Optimism Offers $22M in Grants to Superchain Builders

The Optimism Collective is allocating 10 million OP tokens, worth roughly $22 million, to Superchain builders.

The Superchain refers to an Optimism-based technology stack that aims to create a network of blockchains interoperating through a common framework.

Coinbase’s Layer 2 Base is currently leading the Superchain ecosystem with $5.25 billion in total value locked (TVL), trailing only OP Mainnet, which has $6.2 billion. Other members include Blast, Zora and Fraxtal.

“Build on Base, and you will be rewarded,” wrote Jesse Pollak, creator of Base.

Sign-ups open on May 23 and will run to June 6, upon which the review process will commence. Voting for applications will take place between June 23 and July 8, with the results and subsequent grant disbursement scheduled for July 15.

OP spiked 4% today to $2.23. It’s had a less-than-ideal month, dropping 35% amid widespread crypto volatility.

The Optimism Collective, a governance model that seeks to balance the interests of the different stakeholders of Ethereum Layer-2 Optimism, is looking to reward applicants based on the demand generated for Optimism blockspace, interactions from repeat Optimism users, interactions from repeat Optimsm users with high trust scores, interactions of new Optimism users, and open source licensing of contract code.

For this funding round, a new set of eligibility criteria has been set, bidding to reduce the amount of human review required for spam and “low-quality” applicants.

Builders that have deployed contracts on one or more OP chains are eligible, as are those that made their contract code publicly available in Github and confirmed they will comply with KYC requirements from the OP Foundation, among other qualifying criteria.