Arbitrum DAO Grants Domain Allocator Nominations

Grants Discussions
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The below response reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @krst and @Sinkas, and it’s based on the combined research, fact-checking and ideation of the two.

Ahead of the pitching sessions we are organising tomorrow, we wanted to set forward some questions for the nominees which we believe would offer helpful insights both to us but also to other delegates when casting their vote.

  1. As the domain allocator, how do you plan on building and maintaining a pipeline of grant requests for your domain?
  2. What kind of rubrics will you set for your domain?
  3. How will the selected rubrics help you make a decision when assessing requests?
  4. Is your schedule flexible enough to accommodate meetings with other domain allocators and the program manager to discuss program improvements and pain-points?
  5. How will the community be able to communicate with you to offer feedback on your performance?

Looking forward to listening to everyone tomorrow!

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As the domain allocator for the Education, Community Growth, and Events domain on Arbitrum, I have a well-thought-out plan for building and maintaining a robust pipeline of grant requests and ensuring effective management within my domain.

I intend to actively engage with the Arbitrum community through various channels, including forums, social media, and direct outreach to potential contributors. I will promote the availability of grants within my domain, encouraging individuals and teams to submit proposals for innovative projects in education, community growth, and events. Additionally, I will collaborate with existing community leaders and organizations to identify potential projects and encourage them to apply for grants.

I will establish clear and transparent rubrics for evaluating grant requests in my domain. These rubrics will take into account factors such as project feasibility, impact on the Arbitrum ecosystem, alignment with community needs, and adherence to ethical and best practices. The rubrics will be designed to ensure fairness and consistency in the evaluation process.

The selected rubrics will serve as a guideline for assessing grant requests. Each proposal will be evaluated based on these rubrics, allowing for an objective and standardized assessment. The rubrics will help me make informed decisions by providing a structured framework to assess the merit of each project and its potential to benefit the Arbitrum ecosystem.

I am committed to dedicating 40 hours a week to my role as a domain allocator. My schedule is flexible and allows for meetings with other domain allocators and the program manager to discuss program improvements and address any pain points.

I understand the importance of community input and feedback in improving my performance. I will establish clear communication channels, such as a dedicated forum thread or regular community meetings, where members can provide feedback, share concerns, and offer suggestions regarding the grant allocation process. Transparency and responsiveness to community feedback will be a priority for me.

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The order on the list of candidates should be drawn randomly.
People at the top of the list gain an advantage over their competitors, especially position 1.

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Hey @Goodo, the order on the list was random, and in addition, based on the votes, Snapshot changes the order. Therefore, the control of whats shown on top is based on snapshot.

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Thank @Srijith-Questbook for explaining

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Thanks for hosting this! I would love to review a recording later if possible.

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Hello everybody! Posting here the brief answer I gave in the call that is currently ongoing.

1. As the domain allocator, how do you plan on building and maintaining a pipeline of grant requests for your domain?

Idea is to be reachable in the very short term. What I want from the grantee requesters is to be able to pitch first their idea in a few sentence, and then expand on the pain points (which are always there) and related solutions, alongside the value proposition. My job will then be to evaluate, if available, more in depth docs and get back to a second meeting with the requestors to go into details. If both meetings will be positive, it can be a first solid base to proceed.
I also plan to keep contacts with the projects that will be approved for the grants afterwards, to keep a tab on how the funds are used and if the team is doing what is actually supposed to do. This is to both have internal metrics and also a general feedback on our role as domain controllers.

2. What kind of rubrics will you set for your domain?

Value proposition: how do you plan to bring value to Arbitrum ecosystem

Pain points: what flaws do you see in your model, and how do you plan to address it

Financial planning: how do you plan to use efficiently the funds. This is not trivial, at all.

Timeline: do you have a clear timeline for your project, and how do you plan to respect it

Team: do you have the people with the right skill now that you are applying? What gaps do you currently have and if so how do you plan to fill them?

3. How will the selected rubrics help you make a decision when assessing requests?

Pain points is even more important than values. For example, it’s easy to say “my project aims to bring sticky liquidity”. It’s difficult to answer how you are going to deal with the current difficult environment, or what you are planning to do when the first batch of resources you allocated to this goal will end, just to refer to the previous point.
Another crucial point in the team: world is plenty of good ideas, and also plenty of money to realise these ideas. What lacks is people able to actually implement these. A team that is missing key players needs to first enforce the roaster, and then ask for grants in my view.

4. Is your schedule flexible enough to accommodate meetings with other domain allocators and the program manager to discuss program improvements and pain-points?

I work in crypto full time, and interface myself with people from different timezones everyday. Also, I really like working on weekends when days are slow. And when I am not at my laptop, i think a lot about the challenges that arise everyday. So, when is going to be the time to communicate with the rest of the team, not only I am going to be available, I am going also to be quite efficient in doing so.

5. How will the community be able to communicate with you to offer feedback on your performance?

Everyone can reach me out, through Twitter, Discord or Telegram. I have no issue not only in chatting with anybody, but also in setting up calls if someone wants to communicate something more complex. Even if I have a 1h call with a new person that doesn’t lead to specific results, I would have still connected to that person, enlarge the network, have new ideas and have a new point of view I didn’t had before on a specific topic. To me, this is a huge value added to this position, and not a burden.

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Hello everyone :slight_smile:

On this occasion, we wanted to inform you that we are presenting ourselves as candidates for the Domain Allocators program. It is our aspiration to be one of the four community members entrusted with overseeing grant allocations.

In order to carry out this purpose with quality and operational capacity, we have formed an alliance with the Layer 2 en Español community and LayerX. You can read the details of our application here. We are thrilled to share that our team includes individuals from Argentina :argentina: , Brazil :brazil: , Peru :peru: and Venezuela :venezuela:

We participated in both nominees’ pitching sessions organized by @krst, and they were very valuable in getting to know the candidates. We highly appreciate the proactivity and willingness to connect across different time zones.

As many of you are aware, our delegate @cattin 's vote is composed of the collective will of our community. This occasion will be no exception. That’s why we have organized the 11th Arbitrum governance call within our community, where we will review all applications and cast our votes. It will take place next Monday, the 11th, at 11 pm UTC.

Discord: comunidad.seedlatam.org

ArbitrumCall11va
ArbitrumCall11va1920×1080 112 KB

All applicants are invited to participate. Although the calls are conducted in Spanish, we have bilingual delegation members who provide live translation. @Saurabh visited us in the past when the Questbook proposal was under consideration. It is beneficial to be able to ask questions directly to the source and bridge the gap.

Thank you all :pray:

Nadie nos va a regalar la historia.

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Hi everyone!

Summarizing my presentation here for your reference. My background is :

  1. DeFi : I am a builder on Arbitrum. I do BD and Growth at Stella (a Arbitrum native protocol). Stella was previously Alpha Homora ($2B ATH TVL).
  2. Grant experience : Worked at Alpha Incubate, where we incubated 8 projects that raised from Tier 1 VCs. Also, disbursed >$1M through grants at Flipkart Leap grants program across 16 projects.
  3. NFT : Launched Firedrops (India’s first NFT marketplace) and NFT loyalty program.

Question 1 : As the domain allocator, how do you plan on building and maintaining a pipeline of grant requests for your domain?

I believe there are 3 parts to building and maintaing a pipeline of grants - awareness, application and feedback. Here is what I intend to do for each of them :

  1. Awareness : Work alongside PM, delegates to set up a separate socials, amplify in community.
  2. Application : Publish a guide on applying, best practices, clear rubric of evaluation.
  3. Feedback : Every application gets to hear back in 14 days with feedback.

Question 2 : What kind of rubrics will you set for your domain? How will the selected rubrics help you make a decision when assessing requests?

The rubrics of selection would include :

  • Project Feasibility
  • Community Impact
  • Innovation and Creativity
  • Sustainability
  • Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
  • Due Diligence

Note that your rubrics should be adaptable and subject to periodic review to ensure they remain relevant to the evolving needs of the grant program.
The rubric includes both qualitative and quantitative evaluation points. I intend to do a weighted average of the different metrics to arrive at a final score for each application.

Question 3 : Is your schedule flexible enough to accommodate meetings with other domain allocators and the program manager to discuss program improvements and pain-points?

My current work is a full time BD role at Stella - a DeFi protocol on Arbitrum. I am perpetually online, and thus always available to get back to applicants or community members.

Question 4 : How will the community be able to communicate with you to offer feedback on your performance?

I intend to establish the following communitcation channels :

  • Communication channel : Separate running Forum Post or Discord
  • Feedback : Monthly google form to get feedback on performance as delegate. The results of this monthly feedback form will be shared with the community for maximum transparency.

Also, I also intend to make my personal TG and email public for community members to reach out.

For any other questions, feel free to reach out to me on TG(@apoorv99)

Here is the link to my presentation : Arbitrum Grant Delegate - Google Slides

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Thanks again for having organized the calls, also pasting my respective answers (now slightly amended).

1. As the domain allocator, how do you plan on building and maintaining a pipeline of grant requests for your domain?

  • would ideally use one major platform (Twitter) that could be complemented with the occasional report on other platforms. The idea is to keep it simple and also use Twitter as an onboarding funnel.
  • towards that end I’d plan to visually communicate any proposal’s performance against the decision rubric & turn early, successful proposals into case-studies. on twitter.
  • the exact strategy would have to be based on demand, synced with the program coordinator, and adjusted accordingly

2. What kind of rubrics will you set for your domain?

  • I generally see the QuestBook grants as a potentially great feeder program that can lead into larger grants. It’s small scale & has a very lean lean decision making.
  • Lets lean into this: make it relatively painless for funders/ organizers to get a relatively small amount of funds (to enable further time commitment & provide a positive signal).

On a more pragmatic level:

  • Differences from initially proposed rubric: (1) no discretionary score (to avoid bias), (2) no assessment of product/ project (not vc funding, no excessive due dilligence required here, see this more akin to microgrants), (3) no dev reach category (b/c merit based, no selection for proven devs; would be the wrong grant for them anyway).

  • I’d go with a 5point likert scale per category and select the following tentative categories:
    (1) appropriate scope, (2) demonstrated capability of team, (3) added-value to arbitrum, (4) realistic budget, and (5) communication strategy.

  • exact max grant size to be determined. possibly 5-10k. would reevaluate lowering the max grant size at defined milestones.

3. How will the selected rubrics help you make a decision when assessing requests?

  • would fully base any decision on the rubric
  • would define (1) aggregate cut-off values and (2) category-specific cut-off values for grant eligibility
  • would revise cut-off values after 1 month (with more data)
  • would revise cut-off values again at 3 months after start (or on community request)

4. Is your schedule flexible enough to accommodate meetings with other domain allocators and the program manager to discuss program improvements and pain-points?

  • I have a full-time engagement at an early-stage DeFi project
  • I should nonetheless be flexible enough most of the time; chronically online anyway & very flexible/ self-organized in my full-time engagement

5. How will the community be able to communicate with you to offer feedback on your performance?

  • would make sure there are push and pull channels available that both cater to asynchronous communication and the occasional live gmeets call
  • this being said, I’d hope to largely rely on Twitter for reporting on proposals and addressing any feedback. also as a means of marketing/ transparency / creating an onboarding funnel for future proposals.
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We were thrilled to participate in the Domain Allocator applicant call and have attached our answers to the proposed questions. You can also view our initial application here.

1. As the domain allocator, how do you plan on building and maintaining a pipeline of grant requests for your domain?

Getting the grants program seen by the public through Twitter, forum posts, and blogs. More teams are out there with new ideas than there are available grants. The key is getting all these teams to be aware of this program. The best way to do that is to have consistent content being produced. This can include posts about the start of the grants program, posts about a grant being approved, and recaps of all the grants being funded at the end of the six months. StableLab has the capability to distribute this content as we consistently put out blogs and newsletters as well as are active on Twitter.

Another way we plan on building and maintaining a pipeline of grant requests is by reaching out to our network. We currently work in over 20 DAOs which allows us to constantly be meeting new builders and innovators that we can encourage to apply. We will leverage this network to consistently invite new teams to apply for grants in Arbitrum.

2. What kind of rubrics will you set for your domain?

What’s great about questbook is they let you design your own rubric and they help you through this process. We previously developed a rubric for Compound’s grants program which allowed us to gain experience with this process. Our rubric for the Arbitrum New Protocol Ideas grants will be different as it is a different domain but the same principles will apply.

Some of what will be most important to us:

Clear value add: Does this project clearly explain how it will bring enough value to the Arbitrum ecosystem to offset the cost? Value add can be attracting new users, increasing liquidity, increasing efficiency, bringing awareness, or anything else that creates a positive impact on Arbitrum.

Clear Milestones and Timelines: This shows that grantees have a well-thought-out plan with the exact steps they will take to accomplish the proposed idea. This also helps keep grantees accountable as it allows us to monitor their progress throughout the process instead of having to wait until the grant is finished.

Granular budget Breakdown: We want to know exactly how grant funds will be spent to avoid overpaying or and keep grantees accountable. This helps ensure grantees have been thoughtful regarding their budgets.

3. How will the selected rubrics help you make a decision when assessing requests?

Rubrics are very important as they remove a lot of the subjectiveness of the decision-making process. It holds us accountable because it prevents us from choosing projects we know as we will have to be able to justify to the community why they scored well on the rubric. It also ensures we thoroughly evaluate each part of the application as it requires we look at each grant application with the same process.

4. Is your schedule flexible enough to accommodate meetings with other domain allocators and the program manager to discuss program improvements and pain-points?

Yes, my schedule is flexible enough to accommodate any sort of meeting. Many of the other applicants have other jobs working for specific protocols. But staying up to date with Arbitrum governance and sitting on committees is part of my full-time job as a member of StableLab. Additionally in the unlikely scenario, something happens that prevents me from being able to schedule a meeting, I have an entire team of governance experts supporting me at StableLab. The rest of my StableLab team would be able to fill in and catch me up on anything I was to miss.

5. How will the community be able to communicate with you to offer feedback on your performance?

All of my and the rest of the StableLab team’s contact info is public and anyone is welcome to contact us at any time to offer feedback. I can be contacted on the forum @Matt_StableLab on Twitter, on Discord(Matt_StableLab), or on Telegram. StableLab can also be contacted on Twitter or our website.

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hi sir, I notice in all your communications that you speak in the collective (we, our etc), will you be the one serving on the council directly or will the person attending the meetings and calls be a rotation between several members at stable labs?

In how many different grants committees does stable labs participate?

Do you have a certain segment of innovation on Arbitrum that you personally have a deep interest in?

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Hey! Following up on this, here are our answers to these questions for those that missed our presentation.

1. As the domain allocator, how do you plan on building and maintaining a pipeline of grant requests for your domain?

As the domain allocator for this particular domain, which involves collaboration between SEED Latam, L2 en Español, and LayerX, we plan to build and maintain a pipeline of grant requests by implementing a structured and transparent process. Here’s how I intend to approach it:

  • Open and Ongoing Communication: We will establish clear communication channels and guidelines for potential grant applicants. This includes providing information about the application process, criteria, and expectations. We will ensure that interested parties are aware of how and where to submit their proposals.

  • Regular Outreach: we will proactively engage with the communities to encourage project ideas and grant proposals. Comms will be handled by SEED Latam, creating a channel on their discord. We’re going to provide grantees a space for them to have direct contact with us. Ideally, we should have weekly calls open for grantees after our governance calls, but this could change subject to their preferences (timezone, days, etc.)

  • Multi-regions: To reach a wider audience, we will encourage applicants to be from different regions of the world, we believe plurality is important for Arbitrum’s growth.

  • Documentation and Guidelines: we will create and maintain a comprehensive document that outlines the grant application process, eligibility criteria, and the types of projects we are looking for. This documentation will serve as a reference for potential applicants

  • Review Committee: we will assemble a review committee consisting of knowledgeable members from SEED Latam, L2 en Español, and LayerX communities. This committee will help assess grant proposals and ensure that they align with the domain’s objectives.

2. What kind of rubrics will you set for your domain?

The rubrics will be a set of clear and specific criteria against which grant proposals will be evaluated. These criteria will be designed to align with the priorities of the domain, which include hackathons, educational content and community growth initiatives, in that order of priority. The rubrics will encompass aspects like project team experience, Region and Scope, Other contributions, Others Grants, experience related to Arbitrum’s ecosystem and Sustainability.

In the following doc you can find more details on what information we would request from delegates and also a rough idea on how our rubrics would look like.

3. How will the selected rubrics help you make a decision when assessing requests?

The selected rubrics will serve as a structured framework for evaluating grant proposals. Each proposal will be assessed against these criteria, assigning scores or ratings for each criterion. This approach ensures that decisions are objective and transparent, as proposals will be evaluated consistently based on predefined standards.

4. Is your schedule flexible enough to accommodate meetings with other domain allocators and the program manager to discuss program improvements and pain-points?

As we said in our Domain allocation post, this nomination will be composed for 10 selected members of SEED Latam, L2 en Español, and LayerX. So our schedule will be flexible to accommodate meetings with other domain allocators and the program manager. We believe that collaboration and coordination among domain allocators are essential for program improvement and alignment.

5. How will the community be able to communicate with you to offer feedback on your performance?

To ensure transparency and accountability, I will establish communication channels through which the community can provide feedback on the performance. This can include a determined discord channel. we will be open to constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement.

Our approach as the domain allocator will prioritize clear communication, structured evaluation criteria, flexibility for collaboration, and mechanisms for community feedback.

Check our slideshow here

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Addressing the previous questions (although on-call I answered a couple with a slideshow)

1. As the domain allocator, how do you plan on building and maintaining a pipeline of grant requests for your domain?

Questbook the startup hosting this grants ecosystem fund averages around 80k monthly visitors in ‘active grant seasons’ most of this are focused for protocols rather chains or ecosystems so normally these tend to get more hype and activity once launched and formally announced. There are also other ways to leverage this and following previous comments on the call one would be aligning with other domain allocators focusing on our weaknesses or on our categories that are ‘ripe for improvement’ and start building an ‘ideas to build on’ section followed by in-person hackathon sponsors mostly focused and launched by ETH Global (I personally know the core team and getting access to an event is rather linear).

2. What kinds of rubrics will you set for your domain?

Most of the rubrics are pretty straight-forward due to most of the grants being on an idea phase and waiting for their first check to further give the blank canvas some color. Still, in my forum/application for this domain you can check some of the questions and rubrics that will inspire the domain to foster, follow-up, and fund those who need it that most and bring them from 0 → 1. This questions and templates are inspired from six and seven figures community funds coming from Alcancía’s backers (Celo Community Fund, Compound, Aave, Push Protocol and more).

3. How will the selected rubrics help you make a decision when assessing requests?

The gut-feeling of being a resourceful founder is already something that gives the right touch when choosing based on intuition who is capable on developing the product. Other questions and templates provided in the evaluation rubric are to see how simple the grantee can explain the concept and produce an execution roadmap with milestone to further make the funding process more efficient and metric-based.

4. Is your schedule flexible enough to accommodate meetings with other domain allocators and the program manager to discuss program improvements and pain-points?

Of course, this isn’t a one-man army. The Alcancía blockchain development team will be lending a hand in reviewing the repositories and funding proposals. But if it was a one-man army I can easily be able to give more than 15 hours weekly.

5. How will the community be able to communicate with you to offer feedback on your performance?

All my public and private channels are open for feedback. Mostly recommend reaching by discord (Juandi#0382) or email (juandi@alcancia.io). I’ll also see if it’s possible with the program manager to open a forum post for each domain and its allocator for further feedback – grilling in public is essential.

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@krst and @Sinkas, when will the recordings of the 2 calls be available? I got a couple of folks asking me because they want to look more into the candidates :slight_smile:

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You can find the session recordings in the links below!

Session #1 Recording
Session #2 Recording

You can see a brief overview of which nominees were in each call here.

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Hey @adamfzg, I will be the one serving on the council and attending all of the meetings. However, I will have the support of the entire StableLab team and will be able to leverage their vast knowledge and experience to make the most informed decisions.

StableLab sits on a variety of councils and committees which currently include the Compound Grants Committee, Uniswap Accountability Committee, and Rari’s Security Council.

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I realized I missed this call, although I was out of town so would of missed it anyway… I know the vote is nearly over, but wanted to at least make a post. While I unfortunately missed it all, thank you to those who set the call up / participated!

1. As the domain allocator, how do you plan on building and maintaining a pipeline of grant requests for your domain?

Mainly through social media sites and forums. I’d plan to leverage the knowledge of the PM and other DA’s to establish proven methods to build and maintain an easy to access way to send ideas. I’d like to have applications run somewhere publicly for transparency on all parties. My goal would be to create an application experience that is as simple and transparent as possible to allow as many projects to come forward that is possible. While I would look to always be open to private contact, I’d like all my formal applications to be in a public setting so all can see.

2. What kind of rubrics will you set for your domain?

I’d admittedly be open to input from the PM and other DA’s in this area as well due to this being my first go at a project like this. Impact to Arbitrum, Team history / composition, timeline / milestones strike me as key goals. While I want to have some type of ‘reasonable chance of success’ scoring, I want to avoid weighting that too heavily to stifle innovation. Funding size will be an important metric, and since I am human I’d like to make metrics that can avoid as much human bias as possible… but some care will be taken to avoid a rubric that can be fairly easily gamed.

3. How will the selected rubrics help you make a decision when assessing requests?

  • Impact to Arbitrum - The more a project helps Arbitrum (and even Ethereum on the whole) the better. I do NOT want to punish projects that are also on other platforms, however points can be reduced if a project seems to be hunting for funding versus looking to form a symbiotic relationship.
  • Team History / Composition - Does the project have a successful past? Is there a verifiable social media and/or real life presence? I think in this case I don’t want to knock projects based solely on team size, but funding levels may need to reflect a project that has one. Projects that have had a history of working on Arbitrum (or even other Ethereum-centric L2s) would likely get points here as well
  • Timeline & Milestones - A clear and reasonably manageable timeline is important. Projects will get more points if they can demonstrate they have put effort and planning into their proposals. I would strongly encourage Milestones to keep projects on task.
  • Reasonable Chance of Success - I would like to have some metric here, but maybe a reduced weighting. I don’t want to create a situation of where future predictions are affecting funding, but there will have to be some type of reasonableness factor involved. In this I would be leaning more towards reasonableness in execution / timeline / scale… versus concept success.
  • Funding Reasonableness - Plainly, I’d like to make sure there is some kind of check on funding compared to the size of a project. This may also be of less weighting that other items, and mostly come down to avoiding funding a large portion of a budget to a singular project that has limited scope

4. Is your schedule flexible enough to accommodate meetings with other domain allocators and the program manager to discuss program improvements and pain-points?

I do work a full time job, although I have relative flexibility in terms of time spent outside my work hours, afternoons / evenings / weekends. I went into this knowing that, and I I can stick with my aforementioned 48 hr. response time, up to 15 hours a week as noted in my application. I want to do my best to accommodate time zones, but I don’t want to mislead voters either. Written communication I’d be pretty flexible, even during my work hours (to echo others, I’m chronically online :slight_smile: ). My biggest restriction would likely be calls during my work period.

5. How will the community be able to communicate with you to offer feedback on your performance?

Socials - This forum, Reddit, Twitter. I do have a discord & email I use. I will echo what I said above, I’d actually prefer feedback to be public if possible / appropriate. I realize that I work for the DAO, so I think in this case public feedback is good.

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The below response reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @krst and @Sinkas, and it’s based on the combined research, fact-checking and ideation of the two.

After carefully examining all nominees for each domain separately, and after facilitating two “pitching” sessions to hear the nominees out (in which a total of 15 nominees participated), we’ve decided that we’ll be voting for the following people:

Gaming Domain

Dev Tooling on Nova Domain

New Protocol Ideas Domain

Education, Community Growth, and Events Domain

It was really difficult to decide which people we’ll vote for because there were so many great nominees to choose from and it’s a pity that we could only vote for 1 in each domain. Having said that, we’d like to encourage the community to think of ways we can get more people from the list of nominees involved with the DAO somehow, and we invite everyone to discuss that during the 6th Open Governance Call which will take place on Wednesday September 20th, at 16:00 UTC / 12:00 UTC (add the Arbitrum Governance Calendar to your calendar to make sure you don’t miss it).

You can also join our L2BEAT Arbitrum Office Hours on every Thursday at 15:00 UTC if you’d like to discuss this or any other issue regarding Arbitrum ecosystem.

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First of all, we would like to thank Questbook for running a successful Domain Allocator Nomination process. We have set the foundation for a program with great potential this round and beyond. The Domain Allocator program has received so many great nominees, and we would also like to thank all of them for their applications and time spent on the process.

The following reflects the decisions of Michigan Blockchain’s governance team after reviewing and deliberating on the Domain Allocator nominations:

For the Gaming Domain, we will be voting for @Flook (application): We appreciated their in-depth response that displayed clear experience having developed games as the founder of Merlyn Labs for Arbitrum’s Treasure ecosystem and previous collaborations with major gaming studios such as Atari and Volta. Their expertise in blockchain game development will allow them to support grant applicants throughout the funding process and beyond. Due to the small value of grants in each Domain, we support their vision of promoting a diverse set of dedicated game developers to build out a thriving gaming ecosystem for current Arbitrum users and more so to bring in new participants and gaming enthusiasts. While their involvement in Merlyn Labs does pose a minor conflict of interest, which they stated, we believe their goal of transparency and the accountability fostered by the Questbook system and program will ensure a fair, effective process.

For the Dev Tooling on Nova Domain, we will be voting for @Juandi (application): With their extensive experience and continued success developing tools and applications in the space, we look forward to seeing their support of the Arbitrum Nova ecosystem. Their vision was the most thorough and touched on many of the points the Nova protocol could improve upon. Their relationships with so many players across the greater blockchain space will also allow them to support grant applicants as well as attract more participants to Nova as a smaller Anytrust protocol.

For the Community, Education, and Events Domain, we will be voting for @Shreddy (application): Shreddy has an extensive track record and impressive experience working with communities across the crypto space. We give a lot of credit to Shreddy for their effort and success in building out successful programs for OlympusDAO and KlimaDAO among others. We appreciated their thorough criteria for application evaluation and along with their vision will foster an effective grants program that propels the growth of the Arbitrum community and ecosystem.

For the New Protocol Ideas Domain, we will be voting for @Matt_StableLab (application): StableLabs has a strong reputation of promoting community and governance growth and participation as well as experience leading grants programs (including Questbook’s with Compound). We align with their vision for developing the best user experience on Arbitrum and appreciated their complete evaluation process with thorough explanations as to how each criterion could be met. Having the support of the StableLabs team, we believe Matt will serve as an effective Domain Allocator to properly allocate grants and support the funded teams during and beyond the program.

Thank you again to all of the nominees for their applications. We appreciate all your efforts. This was a difficult decision and we look forward to supporting the Domain Allocators and the Questbook team however we can to ensure a successful first Grants Program. We believe the Arbitrum DAO is quickly aligning its community and driving forward as a leader in the governance space as we support and build a thriving ecosystem.

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