In episode 48, Mark Tyneway, Co-Founder and Systems Engineer at OP Labs, shares his vision for Optimism, RetroPGF , and the importance of Governance. Here are some selected excerpts from the interview:
Podcast 48 [Bridged] - Mark Tyneway — Green Thru
Mark Tyneway: There are often situations where one solution appears obviously better, but it requires a massive behavioral change to be truly beneficial. For instance, consider carbon emissions. If one country reduces its emissions, it could harm its economy. However, if all countries continue to emit carbon massively, it creates uncertainty for the future. We don't know how this might affect weather patterns and potentially destroy significant cities. We need to be able to express credible commitments so that people can coordinate and steer us away from the path we are currently on.
With blockchain, you can programmatically set and commit to conditions. This opens up a new level of trust and coordination, not just among individuals, but potentially even for larger entities like cities or nation-states.
The long-term vision of Optimism is to evolve capitalism. I believe that capitalism in its current form is very inefficient at allocating capital. There are ways to accumulate a lot of capital without necessarily creating a lot of value. We need to upgrade capitalism to a smarter version that has a better view of who is creating value and where the value is flowing. The idea of 'impact = profit' is central to this Optimism vision. We believe that capital allocation mechanisms should reward those that are impactful.
Retroactive public goods funding, in my opinion, is the most important mechanism in the entire web3 space. It's a capital allocation tool designed to effectively allocate capital. Instead of giving money ahead of time based on promises of work to be done, we look backwards in time. We identify things that have had an impact, assess the extent of that impact, and fund them appropriately.
The long-term vision is to start funding physical things like roads, houses, and education systems. We believe that we need to move away from the self-referential blockchain community and start funding real-world things
For those who don't have the resources to start to create public goods without getting paid, we will have a mechanism for this,( It’s called "project tokens" - However, it's not yet implemented.) In the future, a prediction market of the result of the RPGF might come into play. If you don't have the resources to build public goods without getting paid, you can create a "project token". The governance could commit to buying these tokens at a certain price rather than giving you the RPGF. This allows entrepreneurs to sell some of their tokens for runway. Ultimately, the price of these "project tokens" could be seen as a probability of success.
Unlike most blockchain projects that see governance as a liability, we at Optimism see it as our special sauce. We aim to create an entity that can make decisions and allocate capital more effectively than anything else in the world. We want to have the zero to one moment with blockchain governance.
We are trying to take a lot of learnings from the past and incorporate them into our governance system. We have a forum, there's rules, we have a lot of people participating in it. Out of all of the crypto projects, we definitely have one of the more active governance systems. We definitely put a lot of focus into it. There's definitely this possibility to create this entity that is able to make decisions very, very effectively and grow and allocate capital more effectively than anything else in the world. And that is what we're trying to do.