which telegram chats to be and which people to pay attention to

and so on is quite difficult and so there's a I have a lot of respect for the people that are able to look out there and say ah you seem to be doing this here's a person who can help you and weave those together it's it's a really under undervalued but incredibly essential part of bringing these pieces together yeah and then you know I'll just I'll just admit uh while we're doing this podcast in front of a thousands of people just hand to the sky uh it's also part of out of out of laziness for me where if I don't want to do something I can just kick it out to the group and and they do it for me uh like that sanki diagram that I that I dropped at zalu I'm not going to maintain that anymore regen learnings you guys you guys can maintain that and

I'll drop you some tokens in exchange for doing it I mean you see it working actually there's a a person who just popped out of the woodwork and said actually I have an idea for what to do and showed me a V1 last night so 12 hours after you put that out there there's already someone working on it all right that's amazing um yeah I mean I think that that's that's just like one of the amazing things about this space is that you discover you don't discover until you until you build in public and you learn in public is how many people are out there that share the same Mission as you and really want to see it happen and and you don't realize until you until you're not afraid of the criticism of of working in public and you get yourself out there do do you

find those people and so pulling more people out of the woodwork to to build this move in is is kind of the number one thing I'm trying to do it's a it's a it starts off as a single player game but then it becomes a multiplayer game real quick I think running there's a really interesting shift here I think you touched up on it Carl like um data data science is becoming super important to run these rounds uh just to evaluate impact we're seeing many more experiments and so I think these these types of initiatives really put special emphasis on actually shipping something and learning from it um or running simulations to understand something better and moving us out of the space that feels highly theoretical

and like ideas driven and I think if we can get to a culture that celebrates the the the the companies collectives individuals um that ship actual experiments that ship infrastructure that is used uh and we celebrate that and that becomes kind of a a rallying cry um and we we celebrate the learnings and the failures um that is that will get us to a very different state than celebrating the ideas and the great insights and like the uh uh the the the the kind of beautiful theory that we're outlining here you've you guys to to kind of move away from from round three and actually to the wrap up of this of this season you guys talked to a lot of

Builders talked to a lot of people that actually ship different public goods funding experiments uh so I think it's super super interesting to learn about um all the conversations that you had what were like the common themes that struck you that like stayed with you go for it yeah well okay so uh impact season is this is one of the last episodes of impact season and and part of the idea was to batch 10 episodes together the idea being instead of you know picking a bunch of different things hopping from civil resistance to climate to uh Portland localism that just like having

a season just about impact and trying to approach this meme of impact equals profit the value would compound by doing those together and and I definitely feel like we built we at least paint a picture in my mind of how we might do a better job of just measuring impact and and that helps us have a more data-driven path to impact equals profit so Carl the work that you're doing with OS Observer we talked to Raymond and Carl about us Observer I think that that was really great um I think talking to the ethereum attestation service guy Steve made me feel like there's a protocol where we could just all get our attestations of impact out there and then start to evaluate them and uh we also talked to Eugene and michall uh who

were doing sort of a survey of different grants programs out there and Joe and FES from plurality Labs who are who are running the grants program for arbitrum uh and I think that like what I'm starting to visualize in my mind's eye is a a double or a triple sided Market where there's people who are producing impact and then there's people who are rewarding impact and then there's this third category that we're just starting to bootstrap called the impact evaluator that is connecting what has impact to to to profit there and so it's the bootstrapping of that trip- sided Marketplace that's really in my mind's eye when I think about all of the stuff that we discovered in imp season for green pill I'd be curious for the same

question to Carl though Carl what do you think your major themes are from Impact season and uh thanks for being my ride or die co-host for the last 10 10 episodes that's been fun yeah I had a lot of fun I think a few themes to to build on what you said just then number one I think we've got to the point where people realize that the meta is to cooperate as opposed to try and invent a better standard or invent a fancier protocol snap for that uh and so you heard across all the guests they basically said oh we've noticed that someone is doing this and therefore we're going to find a way to coordinate with them we're going to find a way to either work directly on top of their protocol like the discussions that are happening now between ethereum anation service and hypers Sears and then in

communities that have actually tried using some of these tools and in some cases been a little bit frustrated say ah we want to do this but we didn't quite get what we wanted to they aren't going out and saying actually that inspires me to build something completely different or give up they actually want to go back in and try and fix it and and design a better experiment the next time around so I think that like that cooperation that you're seeing which is so rare like let's just be honest that is not typically how the world works and that is like the default culture that we've created here is so special um that was true across all the guess and then even you step back and you look back at the ecosystem and how other products are coordinating and you see that everywhere so I think that's that's amazing um one

thing that I I really respect about what both Juan from protocol lab said and um themes Joe from plurality Labs the two PLS is that you just need to take more shots on goal this this stuff is hard you need to you need to be able to think really long term and be able to deploy Capital at pretty early stages in the process and just plays a lot of bets because if this stuff were easy we'd already know how to do it and it isn't and so that's why we need to have as many smart people talented people trying to to work it out uh I guess the last thing that I think is just so clear now it was probably clear before but but uh since retor pgf and all the things that have happened um coming out of that I

think the idea that you're going to fund your dependencies that you're going to figure out what is the weakest link in your value chain and ensure that that is sustainably funded is something that everybody is talking about right now and you see it in the drips example you see it in the wagm example and I imagine thousands of other experiments that are happening right now so that is that is exceptional the fact that that has now become the default thing that you do in a very short period of time is really cool and when we talk with the the people from the chaos Community which is a um set of people have been trying to solve many of these problems around impact measurement um you know for for decades at this point they their eyes lit up when they heard that this was these were some of the experiments that

were happening in The Ether mucus system they said wow you're actually able to identify these things and there's a a value in funding them properly like making them sustainable that's that's incredible uh so I think that we actually might be at a point when we're able to thaw some of the relations between the the web 3 and the web ecosystems and if that is the you know the the export that we have from all of this that we're able to fund public goods sustainably across both web two and web 3 that would be exceptional yeah there's an Insight that uh comes from vitalic uh when we had him on green pill I think it was in it wouldn't have been like November or something like that but we were talking about what excites him that he feels like is not worked on enough and it was basically

getting all of the impact attestations out there in a common standard so that people can build on top of them and then he was also like start with open source software because right now most open source software developers don't know about crypto or just have a fuzzy awareness and think it's a scam because let's be honest a lot of crypto is a scam and if we can start to fund open- Source software not only is that hardening the digital infrastructure but it's actually a very influential and important set of of people to get involved in the crypto ecosystem um and and so this is actually just just to play it forward six months that's why we did impact season was because we wanted to talk about all the different ways that we were measuring impact and see how open source has been funded so uh vitalic thank you for

dropping that that thought in my brain and uh thank you to Jonas and Carl for for helping me to to execute this season so far but um I think that was just such a profound insight and I'm I'm hopeful that um by measuring and covering the impact out test stations happening in the ecosystem that we can play a small role in accelerating the uh the movement and also creating sort of like uh synapses between the neurons the different people who are who are building in this movement now know more about each other because of of the podcasts that we've done and um you know I would never take credit for anyone's work in the ecosystem but I think we can play a small role in accelerating It Forward by by covering it and in helping to build the movement so um yeah really excited about this being a multiplayer

game that the whole ecosystem is is working on and we can just kind of flash a light on it so that more people see it definitely strongly resonate with a lot of points that you guys made um especially right like running many experiments because this is too hard and you need like many iteration Cycles to get it right I think on the emergence of like more dependency funding what I find really interesting is we're getting to something where collaboration and funding public goods feels like the winning strategy uh it feels like the way to advance whatever you're doing uh to advance your ecosystem to advance the protocol that you're building Etc um and this feels very this to me is like an interesting

theme as it feels like very different than uh something that that resonates more in kind of altruistic nature in which you you might fund your dependencies or fund public goods because you're you're just a nice person or you're a nice project and what I've what I've heard from different um different companies projects Dows is that it's been hard to to to get um sign off on spending to fund dependencies or fund public goods uh and often these things get like booked as like marketing expenses because that seems to be like the core reason to do it just to like set the vibe right like show that you're value aligned and now with this whole theme that you're describing of impact measurement we can get to something

where this becomes the winning strategy and we can actually demonstrate right like if you run this retro pgf round you will see an in I think this is actually like the golden the Golden thing to get to if you run this retop pgf round if you run this quadratic funding round Etc you will see an increase of the production of goods and services that you need that Advance your costs um I think this is just a theme that will get us like that will speed up this whole development cycle because we will see much more kind of self-interest align with the interest of of the public kind of vibe another thing that that happened since when we recorded the first episode towards the end is that there was uh that there's been a lot of discussion

about client diversity in in ethereum and so if you look at the results of rgf3 one of the top funded projects with gu and since then there's been a pretty strong movement to ensure that we don't give too much concentrated um you know uh uh execution um sorry we don't have too much um execution uh running through gas because we want to ensure that um we're fault resistant that there's any kind of a bug that the um you know we don't have some catastrophic failure and so if we were to look purely at some of the metrics that we use going into the round which is that you want to reward projects that have been stable that have been secure that have been able to um be be you know stable infrastructure for

for the ecosystem and now what we know about actually wanting to fund as many alternative clients as possible I think that you would actually see potentially a different allocation coming out of that and so one of the things that's really important here is that you have more than one way of looking at the impact of something uh one one of the things that Jon or Jonas I'm really excited about is um moving from this perception that public goods is this granola hippie dippy hacky sack thing that we do out of altruism and you know by the way I plead guilty to all those things I live in Boulder Colorado I love Ultimate Frisbee in hacky saxs um but it to to it being a sustainable competitive Advantage for your ecosystem okay so the old way of thinking about public goods

funding is that oh that's just some that thing that that those hippies do and the new way of thinking about it is oh wait web 3 is a place where there are repeat interactions and possible win-wins among many smart participants and these ecosystems are all competing for developers and competing for talent to come work in them and the ecosystem that rewards the people who are having impact is G and captures the hearts and minds of these Builders is going to be the one that wins all of this stuff is betting huge on this idea of impact equals profit is a a sustainable competitive Advantage for these ecosystems and um you know so so I think that that moving from hey you do this for altruism uh you

do this for marketing to hey you do this because it gives our ecosystem a sustainable competitive Advantage is is one of the reasons why public goods funding is going to proliferate as one of the new meta most effective tactic availables for ecosystem building available out there and um you know getcoins goal is is is kind of to be the one that's offering the software and services and the best practices to these other ecosystems out there to to to make it happen so you know hit me up if you're if you're running an ecosystem and you want to figure out how to do public goods funding and by the way when we ask for Budget we probably won't call it public goods funding we'll probably call it like an ecosystem incentivization program and I'll point to Carl's blog posts to be like no we have data on how this creates more

impact in your ecosystem so it's just a little bit of how you package it that I think um that we're going to iterate a little bit on but the the tech is there and the movement is is there it's just a matter of packaging it so it doesn't look like this granola hippie dippy thing anymore throw throwing out a a loose a loose question here um what are some of the the the upcoming experiments things people are working on that you're the most excited about like especially like do you have like specific things like low lower hanging fruit for instance we talked about measuring the impact of Open Source software as as kind of the place to start are there examples like this that you found in in

running this season where it feels like this could happen in the next three months six months yeah I mean I think some of this stuff is already happening and um I'll just say that every time Carl publishes a new blog post it's like Christmas morning for me uh because I love data porn so maybe Carl I'll pass it along to you to give a first answer and then I've got another another few things I want to mention cool I I think the the work on the data stuff I feel that's almost inevitable at this point the real goal that we have is trying to democratize access so as you heard from from Raymond we care a lot about not just having open source code and open data but open infrastructure so that anybody can come in Access Data that's been cleaned and indexed and just get

right to trying to find meaning from it and making beautiful data visualizations from it so that is like really important in making sure that we have a lot people that are offering impact vectors in meaning as we do more and more of this type of experimentation the other thing that I really want to see and I've spoken to a few builders that are working on this and would love to support in any way that I can is trying to bring things that are right now not digitally native it could be attending an event it could be receiving some kind of education or onboarding work I'd love to see ways of capturing that either through attestations or other forms that allows them to slot in and start um you know being able to measure that impact as well the third thing that that

I'll say and I don't exactly know what's going to happen here but I think that we're going to start finding non-or ways of funding public goods and right now we are so used to this like shopping cart view of all of the public goods that exist in your ecosystem and choosing which ones you like and which ones you want to fund I have a feeling that next three to six months we're going to see some pretty Innovative new ways of thinking about identifying these are the things that you value and streaming funding to them uh plus one to everything that Carl said one of the things that I'm really uh interested in and it kind of fits right into Carl's theme of non skoric funding tools and just to remind the audience what that means skoric is like something that you would see in the old world non skoric is

Over the Horizon of what's possible so for example like from the perspective of someone in the 1980s Google a search engine is non skoric because it's it's a way of traversing information that couldn't have existed before the internet so when we say we're looking for the non- skoric public goods funding tools we're looking for the things that wouldn't be possible without cryptographic keys in everyone's hands and blockchains and stuff like that um anyway and and anyway so the nonk orphic thing that I'm really excited about is building a web of trust of impact attestations and what I think is powerful about that is that we solved with page rank uh which is a web of trust style system in which links vote for each other which websites are valuable and informative and Google has

resisted all sorts of spam attacks link spam attacks by using a web of trust based system imagine we have a world in which we're all attesting to each other's impact and the fact that I attested to Carl who attested to Jonas who attested to oh I got to pick a pick on someone uh um uh Umar from from the getcoin ecosystem that builds a web of trust where each vote enforces that specific Edge and it becomes very hard to spam and attack the system because you have to co-opt one of the people in the system in in order to to attack the system and um what what does it look like when we have a web of trust where every getcoin Grant every optimism

rpgfantasy and and and we've got this web of trust that has attestations on the attestations I think that we're going to really be able to build a decentralized view of what has impact and and what I think is going to be beautiful is that the data will be open source uh with Google and Page rank only only Google has the data of of the link in the web of trust and Google comes up with one page rank but we're going to be able to have uh Carl's impact rank in Kevin's impact Rank and they're going to be on different impact vectors and so that's the non skoric thing that I think is right over the horizon that I'm really excited to see I think it's going to be

on ethereum attestation service and maybe a little bit of Hy aperts in there in there also but I think that's going to be the deeply powerful nonchem morphic primitive that we'll see birthed in 2024 and hopefully we'll start to have impact in I don't know rpgfan getcoin grants 23 is is is what I'm here for but uh Jonas I'll turn the question back on you what are you really excited about exactly exactly that um that a thousand per. I think one of the interesting things here is we don't need to reinvent or collect a lot of new signals people are already in their daily interactions submitting a bunch of signals so an example of this if we want to measure the impact of callls block

posts most of them he publishes on mirror with an nft mint right together with taking a social graph like foraster we could get at least some loose understanding of like these are the people that are fre humans they are like users on optimism and they really like Carl's block posts uh and come up with measurements like this so we don't even it's not it's not purely about introducing new signals it's using what we already have and the the kind of big theme this goes into what you're talking about like RB of trust is one side of this it's it's kind of like all the same problem um the air drop problem is the same as the retrop pgf problem the Cil resistance problem is the same as the

retop pgf problem um it's all this like single class like it's it's all like the same problem set that we're trying to tackle here and the big the big shift from a user perspective is currently we think of um voting systems and especially public goods funding as this distinct in time process where users Express their preferences Right In A gitcoin system that is like quadratic funding you go in you express what projects you find valuable to the ecosystem and you do this during a round during kind of this distinct period in time where you vote what if we change this towards something where users are

constantly expressing their preferences in their in their interactions within this ecosystem in minting bar nfts in using a library to develop their contracts Etc and the the voting actually becomes the metagame of discussing what are the types of impact uh that we find valuable and how how should we reward them and this is not a new idea right I think we're not this is kind of the case if you go on forecaster or Twitter and you like posts right or you you spend a lot of time reading a post the algorithm already takes this into account um and and once we are there we can actually probably get rid of distinct voting rounds and it can become one continuous stream of

measuring and rewarding impact and I think this is kind of the the north star that we want to get to and The Simple Start is I think where where we will evolve in terms of R pgf is we have a class of impact that we already have signals for right right and the challenge becomes more of like what do we do with these signals how do we identify the impact vectors that we want to have how can users Express kind of their beliefs that they only want to reward open source projects or they don't want to reward VC funded projects um and then the next step is um and then from there we can go into like designing these rounds to fit kind of the areas that we're looking that we're looking into um So based on your question Kevin

this is this is exactly the thing I'm most excited about take us out of like subjective review phase even though we will be there for for a much longer time for a lot of contributions and try to push us towards web of trust impact measurement um allowing voters to actually Express their voting strategy properly not only by like making oneoff judgments on projects yeah plus one um I I really think that there's just going to be this this triple sided Market between people who are creating impact Supply and then people who are rewarding impact getcoin grants retr pgf but also giveth clear fund and a bunch of a bunch

of other stuff hypers certs and and then there's this these impact evaluators and everything I think that we're doing is bootstrapping that Tripes sided market right here we're building like almost like a a flywheel that that transfers energy between these three things and there's a network effect that's going to be built as as these things are built so know we'll have to do an impact season in 2025 and and see what has played out and what what hasn't but uh that's the view from 2024 and I'm really I'm really excited for it um I'm just realizing that we are one minute over and the podcast hosted me is like holy smokes we got to land This Plane you can tell this is going to be this is a good episode because we just went and I I lost track of time which uh which which rarely

happens it's against all of my podcast hosting uh instincts um maybe we could have uh final wrap-up thoughts uh and Carl go to you first great so let me just say first off thank you it's been such a fun Journey uh Ai and Jonas to go through over the past couple months doing doing the series uh a lot of people have come out of the woodwork saying that these these discussions have impacted them a lot I think they see that we're actually building some new Bridges between the Legacy world and web 3 through this three-sided Marketplace that we think should exist I think there's a lot of people who want to be more politically active who want to govern over things but they feel they left out of the process and I think that what retrop pgf has done is given people an amount of control where they can dial

that up if they if they so choose to or they can just observe and have some trust that the system is working so I think it's this really powerful experiment and example and I want to share that with as many people as possible so they can see that these are some of the things that people are working really hard at um I do worry one thing I worry about is if we get too good at it then it becomes a bit less fun because we've solved all of the you know the hard subjective problems that require people to fight it out on Twitter or in telegram chats but I think that's still a long way off uh so I'm really optimistic about what we're gonna be able to do I'm looking forward to retr pgf 4567 and all the learnings that are going to uh be synthesized into the

into the broader theum ecosystem J same question to you any wrap up thoughts a fun anecdote I throw out from some time to time is um if we announce the retrop pgf results and everybody's like over the moon about their allocation that means something is going wrong which is they they they should feel like they deserve this um and the the default should probably be to be like this is this is the right amount or this is too little um and it shouldn't feel like hand handing out uh just like appre like handing out appreciation uh so to your point to your point call if we get too good I think the the positive fives probably won't be too won't be as strong as they currently are um I think in in in

aggregate we're really moving into I I feel like we're really accelerating the speed of running these experiments um we're bringing in many more talented people into this problem set and we see a lot of collaboration happening between all all all kinds of different teams and trying to run these experiments together and I think the more we can we can get to fast iteration cycles and radical learning uh and and building in the open um the faster we will summon ether's Phoenix we can demonstrate that this is the winning strategy uh and it's not something we just do because because we're nice we're nice people uh and I think it's it's um it's been super fun

to see this this podcast take on this theme get all the builders involved and kind of spread this to a wider audience how about youy what are your takeways plus one to each each thing that each of you said I I think for me it's just like a certain amount of gratitude to just be here and to be observing it all and and to democratize access to the conversations that I have because I found it get coin like part of the goal with green pill has always been you know I get I get access to really smart people from like Daniel schmachtenberger to vitalic ruin and just like to access their brains and to shine a light on the best stuff in the ecosystem so I'm just gratitude have gratitude for for being here and gratitude to everyone for

showing up and building building this movement because I think it's maybe one of the most important things we could be doing with our with our waking moments and with our mental Cycles so I'll just end on that point of gratitude all right y'all well this has been fun I think I'll probably uh twist your arm to come back and co-host an impact season in 2025 or 2026 so I'll PL that thought in your minds now and uh thanks for helping me co-curate this season I will see you on the ethernet all right see you peace thanks for listening to the green pill.

network podcast we are featuring the people who build a coordination a network societ soety of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers using crypto to bring positive sum digital systems to the world if you value our work you can collect this episode at pods. medgreen pill please also remember to like subscribe rate and review this episode it helps us to build this cryptoeconomic movement for regenerative purposes um I hope you enjoyed the episode with Jonas and Carl I hope you enjoyed impact season let me know if you did or did not give me feedback on this season we will probably be doing moreon Seasons like this in the future about various themes out there just to cast some of the different ideas for Seasons that I want to do out there we are going to do maybe

do a season on different regen experiments experiments in in different regen niches out there we're going to be doing a season maybe on gitcoin 2.0 I would love to do one on regen Network States and maybe we'll do an impact season 2025 or 2026 so um give me feedback on impact season this is the first season that we've done and I'd love to hear from you all right peace and love see you next [Music] time