Optimism allocates $3 billion for grants to its blockchain developers

Optimism, the Ethereum layer-2 scaling network, has set aside $3.3 billion worth of its Optimism (OP) token to be granted to important contributors in the blockchain ecosystem. The Optimism Collective, the chain’s governance and community arm, announced that 850 million OP tokens will be distributed in four rounds starting in May and continuing until 2024. Bobby Dresser, the Chief Operating Officer of the Optimism Foundation, stated that 20% of the initial OP token supply, or 850 million OP, has been allocated for funding, with 40 million OP already distributed in three previous rounds. The fourth round will focus on retroactive public goods funding (RPGF), where the community will vote on projects that have shown value and deserve tokens. Rounds five to seven will reward infrastructure, governance, and development tooling contributors, with anyone contributing to improving Optimism being eligible for funds. The final round will conclude in mid-November. Retro funding is a source of funding for service projects or individuals who contribute to the blockchain or crypto community without expecting a profit. In the previous funding round, data aggregators DefiLlama and L2Beat, token approval revoking tool Revoke.cash, and blockchain investigator ZachXBT were among the recipients of the 30 million OP tokens. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin praised Optimism’s commitment to public goods funding and expressed his hope to see more projects adopting quadratic funding and RPGF rounds in the future.