The Optimism Collective is a band of companies, communities, and citizens working together to reward public goods and build a sustainable future for Ethereum.

Optimism will dispel the myth that public goods cannot be profitable. Public goods (including public goods for Optimism and Ethereum) often go underfunded when incentives aren't properly aligned, forcing many to make trade-offs between earning a profit and building for the common good. The Optimism Collective is bound by a mutually beneficial pact, a vision that can be summed up with the equation Impact = Profit.

Impact = Profit

The Optimism Collective will deploy a new model for rewarding those who create or sustain public goods - retroactive public goods funding, to support projects and communities building for the common good.

Retroactive public goods funding is advantageous because it is relatively easy to agree on what is useful, and see who built it. It is a lot harder to identify in advance what will be useful, and which team will do the best job of building it. The possibility of an eventual exit payment can also encourage investors to fund initial public good development efforts until the usefulness is obvious, in the same way that the possibility of an eventual IPO or buy out encourages investors to fund startups today.

How is this going to be governed?

The Optimism Collective takes an experimental and agile approach to governance relentlessly iterating towards a system which stands the test of time. Initially, the Collective's model of digital democratic governance will consist of two houses: the Token House and the Citizens' House

Token House

Governance of the Optimism Collective began with the launch of the OP token and the Token House. OP was distributed to hundreds of thousands of addresses that engaged in positive-sum, community-oriented behavior with Airdrop #1. You can read more about the distribution criteria here.

As Token House members, OP holders are responsible for submitting, deliberating, and voting on various types of governance proposals. In carrying out these functions, OP holders may either vote directly, or delegate their OP voting power to an eligible third party.

The Token House votes on these proposal types:

• Governance fund grants

• Protocol upgrades

• Inflation adjustment

• Director removal

• Treasury appropriations

• Rights protection

  
  
  
  

Read here for more details.

Citizens' House

The Citizens' House is a large-scale experiment in non-plutocratic governance and retroactive funding of public goods.

The Citizens' House is responsible for retroactive public goods funding (RPGF). For more information about the Citizens' House, read the Overview. For details about RetroPGF 2, visit the RetroPGF 2 program details. For plans around identity and governance, see the Citizenship page.

What is described here is an initial experiment. The specifics of this system will evolve as the Collective grows.

Retroactive Public Goods Funding

Public goods help create quality communities, but many markets fail to adequately fund them. Why toil building free software for others to profit without any upside yourself?

Optimism is working to change outcomes for public goods contributors.

Retroactive public goods funding (RetroPGF) is Optimism’s process for funding public goods for the benefit of the Collective and beyond.

Optimism funds public goods with token treasury & network revenue

20% of the initial OP token supply is allocated to funding public goods through RetroPGF. And when a user transacts on Optimism, the profits generated from network sequencing can also be used to fund public goods. Better public goods means more development, which creates more revenue that can be directed to public goods.

Public goods supercharge Optimism

RetroPGF 2 will fund public goods that support development and usage of the OP Stack. Whether code or community, any public good that makes the OP Stack thrive can be elegible for RetroPGF.

RetroPGF is built into the fabric of the Optimism Collective

The Optimism Collective pioneered a new model of digital democratic governance by establishing a two house system. The Citizens’ House is responsible for allocating funds through RetroPGF.

Where should I start?

If you're brand new to Optimism, try checking out the guide to deploying a basic contract, It'll get you familiar with the core steps required to get a contract deployed to the network. Luckily, Optimism is EVM equivalent, so it's 100% the same as deploying a contract to Ethereum.

If you're a bit more familiar with Optimism and Ethereum, you can try walking through one of the various tutorials put together by the Optimism community. They'll help you get a headstart when building your first Optimistic project.

Creating an Optimistic NFT

An NFT ecosystem consists of creators (supply), marketplaces, and buyers/traders (demand) built on top of infrastructures that enable algorithmic generation of art, deployment of smart contracts and access to NFT market intelligence.

Supporting Optimism in your wallet

Optimism generally behaves like any other EVM-based chain with the exception of minor discrepancies related to transaction fees. These fee discrepancies are an inherent result of the fact that Optimism is a Layer 2 blockchain network that must publish transaction data to Ethereum.

Connecting to Optimism

Optimism shares the Ethereum JSON-RPC API with only a few minor differences. You'll find all of the important information about each Optimism network on their Networks page. You can choose to connect to Optimism via their rate-limited public endpoints, private endpoints from infrastructure providers, or by running your own node. Because of throughput limits, Optimisim recommend using private node providers (particularly Alchemy) or running your own node for production applications.

Canonical token addresses

The ERC-20 contract address for a token on Optimism may be different from the address for the same token on Ethereum. Optimism maintains a token list that includes known addresses for many popular tokens. You can see the same list with a nicer user interface here.

Transaction status

A transaction in Optimism can be in one of two states:

1. Sequencer Confirmed: The transaction has been accepted by the sequencer on Optimism (L2)

2. Confirmed On-Chain: The transaction has been written to Ethereum (L1)

Optimism is still working on the tooling to easily detect when a given transaction has been published to Ethereum. For the moment, they recommend wallets consider transactions final after they are "Sequencer Confirmed". Transactions are considered "Sequencer Confirmed" as soon as their transaction receipt shows at least one confirmation.

Transaction Fees

Optimisim aims to be EVM equivalent, meaning they aim to minimize the differences between Optimism and Ethereum. You can see a summary of the few differences between Optimism and Ethereum here. One of the most important discrepancies can be found within Optimism's fee model. As a wallet developer, you must be aware of this difference.

Estimating total fees

Most of the cost of a transaction on Optimism comes from the cost of publishing the transaction to Ethereum. This publication step is what makes Optimism a Layer 2 blockchain. Unlike with the standard execution gas fee, users cannot specify a particular gas price or gas limit for this portion of their transaction cost. Instead, this fee is automatically deducted from the user's ETH balance on Optimism when the transaction is executed.

You can read more about this subject here, or use this tutorial. The total fee paid by a transaction will be a combination of the normal fee estimation formula (gasPrice * gasLimit) in addition to the estimated L1 fee.

Displaying fees

Optimism highly recommends displaying fees on Optimism as one unified fee to minimize user confusion. You can do this by combining both portions of the fee (the L2 execution fee and the L1 data fee) into a single value presented to the end user.

Sending "max" ETH

Many wallets allow users to send the maximum amount of ETH available in the user's balance. Of course, this requires that the predicted fee for the send transaction be deducted from the ETH balance being sent. You MUST deduct both the L2 execution fee and the L1 data fee or the charged fee plus the balance sent will exceed the user's balance and the transaction will fail.

Optimist NFT

The Optimist NFT is a customizable profile picture project designed to help their community express themselves and introduce reputation across the Optimism ecosystem.

How it works

Optimists can create millions of unique combinations for their NFT. There are many different thematic sets, each of which tells a part of the Optimism story. Optimists will be able to unlock new features through participation in the Optimism Collective. Learn more.

How to mint

The Optimist NFTs is currently in beta and currently only voters in Retroactive Public Goods Funding round 2 can mint.

Starting in early 2023, each month, several hundred active addresses will be invited to mint. Eventually, Optimist NFTs will be widely available to mint and customize as the Optimism Collective grows to welcome the entire crypto family.

A canvas for builders

The Optimist NFT is one of the first applications built on top of the AttestationStation, a simple reputation layer on Optimism. The AttestationStation is an accessible data source for anyone building with reputation. Anyone can build on top of this reputation layer.

Eligibility for future rounds of the Optimist NFT public mint will be determined by participation in the Optimism Collective and data recorded in the AttestationStation.

To start participating in the Optimism Collective, follow @OptimismFND on Twitter or visit Optimism's documentation to find apps that the community is building with the AttestationStation.

What is the AttestationStation?

The AttestationStation is an attestation smart contract deployed on Optimism.

The goal of the AttestationStation is to provide a permissionless and accessible data source for builders creating reputation-based applications. By enabling anyone to make arbitrary attestations about other addresses, we can create a rich library of qualitative and quantitative data that can be used across the ecosystem.

How can you go from attestations to sybil-resistant identity?

Attestations in the AttestationStation are on-chain and can be used by other smart contracts in a variety of applications. Instead of having a single entity owning user data and identity, the AttestationStation is a graph of peer-to-peer (p2p) attestations.

The first step to get from attestations to sybil-resistant identity is to grow the number of attestations in the AttestationStation. To do that, Optimism is taking a two pronged approach by growing the number of:

• Trusted attestations: These attestations are made by organizations like Gitcoin, DegenScore, Otterspace, etc. attest about individual community members.

• Social attestations: These are attestations from one address about another. Eg zain.eth says kathy.eth is a colleague, kathy.eth says will.eth is a friend, etc.

Anyone can then take the graph of p2p attestations from the AttestationStation and run computations like EigenTrust over the set of data to derive identity sets on top of a purely subjective web of trust.

To build a robust, trustworthy identity network, these computations will be run iteratively. Optimism can start with a purely subjective web of trust, and use that starting point to derive a larger web of trust, and so on —they can begin to establish a credibly neutral reputation that is entirely peer-to-peer.

How is the AttestationStation different from other attestation products?

The AttestationStation is deliberately dead simple and serves as an invite to ecosystem contributors to come build an open-source and permissionless attestation graph together.

Creating this system in a decentralized and open-source manner is important because it allows for greater inclusion and representation of different perspectives. This can help to ensure that the system is fair and accessible to all, and that it accurately reflects the diversity of the communities it serves.

Tracking Optimism