Optimism Foundation, the Ethereum-based decentralized platform has announced the RetroPGF (Retroactive Public Goods Funding) Round 3, an experimental mechanism that realizes the goal of “impact = profit”. Creators, builders, and educators who positively impacted the Optimism Collective could reportedly expect 30 million OP (Optimism) token distribution for supporting Optimism development and adoption.

Akin to venture capital funding, Optimism’s RetroPGF round involves developers shipping efficient Optimism ecosystem code to get financial remuneration. Optimism Foundation tweeted the announcement on the third round of RetroPGF to inform its community:

Working to empower, recognize, and reward the community members for their meaningful contributions to the Collective, Optimism’s RetroPGF rounds grow its economy, promoting the significance of impact and profit. The Layer-2 (L2) scaling system Optimism rewards its community via funding public goods with a demonstrated potential to deliver real impact to the community.

In the GitHub repository of RetroPGF Round 3, the project registration would begin soon with voting in Fall 2023. As per the Twitter announcement, the work of the community might be nominated in the following categories: OP Stack, Collective governance, Developer ecosystem, End-user experience, and adoption.

RetroPGF Rounds 1 and 2 rewarded public goods builders, who received the retroactive grant that brought about a “meaningful difference to the project’s future.” As per the Optimism Foundation, the RetroPGF would be the primary funding mechanism for the Optimism Collective economy, as it enables observing, learning, and iterating depending upon the “successes and shortcomings of the previous round.”

A RetroPGF 3 announcement commemorative OPen-edition NFT has been released, the minting of which would be open for a week. Further, the Optimism Foundation quote-tweeted a tweet by the NFT creation platform Zora, where the latter announced the launch of the L2 blockchain solution Zora Network built on the fully open-source and MIT-licensed OP stack. Zora Network is reportedly building an artist expression and experimentation on-chain hub.