The sixth monthly report is live in our website!
This is the mid term month, and we are releasing:
- the normal monthly report with all the data
- a more comprehensive and generalistic report with the consideration from each member of the team
- we have setup a call for tomorrow, at 4PM UTC, to discuss the mid term results and what we have been experiencing so far; we will also discuss the qualitative research from Castle Labs related to the small builders, which will be published here shortly.
We do invite all the delegates to the call tomorrow to give us feedback and know more about the program!
TLDR:
- referencing period: 18th of August to 19th of September
- 663 proposals in total, of which 89 were approved and 14 were completed
- Similar to last month, slow period tied to seasonality, with a lower amount of new proposal month over month; at the same time, we have the highest number of completed and delivered milestones and we are starting to see several project coming closer to the finish line or completing their grant
- focus of the month of the team has been on creating the BD function for the “New Protocols and Ideas” domain to address concerns from the DAO
D.A.O. Grant Program — Mid‑Term Forum Summary
The following contains a brief summary of a longer form attached to the end of this post.
New Protocols & Ideas — Castle Lab
This track surfaces the clearest ecosystem tension: Arbitrum is rich in flagship protocols but thin on the small, fast teams that turn fresh ideas into valuable products. Many drafts proposals, while good on paper, lack technical ownership or a clear Arbitrum‑first rationale; others are feature bundles or cross‑chain repackages that could live anywhere. Where momentum did appear, it came from founders who could explain trade‑offs, outline a minimal impact model, and anchor integrations on our stack. The path ahead could be to make it easier for very small teams to run lightweight experiments on Arbitrum and to reserve deeper, hands‑on support for the few that prove real differentiation. A simple, shared, cross-domain proof packet (what is new, how it ships, how value accrues here, and who is technically accountable), creates that clarity for builders and reviewers alike.
Education, Community Growth and Events — SeedGov
Education remains the ecosystem’s front door. When paired with credible partners and practical curricula, it builds trust and gives newcomers a map. The recurring weakness is continuity: too many efforts stop at visibility without guiding participants into repositories, capstones, or follow‑on support. The shift that is needed is cultural rather than cosmetic: treat education as a pipeline with a proper followup. That means fewer, better programs with enforceable outputs and light bridges into what should be a builder funnel, so first contact reliably matures into sustained contributions on Arbitrum.
Gaming — Flook
Reframing gaming season over season as a user‑acquisition lab has helped the domain focus on what matters and is realistically achievable with the cap of the program: whether creator campaigns, streams, and showcases actually bring players into Arbitrum games. This lens favors experimentation and iteration over vanity reach or products that can’t be built with the current capital. The headwinds are somehow familiar for people from this industry: mainstream creators still weigh brand risk in tapping into Web3, and audiences remain split between web‑native habits and crypto‑native incentives. As a scouting ground, this domain now informs where larger ecosystem bets deserve to follow with backing numbers, giving Arbitrum a practical way to address where players are and can be reached effectively.
Developer Tooling — Juandi & Erezedor
The strongest pull is around Stylus and tools that shrink the distance from idea to deployed code. AI‑assisted onboarding, credible benchmarks, and bridges to widely used developer standards make Arbitrum feel accessible. The limiting pattern is a wave of mirror projects that add little defensibility. The opportunity is to complement ease‑of‑use with genuine advantage: payments and account‑abstraction rails, analytics, and decentralized AI building blocks that let applications do something here they cannot easily do elsewhere. Tooling should remain, and get stronger in being, an engine in a more complex machine, pushing to reduce friction while compounding what is uniquely to the Arbitrum tech stack.
Orbit — MaxLomu
Orbit was launched to grow ecosystems around existing chains, not to create new ones, and to explore the moment when an app should graduate to its own environment or expand into existing ones. Early partnerships and targeted bets showed promise, but demand has been low and some proposals felt grant‑first rather than user‑first. Interoperability delays have also cooled momentum in our opinion. The clearer story should be business‑driven: validate on the main Arbitrum chain, then expand to Orbit only when it truly serves the product and its market. This track is also a natural place to trial ideas like geographically grounded “crypto cities,” built step by step through composable services that reflect Arbitrum’s strengths.
Program Manager — Jojo
Across domains, the program has been moving in the seasons from just simple “grant availability appealing” for the chain to a more robust and proper path that compounds through clearer ownership, reporting, and Arbitrum‑tied impact. The work ahead is to keep a balance between small, fast tests, what the market wants, and what builders are able to provide; to evolve, adding hands-on support for the ones who need it and strengthening evidence standard so that decisions feel consistent across the DAO in between programs and overarching strategy. To this goal, strengthening the alignment with Foundation, Offchain Labs and the DAO (which all still need to come to terms with this overarching strategy, at least at an inter communication level), is what is effectively needed to graduate this program to a very important stepstone of our ecosystem.