https://gov.optimism.io/t/upcoming-retro-rounds-and-their-design/7861/17

So I got mixed feelings on this one too. Mostly negative I am afraid. From both my roles. On the positive note I believe this will make it easy to resign from one of the roles and bring clarity and peace of mind to me. So let me start.

Lefteris the founder of rotki – grantee

As a grantee rotki has been favored by the collective in all the RPGF rounds so far. rotki is an opensource public good, user facing project with a copyleft opensource license (AGPL v3). The collective has recognized our impact and rewarded us. Something for which we are immensely grateful. The biggest part of our developer salaries comes from the OP we have received.

We are first and foremost a consumer facing application though.

Contributions which fall outside of the scope of upcoming retro rounds include consumer facing tools, education initiatives and events.

According to this post we are no longer eligible.

This is sad to see.

Yes I can make rotki fit any of these 4 categories with a little bit of massaging and depending on exact criteria.

• Onchain builders: We decoded superchain transactions for multiple protocols and deal with all their quirks to attract more users using optimism onchain
• Governance: Rotki is also a blockchain explorer showing your activity onchain and does support optimism governance with all its quirks. And by god there is a lot of quirks we had to work around. Those who build governance dashboards know.
• Optimism stack / dev tooling: We are decoding all superchain transactions, understanding their data and providing opensource decoders for them that can be reused by any other project. This probably fits more to dev toolign than optimism stack though as we don’t build on the stack itself.

But the point here being that mainly rotki is indeed a user/consumer facing app and massaging a grant application to apply only with specific parts of our codebase (say only the governance stuff, or only the open source code decoding optimism stuff etc.) feels dishonest/scammy and just trying to milk Optimism for more money.

As a project we believe in integrity above all else. So unless explicitly specified and verified by a foundation representative that we would be eligible for a category we won’t be applying.

We want to thank the Optimism collective for all the support so far. Your support has made a difference for us

One feedack as a grantee would be that all the communication so far has been one of recurring sustainability if a project keeps building on optimism and the superchain. This new development seems to break with this promise and throws projects under the bus.

Lefteris the citizen – badgeholder

Please don’t judge rotki harshly because of my feedback here. Lefteris the citizen, is not Lefteris the rotki founder.