Hey all, I just finished voting. And I want to share my rationale + some extra thoughts about the round.
I will not share my exact vote allocation because I do not believe it is relevant to my reasoning. I must also admit that I believe I could have done a better job, but other pressing responsibilities have prevented me from devoting as much time as I feel is necessary to thoroughly evaluate all the projects.
My voting rationale
First, the projects on my ballot (in order of votes allocated)
- Nimbus
- Erigon
- Protocol Guild
- Dappnode
- eth-docker ↔ Obol ↔ Lido integration
- Obol DVT integration into Stereum
- GotEth
- Solo Staker List
- Ethereum on ARM
- College DAO
- Bronze Techne Credentials Speedrun
- ETHVeracruz
- Ethereum Mexico
- NodeBridge Africa
- restake.watch
- SEEDNodes
- Squad Finder
- ETH Daily
Honorable mention to ETH Kipu, that wasn’t in my ballot due to personal COIs, but I believe have a solid education program as well.
As you may notice, there’s a clear distinction of categories within my ranking. Projects 1 to 9 are Infra/Integrations, and the rest can be considered Education & Community.
Starting with the obvious, those have had the most impact in the Decentralized Operator Ecosystem, beginning with client teams, followed by the Protocol Guild (which is valued slightly lower as it’s some sort of intermediary if you will), and followed with integrations and others that are the distributors of that infra in the supply chain of node-running software.
These were followed by projects doing education/community. Most of which even if I believe that they do a really good work, were harder to evaluate due to the indirect effects they have on people (and tbh they didn’t make it that clear on their application either, that’s something to improve for the future).
In general there’s a need for applicants to spend more time and learn how to pitch their projects. Most failed to portray an image that made us, the delegates, have a tangible/measurable understanding of their impact, and therefore we are forced to evaluate with more “vibes” than I would like to—this is specially true for communities, most of which used the usage of the product as a metric of impact; imo completely irrelevant as we should never pay for/subsidize that (except in very specific circumstances and with clear growth targets).
As I offered already, if any project wants to chat about improving, please do reach out. I have a notebook with notes of all the projects, I’ll do my best to contact a few but I can’t really promise that.
Please note that some exceptions apply, namely projects that were ranking higher or lower because particular circumstances (mostly very big or small demonstrated/perceived impact).
For the projects I did not choose & considerations for future rounds
If your project is not on my ranking it’s due to any of the following reasons (or a combination of multiple):
- Not relevant to Obol or not enough reasons to justify impact
- For profit or sufficiently funded already
- Project is too new
I will not expand too much into those as I think they’re pretty self explanatory. I think it’s OK for this first round to be more loose, as it allows for the community and delegates to do their own “value discovery”, and we’re seeing some first signals already.
The fact that there are only 18/46 (39%) projects on my ballot tells we need better filtering—the other 28 projects took significant, and maybe unnecessary time to review. And yes, you can argue I’m strict and picky with my selections (which is true) but from the comments in this thread, I’m clearly not alone.
Also, like I said a few paragraphs above, even for those projects that I did select. Metrics and information was not clear; this is likely a more complex issue to entangle, it’s a mix of improving eligibility criteria to make sure only projects with demonstrable and relevant impact (e.g. directly related to Obol, open-source, min 3 months old, etc) and also round focus (see Optimism doing rounds with different scopes).
There’s also a need for alternative funding routes, some projects shouldn’t be funded by retroactive programs (some may have seen it but I’m not necessarily the biggest RAF bull, sorry). But that’s a conversation we can have another day.
All of these are very early comments, we have to see how the results look like, this is literally day 1. Shoutout to @Eliza, who has been incredibly helpful through the process.