I appreciate your willingness to have open discussions about the future of PGN. I know you aren’t technically a decision maker, but many in this org will stand behind your POV.
Because PGN’s built on the Bedrock version of the OP stack - and permissionless proposals and fraud proofs are still a WIP from the OP Stack.
Yeah, we probably should not have launched a rollup on mainnet with virtually zero infrastructure, lack of buy-in from Gitcoin, pre EIP-4844/CelestiaDA launch, an extremely tight budget, and a team of two. But hindsight is 20/20.
Fair. But am curious as to who can. From the conversations I’ve had about the implications of shutting down a chain and burning assets I’m a bit alarmed. We are pioneering new frontiers here - on a technical and legal front.
Transparently, I found out about the shutdown a day before it went public - and my opinions on the matter were never taken into consideration. While Nicole and I were working tirelessly to make PGN as successful as it could be, conversations about its future were occurring behind the scenes. I could tell from general sentiment and vibes that a shutdown was a potential consideration, but not a single decision maker at Gitcoin warned us.
The “orderly” plan is to support users in bridging funds off the network, which Nicole and I have been doing almost daily since the shutdown announcement. We’ve also been exploring with other technical workarounds like making a merkle proof of people’s balances on Ethereum.
Additionally, this is not the start of transition discussions. Since January, we had teams with much stronger technical and financial capital than Gitcoin interested to take this on. We even had a proposal to buy the network off of Gitcoin from a venture backed company. Decisions around the transition were a constant back and forth. There were weeks that a PGN transition would be approved and I’d make future career decisions around this prospect, just to get the decision reversed.
No. We are not asking Gitcoin for more funding. If anything, it was abundantly clear to Nicole and I that our lack of serious capital was the biggest hurdle in making PGN succeed and even if Gitcoin gave us more money, they still could not provide the necessary capital needed to run an L2.
Part of my networking and relationship building within the superchain L2 landscape was to get PGN deployed on necessary infrastructure at no cost and to find real funding to back the network. I was able to do both. Yet, Gitcoin proceeded with the shutdown the week before Celestia DA (which reduced our DA costs from $100k a month to $2k a month), after prospects of a significant funding grant from OP, and right as we had integrated new dependencies that bottlenecked key dapps (including allo and passport) from deploying on PGN.
The months following the announcement of the shutdown, PGN was profitable. Despite being a dead chain, had a half million dollar increase on TVL due to growing momentum for the Superchain and around 2k transactions a day. There was a better way to go about the future of PGN. There was real momentum. And PGN still had strong credibility.
Because a year from now is post permissionless proposals and fault proof upgrades from OP Stack. See more here:
The plan is:
Keep in mind, Nicole nor I are on the RaaS provider contract, nor do we have access to the dashboard to make any decisions about rollup specifics. For example, Gitcoin was paying the highest monthly RaaS rates because we were on the highest tier plan - a simple way Nicole and I could have saved Gitcoin money if we were involved in these partnerships.
We are in a “death spiral of inaction” without clear understanding of who makes this decision. If we are continuing with June shutdown date, would love to know who on the Gitcoin team can provide guidance on navigating the path forward.