The Optimism community welcomes community-based projects, including NFT communities, content providers, and beyond. This document is drafted to provide guidance on how community-based projects can increase the competitiveness of their grants proposals for Growth Experiments. While no project can be guaranteed a grant in any Cycle, following the guidance in the guidance below can help projects maximize their competitiveness.

Reasonable fit between size of grant request and scope of community undertaking

Proposals should select grant size requests that are reasonably proportional to the project’s existing community and to the existing community’s commitment to using Optimism. Applicants will tend to have a greater degree of success if they can demonstrate that a grant will incentivize their community to increase their engagement on Optimism.

Community Engagement

Community engagement means that the members of the community who receive rewards from the grant will increase their long-term participation on Optimism. Some ideas of how to structure rewards incentives to increase a community’s long-term participation on Optimism, include:

• Incentivizing members to participate in governance within their community and rewarding them for on-chain voting within the Optimism-based collective.
• Rewarding community members for creating content on the proposer’s platform.
• Setting up collaborations with protocols / DeFi projects
• Promoting public goods funding (e.g., x amount of mint goes to x public goods fund).

There are many creative ways to use rewards to incentivize long-term commitment to Optimism’s ecosystem.

Engagement does not mean pure transaction volume. If rewards are passed on to community members only for the community members to sell their OP tokens, the Council views such activity as mercenary engagement. Mercenary engagement attracts short term users whose missions are not as well aligned with those of the Optimism Collective as long-term participants.

Community Undertaking

The scope of the community undertaking relative to the size of the grant is an important consideration. An NFT project that can substantiate that it has a community that devotes considerable time (on average) to participating in community governance, events, dialogue, etc., that NFT project may be able to utilize a higher rewards amount to further the mission of increasing the Optimism user base. NFT projects that are unable to show significant participation and commitment by their community are less likely to present a strong case for a substantial grant size.

While it is not required, strong projects may demonstrate the fit of their scope with the grant size request by presenting data that suggests strong engagement. Consider the following metrics:

• average governance participation per NFT-holder;
• average, min and max # of NFTs held per user;
• number of NFTs distributed vs. to be distributed

Content creation projects might include information on:

• cumulative amount of content produced by their communities to date;
• number of engagements per unit of content;