so… what’s going on with the New Protocols and Ideas domain acceptance rate?
More details and metrics can be seen in this spreadsheet I quickly whipped up.
it’s the only domain that has allocated the lowest amount of funds until now, 2.7%, and it has already rejected quite a few projects that in my opinion should be funded (I even personally recommended to a few of them to apply there), and the reasoning for rejection and debrief questions are always the same. It feels like @CastleCapital is either being too conservative with allocating these funds, or they just don’t care enough to spend the proper time to vet the projects that apply and reject them too soon. I would love to understand why there is this very obvious discrepancy in acceptance rate.
This is the main cause for good builders to shy away from Arbitrum, forever. When they get rejected a “smallish” grant, from the only program that is supposed to be the allocator for early stage builder in the whole Arbitrum ecosystem, it sends a very bad signal.
One of the examples is what happened with Lighthouse Labs for example, for their Signals Protocol, that won 1st place on the Collabtech Hackathon in November last year and by rejecting them, we are basically saying “thank you for playing, go somewhere else to get support for your protocol”. They also shared their views here.