I will vote against.
On the one hand, as I mentioned above, this is a good marketing ploy to attract attention to the Arbitrum ecosystem. But on the other hand, we already have many interesting events, such as: ETHDenver, ETHBucharest etc. We also have Stylus Sprint and maybe in the future Arbitrum audit program.
Of course, I would like to hold this event, but there is not enough money for everyone. Let’s not be overwhelmed by many tasks and events this year. This can lead to poor implementation of other activities due to lack of budget for everyone. But next year, I believe, maybe it will be possible to allocate part of the funds for this great idea.
LobbyFi’s rationale on the price and making the voting power available for sale for this proposal
Firstly, we are in line with the feedback of some of the delegates and agree that the impact of the proposals is to be questioned. We also appreciate that some of the feedback has been incorporated into the final proposal.
After consideration, we will be making our voting power available, with a community auction taking place, as we see a broader group of potential beneficiaries rather than just one. LobbyFi will be willing to charge 2% of the requested amount ($67.2k * 2% ≈ 0.5 ETH). It is also worthwhile to mention that LobbyFi is launching a new feature to prevent the VP from being sold in auction for too little - a reserve price. For the beginning, it will be set at a 10% multiplier - meaning that a pool must reach a minimum of 0.05 ETH (10% of the instant buy price) to acquire the voting power; otherwise, an Abstain vote will be cast. A more detailed documentation will be shared publicly as soon as the upgrade is deployed. The proposal will be posted on LobbyFi immediately after.
I am voting against this proposal.
The idea is well intended but, to me, it starts from a totally wrong premise. We partially covered in the entropy call, will reiterate in the forum: the whole approach here is about making protocol come to the dao, help them, give them a hand, having this back and forth to make everything better.
This vision is totally detached from reality.
As of now
- Arbitrum DAO is perceived, by most builders, as a leech entity that is just not helping the ecosystem and mostly dragging it down
- Arbitrum, as a chain, has been seen more and more as a place that has lost ground in defi and other key verticals compared to 1/2 years ago
- ARB has a token has had lackluster performances, certainly similar to OP and to other low float high fdv tokens we have out there, but this is key in the performances of other tokens in the chain.
I am not mentioning the aboves to just criticize full around, but I am mentioning it to explain why protocols and builders won’t come to us. We are not starting from an advantageous point, as a DAO, and the approach to me should be the opposite: we, as a collective, should start chasing some protocols, likely a very few (and most important ones) at the beginning, understand what they need and understand how we can give them what they need compared to the goals we have as a DAO. And after we create these successfull initiatives, we enlarge the scope out to the point we - hopefully - turn the table in term of reputation, so that builders see us a value added for the chain and not value extracting.
To be clear: I am not saying that the DAO is value extracting. But this is how we are perceived by most builders that have hands down in the chain everyday.
This is the main reason i am voting against this proposal.
I want to also echo some of the feedbacks received here:
I agree that this habit of chipping out money from the event budget is something I don’t personally like. With the current position in the market that Arbitrum ecosyste has, I really think we should focus on the biggest impact possible, and in this sense is likely that 10 events of 60k have less impact than a single event of 600k (quite superficial but you get the idea).
Finally, I am still a bit puzzled of the AVI findings, not only we have to receive all deliverables but I have yet to see a compacted finalized finding. So far I have seen several threads, with several deliverables, and there should be an effort to unify and simplify the findings with then specific follow ups on specific verticals. This is a bit OT here but partially related in the sense that part of the request is tied to the findings of the AVI research.
To conclude, I think the AVI team is well intended. And I don’t want to question their expertise here nor the network that they have build in the last year. But I just think the approach should be different: if we embark in a 3, 4, 6 months adventure in this sense, we will lose valuable time and so we will lose opportunities in a market that is getting narrower and narrower.
Finally, is worth waiting for the SOS goals to come live. It will be way easier for us to understand how we can help protocols if we know what goals we have as a collective.
5 Likes
This is my main reason why I am against this proposal, even if the idea might be good.
We as a DAO should have a clear focus on costs this year. Last year the DAO spend millions for initiatives and we haven’t seen any fruits yet.
Draining the new event budget straight from the beginning with an initiative we don’t know the if the outcome will be in any way positive is simply extracting value for other really important events.
We need to focus on less but very high quality events to make sure Arbitrum, the DAO and its delegates as well will be seen as something positive and supportive. This isn’t the case right now, the DAO is seen as a burden and many decide even against Arbitrum because of this.
We should change this.
Going to vote NO.
I voted no. Like Entropy said, its too vague with inflated costs. When I commented on this last week I thought it was gonna be meditated and refined before going to snapshot. That Program Design & Development line - 10k just to figure out what to do? I thought we were doing that on the forums. I get that work needs funds but at least outline the plan first. I’d love to see proposals with more meat before approval, not just “we’ll figure it out later”. Arbitrum needs efficient spending, not blank checks for good intentions because that kills token value.
I also want to echo the sentiment of limiting spending this year. I’d love us to focus first on the Mission and values of Arbitrum - that initiative is already started and when we are clear on how Arbitrum will support Ethereum then we have a purpose to make decisions and it will be easier to make proposals and also to vote.
1 Like
I decided to vote ‘abstain’ in snapshot proposal as I find myself not convinced enough to vote for or against. I truly understand the need to support early-stage protocols and the value that working sessions can bring to them if they are correctly executed, but I also resonate with most of @Entropy’s and other delegates’ comments on the specifics, the budget, and the KPIs.
If the proposal doesn’t find enough support, I would love to see it reworked based on most of the feedback, with a lower budget to maybe have a small first pilot, and posted on Questbook, as I see a lot of value in the general idea.
1 Like
We’re voting AGAINST this proposal.
As builders in this space since 2017, we’ve seen that serious teams find their way without managed networking events or facilitated workshops. The reality is simple: if a team can’t navigate basic documentation, join Telegram groups, or network within existing channels, they likely lack the fundamental capabilities needed for successful protocol development.
The $67.2k budget effectively subsidizes basic research and networking that competent teams already do as part of their development process. Quality builders naturally gravitate toward resources and connections they need - it’s a core competency, not a service to be outsourced.
True ecosystem strength comes from teams who demonstrate initiative and resourcefulness from day one. Let’s focus our resources on direct protocol development rather than creating artificial support structures.
Voting against
Would have liked to see this as part of a more holistic approach to recruit/attract and continuously coach/support participants (longer than just 3 months). Also as already mentioned by some it doesn’t fall into the events category
I believe the above can be achieved with a much smaller budget (if any). An idea would be to try out “Masterminds”
- bring builders on Arbitrum together (thinking super simple such as tg channels etc)
- brake them into smaller groups based on similarity (size, domain etc)
- set up a call, where for each call someone is in the “hot seat” and shares a topic/area they are struggling with, while the others are there to give advice
Could be a boostrapped way to test some sort of shared space.
Voting AGAINST
I support the idea of offering P2P support for mature protocols. However, the proposal seems to be developed backwards, trying to justify a $50k budget ($12k marketing spent including an event report while there’s an additional $9.6k for reporting and DAO engagement).
I belive there’s value in this initiative but the proposal needs to be reworked, trimmed down, and likely made through Questbook to start.
Thanks to everyone for the great engagement. We appreciate the thoughtful discussions and feedback. They seem to fit in a few categories and this is an attempt to cover the majority of them even where we might not have answered every response individually. We also had a fruitful discussion on most of these in the AGC Office Hours yesterday. Please review the recording for deeper explanations or ask further questions here.
Who are the experts:
Your concern is valid and addresses a key risk in peer-to-peer learning programs. As a general principle we allow people to only speak out of personal experience, rather than teach what they’ve read about or be taught.
Our facilitators are not intended to be instructors, but instead aid the sharing of recent, practical experiences and valuing both successes and failures, as failures often provide deeper learning insights.
Research indicates that learning from peers who are in their “zone of proximal development,” those just ahead in experience, is highly effective due to the relevance of shared experiences. Given the rapid growth of Orbit chains, from a few to approximately 100 within a year, we can also use it as a chance to identify common challenges and bridge gaps in understanding. Individuals unfamiliar with Orbit chains can still offer valuable insights by connecting its benefits to broader applications.
In fact the very fact that there isn’t a wealth of recognised experts on a topic like Orbit, which is very new, makes it the perfect fit for having the proposed approach. Frontier topics like these are the default environment in which we’ve done most of our work.
We have successfully applied this approach across various industries where often we had less personal expertise to start with (from aerospace to off-grid agriculture) by facilitating the exchange of insights rather than relying on singular experts. We feel quite confident about the current situation.
All that being said, the approach allows us to work with certain well recognised figures to provide social proof and leverage their experience in supporting us to weed out any actors who are not meaningfully contributing to the learning process. More of how we’re approaching the recruitment is visible in the marketing section.
More about our team here. We will share our Go-To-Market experiences in a future post.
Budget
The topic of costs and budgets was discussed in the office hours and we feel that this is very welcome towards establishing norms, so different proposals can be compared.
Ultimately I think we should be doing a better job to express both the value as well as the costs involved. We made an update to the explanation of what fits in every category.
How we reached these numbers:
We used time estimates of how long these activities typically take from previous programs we’ve run. In the case of the clinics, here is what’s the work involved:
- Growth Circle Clinics: $15k
- 7 clinics with 3 facilitators
- $3k or the initial one + 2k for the next 6
- 3 facilitators running topic preparation, developing guest expert briefs, providing per and post session feedback, participant engagement to curate topics (incl. reading decks, materials, data rooms, form responses, feedback processing, retro, improvement planning for next sessions) Management of the group chat platform to collect asks, organise P2P support, share useful insights about certain participants to deepen the relationships etc.
- Essentially we have about 32h of work per biweekly session to make it run like intended + a one off effort for 16h around the first one, due to broader team involvement and additional preparation. The team involved in the project is 3 higher time commitment core participants + 4 supporting ones.
It’s worth also keeping in mind that running these activities online is often more costly than doing them in person if you are aiming at the same level of experience. Additionally if you want to have higher caliber participants, the sessions need to be very tight and high value, which also means that the team organising them needs to be more senior and spend more time preparing them. Eg running a 4h session might cost less or the same compared to 2h one if the aim is to achieve the same output.
Relationship with AVI
Additionally, we fully acknowledge the delays with AVI and the shortcomings in how we’ve communicated our work to delegates. Stakeholder alignment and management was more complex than we expected. There have been many efforts to address this, including engaging you and others on this, and strengthening the ability to efficiently align AVI’s work with the DAO is one of our top priorities.
As a part of this effort, we’ve scheduled three follow-up sessions in response to last week’s presentation (the lumas can be found here: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday) and additional AVI Office Hours. We would greatly appreciate your input.
Regarding budget transparency, we welcome a discussion on how our costs compared to other benchmarks and have provided more detailed breakdowns in the main post.
Does this fit as a part of the Events budget
In terms of the events category, yes as discussed on the office hours yesterday, we do recognise it might be a borderline case. Thank you for attending and engaging! We were under the impression that it fit under the educational workshops subcategory. That said, we now recognize this has led to confusion about the series, with some perceiving it as a simple speaker event and podcast rather than the more intentionally curated and hands on support initiative it actually is. This was designed with a clear structure, as we’ve watched many informal attempts fail to generate meaningful results.
We agree that we should focus on providing value through the events that are proposed. Since we are approaching the end of Q1 and only EthBucharest has been approved, we believe that these educational workshops fit well within their expressed aims and can provide the value outlined here.
We’d also like to clarify that this is not primarily meant for marketing, though it might be a secondary benefit.
We agree that short-term strategies matter, and we also need to think long-term. As a DAO, we have the ability to do both. That being said, we wholeheartedly disagree that the sentiment is all negative, there’s a segment of founders that build on Arbitrum because the tech works and they are barely aware of the DAO or have hardly interacted with it or the social media discussions around it (some never have).
We should focus on identifying lanes that make sense long-term, not just because they are trends, but because they align with Arbitrum’s ability to generate real ‘on-chain GDP’ and strengthen its core assets. This is the foundation of the AVI thesis. If we limit ourselves to competing on what might become zero sum games in an oversupplied infrastructure market (where 50k developers have 100 chains to choose from, many indistinguishable) we risk stagnation. A more balanced approach ensures both short-term traction and meaningful long-term differentiation.
Misc.
Thank you for pointing this out. We’ve corrected it on the forum, with an emphasis on highlighting the information about the lack of Tally.
McFly, some of what you’re saying has merit. However, many people would agree that YC’s $0.6T+ in portfolio value has been at least to an extent enabled by their support, while certainly some of these companies would have made it otherwise too. And furthermore they’ve been able to capture a lot of this value. In a competitive environment where Solana is doing an excellent job of already doing a lot more for application layer builders there’s merit in the Arbitrum ecosystem helping itself to be even more competitive.
We’re glad to see people engaging with the materials on the forum and your attention to metrics is appreciated. While there isn’t a final report for Phase one yet, if you attend the AVI thesis events (found here: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday) you can get more insights and meet with some of the parties interested in collaborating. While objective metrics are possible in the long-term, meaningful insights rely on a high-context, high-integrity stakeholder group with skin in the game. This is why we are pushing the AVI Snapshot related to the Interim Experts Council.
In the meantime, we aim to:
- Develop a logic model that challenges our assumptions about what drives impact on key outcomes
- Keep things simple and encourage DAO participants to engage, make intuitive judgments based on anecdotal evidence, and remain open to refining their understanding over time
The recording of the office hours can be found here and we’ll link it at the bottom of the main proposal post.
I voted FOR this proposal on Snapshot. I think we need such initiatives to increase builder activity on Arbitrum.
My only suggestion is to not invite only early stage web3 startups, but also include more established web3 projects. A mix of new and experienced builders will provide better results, and better understanding of project needs at different stages of their business lifecycle.
The budget does not seem excesive given that there will also be in-person events at major conferences. Meeting peers and delegates in person helps develop stronger bonds and is more likely to result in collaboration between projects.
I will be voting AGAINST this proposal on Snapshot. While I don’t have the best grasp on all the ins and outs for putting together an event of this nature, the budget seems quite steep for what is largely an online event.
Since I’ve been voting and going over proposals I’ve come across others that do a better job at justifying their cost structure or at least offer far more value/ROI/leads in relation to cost.
I’m voting against on Snapshot.
I believe event benefits and KPIs should be tightly linked, but they feel disconnected here. For example:
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I think scalable support should answer how it reduces barriers. How many issues get resolved. How does the community self support…
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Measurable impact after an event such as how many builders onboard. How many sign ups or clicks. Any growth in followers on X or other channels.
Like other delegates, I also disagree with the budget since there’s no clear outcome commitment. More projects joining doesn’t mean they’ll stay or bring long term value to Arbitrum 
To me, the expected results feel too vague. Can’t say yes to this
After careful consideration, we’re voting against the proposal on Snapshot.
We think the proposal offers a solid vision for decentralized growth by empowering skilled builders to take on leadership roles, reducing reliance on expert groups, and promoting community-driven development. It also creates opportunities for direct interaction between makers and the broader ecosystem, which helps showcase Arbitrum’s live ecosystem in action. The initiative has good potential as a marketing tool, drawing attention to Arbitrum and helping early-stage projects grow.
But the actual demands for this kind of event remains unclear to us. We might need more concrete evidence or feedback from early-stage teams. Besides, the KPIs are too vague, with little focus on more measurable outcomes—like actual projects launched or liquidity growth. Additionally, the budget felt high given that the majority of the events are virtual. Lastly, the $67K budget also raised questions, especially with a relatively small group of 20 participants.
The Arbitrum Growth Circle has a lot of potential to build a self-sustaining support network within the ecosystem. However, there are still lingering questions about demand, KPIs, and return on investment. If the program can address these and demonstrate ability to deliver clear, measurable outcomes, it will likely be an excellent resource for Arbitrum’s growth.
Hi! I’m sharing the concern raised by @Entropy regarding the use of the events budget. I’ve already expressed my thoughts on this in previous votes (here, here & here), to which I refer to avoid being redundant. For that, I vote against this proposal.
Regarding the content of the proposal, I believe there is value in the idea, which is why I encourage the team to bring it to the domain allocator. There, you can discuss the details with @SEEDGov as the events domain allocator (it could even be considered as a joint initiative with @maxlomu , given that his domain is focused on Orbit) and design the proposal with detailed plans for speakers, workshops, and everything else required before it is approved.
Hey @Farstar, thanks for putting this proposal together. After reviewing it and discussing it in your earlier Office Hours, we’ll be voting AGAINST on Snapshot for a couple of main reasons:
- The Events Category might not be the right fit
We believe Arbitrum Growth Circles should complement the Arbitrum Ventures Initiative (AVI) rather than be separated as a standalone event. When viewed in isolation, the value proposition and ROI aren’t totally clear. However, as a program focused on nurturing new builders within Arbitrum, it’s easier to see the potential. Incorporating this directly into AVI’s broader strategy would be more holistic and was echoed in your response to Blockworks:
- Cost per Attendee
With a budget of $67.2k for a relatively small audience, it doesn’t seem like the best use of the events budget, which is meant to support high-impact, larger-scale initiatives.
Overall, we appreciate the concept, it reminds us of a Y Combinator’s Startup School approach, which could be valuable for developing the next generation of Arbitrum builders. We just think it should happen under AVI’s umbrella for better alignment and clearer ROI. We hope you’ll consider all the feedback, refine the proposal (including lifecycle and value creation as discussed with Insomniac), and come back with an updated plan.
Looking forward to seeing where you take this next!
I’ve decided to vote against this proposal. While I believe empowering the community by creating support networks is essential overall, I don’t think this approach is the most effective way to achieve that goal.
My main concern is that the costs are not justified well, and the budget seems high compared to the structure and goals outlined.
I feel like the proposal lacks essential information concerning covered topics, … , falling short of the level of detail I’d expect for a Snapshot vote. While I appreciate that early discussions can stimulate debate, I think that proposals reaching the Snapshot stage should be more thoroughly outlined. This is especially important given that, in this case, the Snapshot approval would be sufficient for implementation.
My view on this is that we should allocate the Event budget towards larger, more impactful events that can drive significant growth. As I said, even if I see the point of this proposal, it risks using resources without achieving our broader objectives.
I still want to thank @Farstar for their initiative and effort in crafting this proposal. I hope we can collaborate on refining this concept or developing alternative approaches to effectively support the ecosystem in the future
I will be voting FOR this proposal in Snapshot.
I do believe there is a gap for projects that are beginning to grow and this type of support is something that has to be tackled. This proposal will ultimately help in growing the community of builders. Other ecosystems could have limited teams to give this support, Arbitrum’s advantage should be our structure and community expertise. We should leverage this.
I also think the Events Budget is an ideal funding mechanism, as it was approved, it tried to “get protocols building on Arbitrum aligned with the overall events strategy.” The Events Budget also passed with the idea to “enable the DAO to move more nimbly while also getting better pricing”. This proposal will be launched at ETHDenver and culminate in ETHCC which could help sustain momentum between events.
A traditional conference approach is normally more expensive than what is being proposed here. Additionally, this program will span several months, produce documented resources, and create infrastructure for future builder support which I think is positive overall for the ecosystem.
2 Likes
Thank you for your time developing this the proposal Farstar.
After reading this proposal and the comments I’ve decided to abstain my vote, I do believe there is value in this project and this idea, but there is still a lot of questions to answer regarding the budget and the benefits of all this events. It is not clear to us. Not to mention the demand of this events is also unclear…Maybe if there was a little more details on justifying all this… I will voted For.
After reviewing the proposal and delegate feedback, we have decided to vote against this proposal. While we share the vision of empowering our community, we agree with other delegates that this plan is flawed. It assumes protocols will approach us despite our current reputation and lacks clear details on session topics and qualified speakers. Moreover, allocating $67K for a largely virtual series appears excessive, particularly given the unclear connection to the 2025 Events Budget and the pending AVI Pilot deliverables.