@paulo, @jojo — thank you both sincerely for the time and thought you’ve put into this discussion.
We have spent considerable time as a team reflecting on the process and our own approach to the application. I want to acknowledge up front: winning a hackathon or having prior DAO engagement does not entitle any project to a grant. We agree fully that every application must be evaluated against the DAO’s approved rubric for New Protocols and Ideas.
That said, I want to respectfully clarify a few points:
@jojo, isolating individual rejection criteria out of the broader context (such as “governance tooling not being core to this season”) does not present the full picture of what was a deeply iterative and collaborative review process. This also differs from the stated objective at the beginning of this post.
In our case, @Castle had some misconceptions and questions, which we diligently addressed over multiple rounds. Despite this, the final response was an immediate refusal with no opportunity for re-review. We found this surprising and disappointing, especially after the effort to clarify and align.
Additionally, the public scoring of 1/5, even after multiple clarifications, leaves a permanent visible mark on our project that does not fairly reflect the spirit of the engagement or our hard work over the past six months.
The two main points cited in the rejection were:
- Sustainability concerns not properly addressed — we respectfully disagree. We provided detailed responses on both our long-term plans and business model.
- Governance tooling not being a core focus of the New Protocols and Ideas domain — yet the published program description explicitly includes “governance tooling” under that domain’s scope .
We had no avenue for review or escalation than to accept the decision despite a clear disparity between the stated goals and rubric. We hopefully offered some constructive feedback and understand the subjective nature of any grant process. However, I want to be clear: we do not want our project or its perception in the ecosystem to suffer as a result of this process.
We remain committed to attempting to build within the Arbitrum ecosystem and hope our experience can be used as a constructive datapoint for further refining the program.