Introduction

The goal of Filecoin’s Retroactive Public Goods Funding is to retroactively allocate rewards to realize impact=profit — the principle that positive impact to the collective should be rewarded with profit to the individual. This principle serves as a North Star, motivating the creation of a more productive and sustainable public goods economy.

• Impact signifies the value a contributor has created for the Filecoin ecosystem.
• Profit signifies the value a contributor has extracted from the Filecoin ecosystem.
• The gap signifies the difference between a contributor’s impact and profit (e.g. impact - profit = the gap).
• FIL-RetroPGF-1 will fill the gap between a contributor's impact and profit, resulting in a state of impact = profit.

The outlined vision requires badgeholders to rethink how they reward projects, rewarding past impacts on the ecosystem rather than the expectation of future contributions. This document further defines each of these concepts and provides a framework for badgeholders to evaluate impact.

Why provide a framework?

• Defining impact more precisely is a key to FIL-RetroPGF-1's success.
• Achieving this is a collaborative effort among badgeholders.
• This will support badgeholders in their voting process and allow projects to better understand what they will be rewarded for.
• Defining impact and establishing relevant frameworks will be an ongoing effort. FIL-RetroPGF-1 will lay the groundwork for a common understanding of impact evaluation.

Our hypothesis is that impact evaluation frameworks will result in more consensus among badgeholders and coherent voting behavior.

Defining Impact

• Retroactive means that there should be no forward-looking assumptions. Only past impact is considered. Impact measurement should not include any considerations for the future contributions of a project or individual (e.g. how much impact will they have in the future? How important are the rewards to enable their future work?). Future contributions can and should be rewarded in future RetroPGF rounds.
• Impact measures the outcomes that were created for the Filecoin ecosystem. Impact does not consider the inputs that went into a particular contribution (e.g. how many people have worked on a contribution or how many hours were spent).
• Each round has a scope which outlines the public goods and impact that are rewarded. There are seven categories eligible for funding in FIL-RetroPGF-1.
  1. Infrastructure & Dependencies - software used to build or deploy the FIL Stack; contributions to protocols or standards upon which the FIL Stack runs; experiments that support future development of the core FIL Stack protocol.
  2. Tooling & Utilities - Work that helps builders create applications on Filecoin mainnet, build on the FIL Stack, or use applications built on Filecoin.
  3. Education & Outreach—Promote awareness and knowledge of Filecoin's operation through technical or social contributions.
  4. Protocol R&D - Work to improve the Filecoin protocol, to include both theoretical contributions and implementations and prototypes.
  5. Collective Governance - Work that impacted Filecoin's governance participants or helped bring new governance participants into the network.
  6. Products & End User UX - Work that helped improve the end-user experience and adoption of Filecoin technology.
  7. Other - work that does not fit into any other buckets but is a deserving candidate for FIL-RetroPGF-1 funding.

Defining Profit