We need your votes in OP's Retro PGF!
Hi,
It's been a while since I wrote on my blog proofinprogress.com, and that's largely because I have been busy working on a new project called Kiwi News, a decentralized Hacker News. To many of you who have been following here, this can't come as too big of a surprise as I've written here too about my struggles regarding the real Hacker News.
We've built Kiwi News on a credible neutral network architecture using an algorithm that I discovered in the Farcaster whitepaper and which I have managed to reproduce using libp2p and its gossipsub module. That happened in spring this year, and since then, we've worked tirelessly on building a product that showcases the protocol.
Our business model has been to sell NFTs upon sign-up, and while we've made some revenue, we're still far from breaking even. This brings me to the actual reason for writing this email.
Optimism, the layer two chain we've based our stack upon, is currently running their retroactive public goods funding, and our project is an applicant. However, this hasn't been without difficulties for us.
Optimism's rule is that for a project to qualify, it must reach a "quorum," meaning that a minimum of 17 badge holders must vote for each project. We are currently at nine votes, so there are another eight left, just to qualify!
While I'm usually more relaxed and trustful regarding these things, I think the 17-vote threshold really threatens our qualification. We've invested a lot of private funds into building the protocol and product, and we've served a large part of the Ethereum community for free through our code, community building, and by contributing to R&D in the space. We deserve to be recognized.
Hence, if you happen to be an OP badge holder or if you know one, I strongly encourage you to vouch for our project so that we pass this bar. We really need your help here, as most promotion hasn't yielded lots of impact.
Voting closes in two days, so this is urgent.
Here's our application: https://vote.optimism.io/retropgf/3/application/0x50565b1e518ab91b14ef50fdab91a63623fb5951e96c18918e36be5aeb6fd297
Thank you, and I appreciate you reading this far!
Best,
Tim from proofinprogress.com and Kiwi News