Arbitrum Growth Circles: Final Report
Milestone 5 · Post-Event Final Report and Impact Metrics
When we kicked off Arbitrum Growth Circles (AGC), we weren’t trying to build another generic accelerator. In a competitive L2 landscape, Arbitrum has historically had limited visibility with traditional financial institutions, and technically strong Arbitrum protocols were struggling to translate that strength into institutional traction as a result. We wanted to close that gap directly. We ran AGC Cohort 1 as a go-to-market bootcamp for early-stage DeFi teams building toward regulated, institution-facing use cases, organized around a shared cohort thesis - custodians as a distribution channel for DeFi protocols rather than generic startup support. This report closes out Milestone 5, the program’s final milestone, summarizing what AGC Cohort 1 delivered and what we learned.
Program Milestones
| Milestone | What We Delivered |
|---|---|
| M1 Pre-Launch Advance | Covered contractor costs critical to program launch. |
| M2 Pre-Launch Prep | AGC website live; 5 core mentors and 10 founding teams recruited; program design and schedule finalized. |
| M3 Launch & Workshop Phase | 60+ protocols and 20+ domain experts engaged; 16 teams, 33+ collective participants and mentors; workshop attendance held above 80%. |
| M4 Execution Phase | Preliminary Report posted to the Arbitrum forum; 2 clinics facilitated by OCL and 1 by AF; ~75 program NPS. |
| M5 Post-Event Final Report | 180+ hours of mentorship delivered; 400K social impressions; 22 deals and partnerships closed or in motion, across ~$250M in cohort-wide stated interest. |
Program Delivery & Mentorship
We built AGC1’s mentorship model around facilitation, not one-on-one advisory hand-holding. A five-person core mentor bench each carried a small number of named teams at a light, sustainable cadence - roughly 30 minutes per team per week across the program’s 12 weeks - supported by a wider bench of around 35 domain mentors and clinic speakers, each committing a minimum of 6 hours across the 3-month window through workshops, clinics, and specialist deep-dives. That bench drew from Fabric Ventures, Offchain Labs, Greengage, JST, Across, L2Beat, and Protocol Labs, among others, and workshop attendance held at roughly 80% throughout the program, with optional sessions averaging around 50%.
Delivered against that structure, mentorship hours across the cohort comfortably exceeded our 180-hour target: core mentor engagement alone accounts for roughly 100 hours of direct, weekly team contact, before adding the domain and clinic contributions layered on top.
This is our broader Growth Circles methodology at work: rather than concentrating a small internal team’s attention on a handful of teams, or spreading thin across the whole cohort, we pair a light, consistent core-mentor cadence with a deeper bench of specialists who opt in around specific needs. Clinics, bi-weekly work sessions, and a peer-first culture carried much of the load a larger internal team would otherwise have had to shoulder.
We saw the clearest evidence of this working when mentors stepped beyond their formal remit. Nashpoint founder Cormac Daly confirmed that mentor Armando Aguillar moved from an assigned mentor into an active advisor role, continuing to make introductions to LATAM wallets, neobanks, and investors well past any formal commitment. Caddy’s Arko Ganguli offered a similar account of mentor Lino Velev, crediting him with guiding the team through multiple stages of their ideation journey well beyond the program’s formal structure. Testimonials from across the cohort are published in full in the Preliminary Report.
Deals & Institutional Partnerships
AGC Cohort 1 produced real institutional traction, anchored by two flagship case studies and reinforced by a pattern we specifically designed the program to produce: startups creating value for each other, not just receiving it from mentors.
Nashpoint is the cohort’s clearest institutional-adoption story. Over the program window, Nashpoint closed a partnership with Centrifuge - its first major institutional partnership - and followed it with a direct integration with DigiFT, extending its reach into a network of global asset managers including UBS and Invesco. DigiFT has itself since partnered with WisdomTree (~$100B AUM, SEC-regulated), giving Nashpoint indirect exposure to that relationship as well. Nashpoint’s core infrastructure also received security-audit grant support through the Arbitrum ecosystem’s DAO-administered subsidy program. For Arbitrum, Nashpoint is evidence that the custodian-and-RWA thesis this cohort was built around isn’t theoretical - it’s already producing partnerships that extend the ecosystem’s reach into institutional balance sheets.
Nashpoint on LinkedIn, detailing its Centrifuge, DigiFT, and WisdomTree integrations. Full post: linkedin.com/posts/nashpoint
Caddy delivered the program’s largest confirmed capital commitment: a $105M initial liquidity agreement with Hilbert Group’s Syntetika platform, scalable to $205M, publicly announced by both parties within the program window (October 2025). At the time, it was the clearest evidence yet that structured go-to-market support, not just strong technology, could turn Arbitrum-based protocols into credible counterparties for institutional capital.
Hilbert Group on LinkedIn, confirming the Syntetika / Caddy Finance commitment. Full post: linkedin.com/posts/hilbertgroup
Beyond the two flagship stories, we saw something rarer: startups doing deals with each other. Blend and Ostium, and separately Nashpoint and Blend, connected and began exploring product integrations specifically because they were cohort-mates - a direct result of the peer-to-peer structure at the center of AGC’s design, not a byproduct of mentor outreach. Across the cohort, cumulative stated deal interest reached approximately $250M, spanning custodians, asset managers, and institutional counterparties including Centrifuge, DigiFT, WisdomTree, Hilbert Group, Cobo, and Copper.
On the ecosystem-relationship side, we opened a direct working relationship with Offchain Labs’ partnerships team. For Nashpoint, that meant a distributor introduction and a standing monthly-sync commitment. For Caddy, it opened a chain of introductions into institutions including Amber Group and JST, plus further connections inside the Arbitrum team and ecosystem.
Given the sensitivity and early stage of many of these relationships, this section reflects only what counterparties have agreed to make public; a number of additional conversations are progressing but aren’t yet ready to be shared externally. We maintain an internal tracker of all cohort deal activity and follow-up engagement, and can make it available on request for anyone who needs the fuller picture.
Beyond these named deals, AGC Cohort 1 also opened exploratory dialogues with a broader set of institutions and custodians - including Julius Baer, CME Group, Citibank, Signum, Deribit, Canary Capital, 7RCC, Zodia/Standard Chartered, BNY Mellon, and Aegis - reflecting growing confidence among TradFi participants in Arbitrum’s institutional potential.
Deal & Partnership Pipeline
| Stage | Number |
|---|---|
| Closed | 4 |
| Term Sheet / LOI | 1 |
| In Discussion | 12 |
| Early Connections | 5 |
| Total | 22 |
Community & Social Engagement
Throughout the program, we maintained a consistent public presence across LinkedIn and X, mirroring each major milestone - from launch and kickoff through the GTM Labs, the EthCC recap, and each workshop in the pipeline-management series. Across organic posts and a broader paid campaign, our content reached nearly 400,000 impressions over the course of the program. What we are actually proud of, though, is what happened alongside that reach: high engagement throughout, and founders reposting about their experience on their own channels without ever being asked to - amplification we didn’t have to ask for or pay for. That is the part of AGC’s institutional positioning we value most.
Our Cohort 1 kickoff announcement on X, 1 Sept 2025 - 13k impressions, 7 reposts, 48 likes, 19 replies.
What We Learned
Our own framing for AGC Cohort 1 was not “run another accelerator” - it was answering a harder question: how do you turn protocol-level innovation on Arbitrum into credible, investable products that real institutions can actually use? Five findings from that process are worth carrying forward into any future iteration of the program:
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The most valuable founders around Arbitrum often can’t reach it. AGC Cohort 1 surfaced a specific founder profile - high-capacity, often non-US, deep TradFi/Web2/gaming experience - who simply don’t know how to “enter” Arbitrum or who to talk to. Their constraint isn’t capital or execution capacity; it’s cultural and relational access. Caddy is the clearest example: a TradFi/Web2 team that went from being unfamiliar with Arbitrum to $200M+ in TVL within months once given a structured on-ramp.
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Geography and local presence matter more than expected. Most of these founders sit in London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin, not New York or San Francisco - and in those cities, Arbitrum has historically only showed up in the room because one specific founder or partner drags it in, while Avalanche, Solana, Ripple, and increasingly Base are the default names at the table. The story isn’t hard to sell once it’s told; the bottleneck is awareness and physical presence.
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Other ecosystems are raising the bar on founder support. Base’s approach - partnering with local VCs, covering travel to key events, tying capital and GTM support to physical presence - sets a comparison point we don’t yet match structurally.
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Enterprises weigh compliance and privacy as heavily as performance. Institutional builders need a credible answer on identity, KYC/AML, and compliant data handling on public infrastructure - and engagement visibly spiked whenever we could show a credible pattern for that.
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Relationships are the real distribution channel. Warm, structured introductions through trusted nodes - bank venture arms, local VCs, infra partners - consistently outperformed X/Twitter reach for this audience.
As we put it in our Post-Cohort 1 Lessons Learned: “Arbitrum doesn’t have a demand problem. It has an access and coordination opportunity.”
Closing
With this report, AGC Cohort 1 has delivered against every commitment set for Milestone 5. The full workshop and mentorship program ran its complete course, from kickoff through the final clinics and work sessions, and this report is the final account of what we delivered.
Our mentor bench - built around facilitation rather than one-on-one hand-holding - delivered more than 180 hours of mentorship once core mentor cadence and domain and clinic contributions are counted together. Our social presence maintained a consistent, positive drumbeat across every major milestone - through organic posts and a broader paid campaign - reaching nearly 400,000 impressions, with founders and partners resharing their own progress along the way. We opened real working relationships with the ecosystem stakeholders this milestone asked us to reach, including Offchain Labs’ partnerships, alongside Nashpoint’s own growing institutional footprint. And dealflow moved from mentorship into tangible outcomes across 22 deals and partnerships, closed or in motion - from Caddy’s confirmed capital commitment to Nashpoint’s string of institutional partnerships and the cross-cohort deals between Blend, Ostium, and Nashpoint - with several additional relationships still progressing behind the scenes.