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Retro Funding

Retro Funding

TL;DR

Retro Funding allocates capital after impact has been made. Instead of funding ideas or promises, it rewards contributors for work already completed—measured by its demonstrated value to the community.


Retro Funding is a results-oriented capital allocation mechanism that rewards projects and contributors after they’ve created value. Rather than funding proposals, Retro Funding evaluates real-world impact and distributes funds based on that evaluation.


This model was popularized by Optimism’s RetroPGF, which uses community input, delegate reviews, and other signal sources to assess which public goods made the biggest difference—and rewards them accordingly.


Retro Funding is particularly powerful in environments where:

  • Impact is hard to predict up front
  • Contributors are already doing the work, regardless of funding
  • There’s a need to reward organic, emergent contributions


Retro Funding can be paired with open nominations, community voting, delegate evaluation, or hybrid review models. It works best when backed by credible commitment—a known promise that retro funding rounds will happen regularly and transparently.

Best For

  • Public goods ecosystems
  • Open-source projects
  • Community infrastructure
  • Post-hackathon or post-round evaluations

Good At

  1. Minimizing funding risk
  2. Rewarding actual, visible outcomes
  3. Encouraging impact-driven work
  4. Avoiding overpromising and under-delivering

Dependencies / Requirements

  • A way to measure or evaluate impact
  • A review mechanism (delegates, community vote, etc.)
  • Strong record-keeping or documentation of contributions
  • Ideally, a pre-committed fund or matching pool

Not Good At

  • Projects that need upfront capital to get started
  • Situations where impact is hard to define or measure
  • Environments without strong context or evaluators

Who Should Use It?

  • Ecosystems that want to reward work, not pitches
  • Communities that already have a lot of informal contribution
  • Protocols or DAOs experimenting with results-based funding
  • Groups committed to long-term funding of public goods

Example Use Cases

  • A DAO runs quarterly Retro Funding rounds to reward ecosystem builders, content creators, and maintainers
  • A civic community recognizes grassroots efforts like mutual aid, disaster response, or local organizing after the fact
  • A protocol awards funds to contributors based on downstream usage, adoption, or user feedback