Arbitrum's Short-Term Incentive Program (Arbitrum Improvement Proposal)

Disclosure - I was part of the working group that helped draft this with @tnorm. TLDR - there was a lot of compromise made here, and I don’t know that I Iove everything about it, but I think it works and captures the essence of what is needed. (This is how compromise works)

I think the main thing here is to enable Protocols to access DAO funds as quickly as possible and for the DAO to be able to judge how those funds were used.
IMO it is unlikely $75m ARB is used in 2 months given the requirement for public voting.

More likely:

  1. Experimentation
  2. Improved Data
  3. Improved future discussion (as empirical overtakes theoretical chatter)

Things to watch for:

  1. Excessive spending
  2. Favouritism for particular protocols to exclusion of others (ie kingmaking)

Given the bear market, and the peculiarities of network effect, the DAO will likely need to be bold to retain market position or risk losing out to others (optimism, Mantle etc.) Hopefully, this programme will be an opportunity for protocols to innovate and make requests for funding that demonstrate more thought than pure ‘incentives’ (i.e. outright unfettered giveaways). Vertex Protocol will be making an effort to do this - we would urge other protocols to do the same to avoid some of the mistakes people on the forum seem so concerned about.

75m ARB ‘given away’ seems foolish.
75m ARB as capital to fuel the ecosystem could be genius.

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