Arbitrum D.A.O. Grant Program Season 3 - Official thread

[paulofonseca]

@JoJo

they ask a specific set of questions

shouldn’t these questions be in the application template then? If they are all the same…

@JoJo

governance tooling are not a main focus in the “new protocols and ideas” for this season.

who decided that?

@JoJo

but underspending offers the advantage, if/when the right time comes, to heavily invest in good teams and opportunities. The opposite is instead not possible

but there isn’t consistency on this between the different domains. that’s what I pointed out. and as the PM, you @JoJo should look into it and try to make it more consistent I think, that’s why I commented this. I agree that maybe right now, with all the changes in the DAO, there isn’t a clear direction of what to approve, but that shouldn’t be an excuse to reject builders.

@JoJo

Do you have any data or conducted any meaningful number of interviews to protocols and builders that decided to not build in Arbitrum due to either a lack of grant programs or direct rejection in the grant ask from the D.A.O program?

Actually yeah. I spent last week in Amsterdam for ETHDam and a few other meetups, and during that week I met at least 3 builders that whenever I said I was a delegate at Arbitrum DAO, immediately had to tell me their stories of how Arbitrum doesn’t value builders like them, because they got rejected from previous rounds of grants on Arbitrum. One of them even showed me the telegram chat between his team and you @JoJo when you were the DA for this New Protocols and Ideas domain last season, saying that you were dismissive of their project and that that was why they didn’t focus more on Arbitrum. This is anecdotal evidence of course, so it is worth what it’s worth… but I really think we can’t, as an ecosystem, be rejecting small grants like these, in this way, and claim to be builder friendly. The testimonials on @krst thread are also quite revealing of this sentiment, I think.

@JoJo

• posting on a public forum statements containing insinuations about the work ethics of the individuals involved

is something that doesn’t provide any value to our program, to our DAO or to Arbitrum as a whole.

regarding this, I would ask you to quote my full sentence and to read it in context.

@paulofonseca

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.

I was not insinuating anything about anybody’s work ethic. I was wondering what would be the reasons for this discrepancy, and I came up with 2 options: they are being too conservative, which you explained why but I would love to hear it from @CastleCapital directly and that’s why I tagged them in my previous post and not you; or if it’s just incompetence or complacency, which is something every delegate in this DAO should be on the lookout for and should inquire about. And that’s what I did. I have no conflict whatsoever with Castle Capital and I think they actually do great work, but in this case, I just don’t understand what they are doing and why, especially because I’ve been recommending good builders to get into Arbitrum and apply to these grants and they keep getting rejected.

So, I would still like to hear, from Castle Capital directly, why their acceptance rate for the New Protocols and Ideas domain is way lower than in the other domains.