Glossary
Retroactive Public Goods Funding
A funding model that rewards public-goods work after it has already proven useful, so a community pays for demonstrated impact instead of betting on grant proposals up front.
Retroactive public goods funding (RetroPGF) flips the usual grant model: instead of judging proposals before any work is done, it pays contributors after their work has already demonstrated value. The premise, often summarized as "impact = profit," is that it is far easier to agree on what was genuinely useful in hindsight than to predict it accurately in advance.
The best-known implementation is the Optimism Collective, which runs periodic rounds where a group of voters allocates a fixed pool of tokens across projects — infrastructure, developer tooling, education, client software — judged by their past contribution to the ecosystem. The hard parts are measuring impact fairly and resisting collusion or popularity bias among the voters who decide the payouts.