Kiwi News has received an allocation of 28,318 OP in Optimism's latest retroactive public goods funding.
As an open-source community of contributors, besides Mac and me, there have been many others who were instrumental in having the project succeed. Freeatnet set up an alternative client that is running to this day; Carlos built Kiwi Search, which is a core part of the product offering. Rainer built an entire Dune Dashboard. We've had many active contributors and curators!
It’s fair to say that this risky work from individual open-source contributors is what makes the Kiwi News community special and sets it apart from more traditionally incorporated entities.
While we admit that equity is the greatest performing interest-bearing instrument, we are truly more excited about giving back to those who have helped us build the product and protocol by spending their actual time working on it.
Hence, in two prior internal retroactive public goods funding rounds, we’ve already paid out small amounts of our revenue to around ten of our contributors. This happened in August and October 2023, with another round going to conclude on Monday.
For the uninitiated, our internal retroactive rounds have, of course, been hosted with much less allocatable capital than, e.g., Optimism’s last. For comparison, we’ve shared a total of 1.2975 ETH, while OP dropped 100M USD on the ecosystem just in their last round!
However, now, with Kiwi News receiving 28k OP from the Optimism Foundation in their latest round, we also sense the obligation to reward our past contributors for their share of contributions to Kiwi.
Hence, Mac and I are happy to announce that we’re sharing 10% of all our OP RetroPGF allocation with the community. That’s 2,831 OP or about $9,000 as of 5th of February 2024.
Do I have a share in OP’s retroPGF allocation?
We will consider all prior ETH allocations to individual contributors. So, if you’ve received ETH from us in the past, you’re most likely eligible.
In summary:
Round 1 happened in July/August 2023. There wasn’t a public vote; instead, Mac and I decided who would get how much.
Round 2 was a proper Kiwi RetroPGF round on prop house that happened in November 2023.
Round 3 is a proper KiwiRetroPGF round on Snapshot that's happening in February 2024.
If we summarize everyone’s earnings from those rounds, here’s a breakdown of allocations per contributor. That's without properly factoring in the current round, which might also make more contributors eligible.
Breakdown:
Freeatnet.eth: 0.65 ETH (+ ongoing round)
Matallo.eth: 0.325 ETH
Pugson.eth: 0.1 ETH (+ ongoing round)
Kenny: 0.1 ETH
pierrepauze.eth: 0.0625 ETH
Caroline: 0.05 ETH
Mishaderidder.eth: 0.05 ETH (+ ongoing round)
seanhart.eth: 0.05 ETH
Brais.eth: 0.02 ETH
Alexpalmer.eth: 0.02 ETH
Cypher.eth: 0.02 ETH
Additionally, there’ll be the values of this round’s receivers.
We’ll sum them up, and then each contributor’s share for the 2,831 OP is essentially 2,831 * (share_ETH / total_ETH) OP. However, please don’t take this for granted yet, as we’ll release a more detailed document with the canonical math when it is time.
Details on token streaming
Kiwi News’s allocation of OP is vesting linearly until May 5th, 2024. You can see the details of this on our Superfluid profile.
To keep the risk of price changes low while still fulfilling our bureaucratic norms, we’re planning to allow invoicing individual contributors bi-weekly. The reason is that we don’t want to artificially hold a contributor’s allocations of OP when they might already want to sell them for a more stable currency, etc.
To keep the paperwork manageable, however, one constraint is that the unrealized EUR value of the invoice must be above 100 EUR to avoid many numerically small invoices and their bureaucracy overhead.
Am I eligible to claim my OP share?
All those who are eligible to claim their share of OP have been added or invited to a Telegram group called “Paid Kiwi Contributors.” In there, we shared the details of being eligible. Basically, you have to fix your past paperwork so your accounting is in place.
Why are we doing this?
We do believe in real risk-taking, and we consider our time to be the most valuable and democratically spendable resource everyone has.
In announcements and on social media, we’ve already talked about the detrimental outcomes that (ad)venture capital can have when building products. This past low-interest rate decade, there has been a shortage of good investment opportunities and an oversupply of risk-seeking capital in the market. This led to investors scrambling, making huge bets, but being hard-pressed to do proper due diligence. It also led to the infamous spray and pray practice of wanting to achieve a few outsized results in an otherwise low-quality cohort.
We think that, momentarily, taking this money (venture capital) to build products is a worse option than taking our user’s money and addressing their problems directly. If we take VC’s money, we’re fundamentally serving their interests. If we take our users’ money, we’re serving their needs.
This has become part of the project's DNA.
And we continue to stand firmly behind this critique. Questionably raised and sloshing around; low-interest rate capital is a lower form of interest-bearing capital than the precious time of our contributors. Serving paying users automatically aligns us with the most important issues. We speak to users if sales drop or users are dropping off, and if we do the right thing again, there are more sales and more using our product.
But all of the above is also why you cannot buy equity in Kiwi News using Dollars. The door is open for business and so you can be part of our community and you can be rewarded in retroPGF rounds. But there's no pay to win.
And so, while some might see this work as easily dismissable or non-serious, we consider it an exciting responsibility that may bring about further dynamism and growth in our community.
We hope that we're making all of you happy with our contributions to the community, and we commit ourselves to continuing to do so in the future.
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