404DAO
July 31, 2025, 10:20pm
4
Cross-posting our thoughts on the final ARDC deliverables, along with a potential approach for building on and iterating on the work completed to date.
Thanks again to the ARDC members for publishing their reports. We appreciate the work done through ARDC V2 and believe the research has provided a strong foundation of objective ecosystem insights and intelligence (while being relatively cost effective). That said, the recurring challenge remains how the DAO can act on this type of research and translate it into something more digestible, actionable, and impactful for the ecosystem long term.
With ARDC V2 ending, the DAO no longer has a dedicated R&D function for ecosystem mapping and intelligence. Entropy’s Dune dashboards do a great job of highlighting key sector activity, but they don’t provide the same depth and objective coverage as ARDC’s reports.
Today, valuable knowledge is spread across isolated reports and deliverables with no ongoing process or platform to keep this information live and accessible to AAEs, delegates, and the broader market.
We see an opportunity to internalize and productize ecosystem research into a persistent, DAO-owned platform that achieves three objectives:
**Inform Delegates:**An easy-to-use UI that aggregates research, live dashboards, and tooling into a digestible interface, enabling faster, better-informed governance decision-making.
**Augment Realtime Decision-making Capabilities for AAEs:**A real-time data pipeline feeding AAEs with up-to-date research and intelligence, allowing them to pivot strategy or reallocate resources with current information. Sensitive data could be made accessible internally before being released publicly.
**Drive Ecosystem Marketing & Distribution:**A native “infofi” product for Arbitrum would enable our own distribution channel for ecosystem support. This would showcase Arbitrum ‘s competitive positioning, showcase high-impact or up-and-coming projects, surface vertical-specific opportunities (RWA, DeFi, gaming, etc.), and help position Arbitrum to investors, partners, and retail participants in a scalable, shareable way.
We suggest that OpCo, in collaboration with Entropy and other contributors such as Castle Capital, explore what this could look like. Some immediate next steps could be:
Building new dashboards for ARDC’s highest-impact data points
Defining a lightweight R&D function within OpCo or within an existing AAE responsible for continuously tracking and updating ecosystem intelligence.
Developing a longer-term vision for an Arbitrum Intelligence product, combining research, dashboards, and distribution capabilities under one DAO-owned platform.
This program delivered excellent raw materials for understanding the competitive ecosystem. The next iteration should focus on turning intelligence into a living product that amplifies its value across governance, strategy, and external perception of Arbitrum.