CMU Governance: Optimism Cycle 11 Recap
Welcome to Governance
Governance at the Carnegie Mellon University Blockchain Club has never been more active. We mainly contributed to Optimism Governance. We voted on two major proposals, received 1750 Optimism tokens as retroactive delegate rewards for Season 3, analyzed case studies of rejected and passed proposals, and created a metric system to quantitatively assess a proposal and aid in the decision to vote for or against it.
In the fall of 2022, CMU Blockchain had no real governance team, and the odds of participating in governance for one of the most prominent protocols seemed slim. However, with five dedicated students who met at 10 am every Sunday, we established a framework for future semesters of governance within the club.
Below, we share the proposals we voted on and our reasoning behind them.
Optimism Proposals
Upgrade Proposal: Bedrock
We evaluated the Bedrock Upgrade Proposal primarily by its potential impact through technical upgrades, consideration of security vulnerabilities, and the go/no-go criteria to ensure a smooth transition and address any concerns during the upgrade process.
Regarding impact, the Bedrock release aims to significantly enhance the Optimism L2 network, improving its performance, security, and compatibility with the Ethereum ecosystem. The substantially lower transaction costs following Bedrock performance improvements will drive higher adoption of Optimism, and implementing a modular architecture will greatly benefit ecosystem developers. The technical advances set the stage for a multichain future.
For the action plan and go-live criteria, there is limited downtime expected with the upgrade (i.e., 4 hours) and no loss of historical data. The initial Sherlock audit contest and proposed follow-up to test any bug fixes are also crucial for the network’s security.
Overall, there was a lot of support from the community and Optimism partners, which signaled the potential to benefit the wider community.
Delegate Suspension: Fractal Visions
We evaluated the proposal using the evidence presented and whether or not the actions committed in the evidence were in accordance with the code of conduct.
The Optimism forum presented evidence against “Fractal Visions,” a delegate, cited issues including doxxing another individual in the Optimism community and making racist comments. We found that this evidence is substantial to the claim and believe a 3-month suspension is appropriate for the code of conduct violation committed.
General Voting Schema
We decided to start with one set of metrics to test it for future voting cycles before we individualize new categorical systems per project (i.e., finance, NFT, social club, etc.). Here are the categories we found significant, the weight, or importance, of each category to the decision-making process, and the explanations for the weight.
The metrics enable a simple, consistent, and objective method for analyzing project proposals. These rules promote effective communication and collaboration between our governance team and those seeking funding. We assigned weights from (0–1], with higher weights indicating greater importance to the voting decision.
If a proposal doesn’t fit the ranking mechanism, as the ranking system is only a general model, we will have to judge the proposal on a case-by-case basis. We plan to grow and adapt these rankings continuously.
Conclusion
None of this would be possible without every team member’s contribution to this ongoing project. We want to also thank the team at Andreessen Horowitz for providing us with this opportunity, Ross Shuel as our point of contact, and the Optimism team for their hard work. We also want to give a special shoutout to our MVP of governance this semester Emma Kwan. She will be graduating this spring, and we wish her the best!
We look forward to the cycle 12 voting period and future participation in governance. Please email blockchain@cmu.edu if you’d like to connect about partnerships.
Sincerely, The Carnegie Mellon Governance Team.
Emma Kwan, Ram Potham, Victor L. Rodriguez, Tanay Venkata, khushi
