We love to work in the open at OPLabs! Here are some reasons why, in no particular order.

  1. Communication efficiency. Hosting N:N conversations is much more effective than having many N times 1:1 conversations.
  2. Optimising for nerd-sniping. I have long argued that Ethereum’s ability to seduce brilliant people is among its superpowers. The smartest people want to see how the sausage is made, and radical openness allows it to happen.
  3. Collaboration and cooperation. When working in the open we all get to build on each other’s work rather than continually re-inventing the wheel. Ideas cross-fertilise, multiply, and become stronger.
  4. Learning and growth. Working openly allows us to learn from each other's experiences, mistakes, and successes while reducing information siloes and single points of failure.
  5. Linus’s law. "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” A similar principle applies to protocol development. The more openly we work, the more eyeballs we gain.
  6. Fewer information asymmetries. Information is power, and the selective withholding of information can be used to divide and conquer, to pick winners and losers. The more openly we work, the more our claims of credible neutrality ring true.
  7. Transparency. Our industry’s critics love to cast us as “shadowy super-coders” operating in dark and secret places. As an Ethereum L1 dev, when the regulators came knocking for all our “internal docs and recordings”, it was a huge pleasure to tell them that there were none, and to send them to GitHub, Discord and YouTube to do their own research. Nothing demonstrates a greater commitment to decentralisation than working in the open.

Many of these mirror the reasons we made the OP Stack open source with a liberal licence, which has been hugely effective in establishing it as an ecosystem standard. I mean, how did you end up here yourself, protocol dev?

Naturally, there will be things that we cannot discuss openly and publicly, such as zero-day bugs, and occasional commercially sensitive matters. Ideally, these will be minimal, and we will fall back to private channels when we must. But we are very keen to make working in the open the default for everyone contributing to the OP Stack.

Why not hop on over to the new Optimism Protocol R&D Discord server and join the work?

Footnotes

  1. Relevant from geohot: “We don’t believe in stealth.”