Council Milestone Assessment Procedures

Each grant proposer will be required to submit a set of milestones by which the community can judge the progress of the proposer’s project. Milestones enable the proposer and the community to achieve consensus on discrete indicators of good-faith effort to achieve the aims set forth in a proposal.

Each project may have benchmark milestones and a small number of critical milestones.

Benchmark Milestones

• Benchmark milestones mark important points on the proposer’s roadmap for accomplishing their aims.
• Benchmark milestones are meant to enable the proposer to display success to the Optimism community and for the Optimism community to monitor grantees’ progress.
• Completion of benchmark milestones is not required for full award of a grant; rather, the completion or non-completion of benchmark milestones will inform the community on a proposer’s commitment to the Optimism community and may factor into future grant decisions.
• The quality of benchmark milestones will factor into the Council’s assessment of the quality of a grant proposal.
• An example of a benchmark milestone is: “Our project will reach 100 users by X date.”

Critical Milestones

• Critical milestones demonstrate good faith effort to accomplish the aims set forth in a proposal.
• Critical milestones are meant to provide the Optimism community with satisfaction that the proposer has taken actions consistent with those outlined in a successful proposal.
• Non-completion of critical milestones will be grounds for the Council to recommend that Token House revoke any remaining grant tokens.
• On-chain data or other publicly verifiable information is favored for the determination of critical milestones.
• An example of a critical milestone is: “We will deploy X smart contract on Y date.”

Builders: benchmark milestones should be designated for monitoring over the course of one year. Proposers need not articulate critical milestones that require a full year to accomplish; however, the quality of benchmark milestones that enable the community to track project progress may be taken into consideration by the Sub-Committee when scoring a grant application.

Growth Experiments: benchmark milestones should be designated for monitoring over a timeframe articulated by the proposer in the grant application, which should encompass the duration of the distribution of the grant and beyond. Critical milestones should be designated within a 3-6 month period after the date of grant distribution.

Milestone Reporting

During the Final Review of a grant cycle, the Council will determine a set of benchmark milestones and critical milestones with each grantee eligible to receive a grant (based on the final ranking of grant applications). The Council will publish a list of approved milestones to accompany the Grant Review Roundup in the following format: