We support the proposal and respect their path to growth on Optimism. The dual-pronged approach of fee rebates and direct marketing campaigns are likely highly catalytic for user growth on Optimism — and this would be a different user segment than typical market-dependent defi users and crypto speculators.
Overtime Markets has a unique value proposition for Optimism and stands apart from crypto-native DeFi protocols. With these fee rebates, we believe they ought be able to better compete with centralized offerings and continue the growth they’ve seen over the last 2 months since launch.
We think there is an information gap that Overtime could meet by reporting more of their expected go-to-market strategy, but now is the time to give them an opportunity to jump ahead of the pack.
Overtime Markets is a permissionless, onchain sports betting market and without doubt the most advanced one available at the moment. Naturally, there is is nothing of its sort available on Optimism.
We like supporting this type of project because it is an all-weather product, always appealing to large numbers of retail bettors, and it makes use of key advantages of blockchain over centralized services more generally.
There is every reason to expect a crypto-based sports betting market to become an enormous vertical, and getting an early lead in this space could be extraordinarily beneficial for Optimism. Thales have shown some willingness to migrate over to Arbitrum so if we think that Overtime could be a genre-defining product, we should try to accommodate their remaining with us.
70%, or 210,000 OP, as fee rebates.
We’d been unsure about how these fee rebates effectively act as a catalyst for new users and shared our concerns with the Overtime team. Red’s recent post has brought us over the line in supporting this proposal as written. Basically: the rebates get Overtime to beat large betting market prices, offering a natural pull for users from those other areas. Bettors are often fairly crypto-savvy, as many centralized sports books accept crypto payments, and price-conscious — so this fact offers some good support for drawing in these users.
Moreover, this user growth is what Overtime will need to bootstrap the AMM use once it rolls out, so the timing works out: use grants, get users, grants go away, users are now there to support liquidity through the AMM. It’s not like typical liquidity mining where often some uneconomical initiative goes back to being uneconomical once incentives end.
30%, or 90,000 OP designated for promotional events such as those held by FIFA.
This allocation works well in tandem with the fee rebates: the rebates make the protocol economically competitive in this early stage, and this piece promotes this competitiveness. The timing is good given sports, and this is one we can clearly set KPIs against.
Overall, this ask satisfies our major questions we have for all protocols: does this grant achieve a step change in activity that sets up your protocol for success after incentives cease, and why is now the best time to do it?
Overtime is a first-of-its-kind offering built entirely on Optimism that has the ability to bring non-native crypto users directly to Optimism, onboarding an entirely novel user segment. In our opinion, these types of users have a lower chance of simply farming rewards - they’re there exclusively to use the product, and they’ll use all kinds of onboarding means to get there.
This seems like a good return on the OP grant, as it acts as a short/medium-term solution until the other solutions are released to bring the needed liquidity and spreads and cover the gap with centralized bookmakers.