Unveiling FIL-RetroPGF-1: Retroactively Funding Filecoin Public Goods
Today, we’re thrilled to announce the first round of retroactive public goods funding, FIL-RetroPGF-1! The first round will award 200,000 FIL to recognize impact achieved by contributors to the Filecoin network.
This is a huge step forward for the Filecoin network. Many critical components of blockchains depend on open source and public contributions: miner client implementations, protocol research and development, and user documentation, to name a few. But public goods are by nature non-excludable and non-rivalrous and therefore, inadmissible to the same means of funding as private goods, leaving invaluable contributions to open source networks under-recognized.
RetroPGF is an upgrade to Filecoin’s core economic mechanisms that addresses this gap in funding. It sets out to fund contributions that have generated recognized impact for Filecoin using Optimism-style retroactive public goods funding.
In essence, fund in recognition rather than anticipation: build it, and they shall fund.
The Funding rounds will be sequential and adaptive to allow experimentation and future evolution of the program. At a systems level, FIL-RetroPGF is a way to set the course for the network in a mechanistic, iterative, self-improving, and decentralized way.
We aim to have ~2 rounds per year, encompassing:
- Feedback and improvement loop
- Testing, then scaling
- Time-boxed attention moments
Each round will follow the Optimism template:
- 🪪 select badgeholders
- 📝 applicants submit projects
- 🗳 badgeholders vote
- 📊 calculate & publish results
- 💰 fund the projects
- 🤔 reflect & improve the system
The badgeholder selection process for the initial round will include input from various stakeholder groups across the Filecoin ecosystem, with subsequent rounds opening the badgeholder pool further and fine-tuning to fit the ecosystem’s evolving needs best.
Anyone can nominate a project that has achieved impact in the past 6 months in one of the following categories:
- Infrastructure & Dependencies
- Tooling & Utilities
- Education & Outreach
- Protocol Research & Development
- Collective Governance
- Products & End User UX
- Other (for important contributions that evade any above category)
The iteration begins today. Have a project you’d like to nominate? You can do so on Github here.
In the first round FIL-RetroPGF-1 aims to distribute 200,000 FIL, with plans to grow the program substantially in the future. For more on FIL-RetroPGF-1 check out this talk at FIL Dev Summit, and more documentation on processes incoming soon. Extending a huge thank you to all nominators, applicants, badgeholders, and funders for stewarding this important initiative to encourage and reward building public goods that push the Filecoin network forward.
