Zora has been one of the largest recipients of retroactive funding. It's well deserved. Zora built the creator on ramp to crypto. Zora pays out $2M/month in rewards to creators, curators, collectors & devs. Despite these rewards, indie devs like me, who build tools & platforms for independent creators find ourselves receiving little to no funding as the majority of rewards flow to power law winners like Mint.fun, Daylight & the official Zora UI. How can Zora use these retro funds from OP to maximize their impact on the thriving community of indie builders & hackers building open source tools for Zora's Network/Protocol & UI?
Before jumping into the details, let's start with definitions of Proactive vs Retroactive funding.
Proactive - issued BEFORE devs build/mint
Retroactive - issued AFTER devs build/mint
Chains like Polygon focused on Proactive funding. This led to a $1M grant to Mint Songs which went entirely unused and ended up getting returned to Polygon. Meanwhile, Base has grown a thriving ecosystem of builders with small, retroactive, funding of 1-5 ETH with the promise that if you build on Base you will be rewarded. Retro funding reduces spam & waste by only rewarding builders for finished products over empty promises of future builds. It is easier & more effective to measure and reward impact retroactively than proactively.
I suggest a simple 80/20 split between Retroactive/Proactive funding. This matches Base's focus on rewarding builders with small 1- SETH grants. Base has seen a major influx of new devs via
Builder Grants - targeted funds
Rounds.wtf - social-based community voting
Buildathons - in real life (IRL)/event-based community voting
Each of these mechanisms can be used to reward contributions both proactively & retroactively, depending on which part of Zora's stack/ecosystem they want to incentivize builders' attention.
Where does Zora benefit most from the builders' contributions? At the network level (mints on Zora Network) or at the protocol level (mints on Zora contracts across the superchain)? Where is Zora seeing the majority of their revenue? On Zora chain mints & sequencer revenue or mints across the Superchain? Looking at the Protocol Rewards Leaderboard we can see Zora network brings in the most rewards with Base network as a close 2nd. Personally, I have found building on Zora protocols on the Base network to be the most rewarding combination for builders to maximize funding and distribution of their work.
The Superchain has already made it clear the impact of indie builders on Zora, Sound, Manifold, etc. will go to the big protocols rather than directly to independent contributors, I have so far been very vocal about how this incentivizes builders to leave shared protocols in favor of home-rolling their own to apply for retro funding. I believe composability should be incentivized. Zora has publicly announced they will redistribute any retro funds received back to the community. I am excited to see how much funding Zora receives & how effectively they distribute these funds to incentivize builders in the community.
Ours truly,
