Retro Funding: Onchain Builders rewards projects that drive cross-chain asset transfers, enabled through interop, by growing the Superchain across eligible OP Chains.

• Timeline: The program will take place from Feb 18 - Jul 31, 2025.
• Application periods: Apply by the monthly application deadline, and your project will be evaluated for rewards starting the following month.
• Grant delivery: Rewards are delivered monthly, starting in March.
• Budget: Up to 8M OP

New in 2025:The Retro Funding program is transitioning from annual rounds to ongoing impact evaluation and regular rewards, offering builders greater consistency and predictability. Learn more

Eligibility

In order to apply, your Onchain project must first be added to OP Atlas. A project can't be considered for enrollment until its setup is complete.

Applications must meet these criteria:

• Onchain deployment: Your project must have a verified contract on one of the following OP Chains: Arena Z, Base, Ethernity, Ink, Lisk, Metal L2, Mode, OP Mainnet, RACE, Shape, Superseed, Swellchain, Unichain, World Chain, Zora, Soneium, Polynomial, Mint, BOB.
• Contract Verification: To verify ownership of a contract, the deployer address of the contract must sign a message in the “Contracts” step of project setup in OP Atlas.
• Contract Attribution: Contracts deployed by factories are attributed to the factory deployer. Contracts must have a single project owner applying for Retro Funding; overlapping claims are not allowed.

To be considered for additional DeFi rewards, projects must meet these criteria:

• Adapter requirement: DeFi projects must have a functioning DefiLlama adapter. A link to the adaptor must be provided in in the “Contracts” step of project setup in OP Atlas.

To be considered for additional Account Abstraction rewards, projects must meet these criteria:

• Operator registry requirement: AA projects must be included in the BundleBear operator registry (contract addresses verified in OP Atlas must be present in the registry). Add your project to the BundleBear-app in GitHub.

Rewards

Your impact will be rewarded based on the following criteria:

1. Growth in Superchain adoption
2. High-quality onchain value (e.g., TVL)
3. Interoperability support and adoption

Your impact will be measured via an evaluation algorithm powered by onchain data. The evaluation algorithm will evolve throughout this Retro Funding Mission based on feedback from Optimism Citizens.

Requirements

‍All projects must meet minimum activity requirements (measured over the last 180 days) to earn rewards:

• At least 1000 transactions
• At least 420 qualified addresses (ex: no bots)
• At least 10 distinct days of onchain activity

DeFi projects can earn additional TVL rewards if they had at least $1M average TVL over the last 180 days.

Learn more in the Collective Governance Forum: Retro Funding Mission: Onchain Builders