Thank you for this open dialogue. One of our supporters brought this thread to our attention, as we have relevant experience to share. Below I have made some broad statements based on operating in DAO governance for 2 years, as well as more specific details of our experience engaging with several Arbitrum-run programs.
1. What is one thing where ArbitrumDAO could support your project’s success in Arbitrum?
What would be helpful for us and other builders, is a concrete list of open challenges that the DAO is actively looking to address. It would also be great to have a more formalised process in which projects can proactively tender and debate their proposals. Currently, many application processes give little opportunity to go deep on technicals, and tend to result in a popularity contest where well-known entities (which have already received funding) get the majority of support simply because of reputation.
I think this is poison to DAOs and the crypto community as a whole. It prevents new participants from making serious contributions because of the way the system is set up, and crypto is supposed to be all about designing systems in a way that enables everyone to participate.
So to answer your question on a very macro level, I would advocate for fundamentally rethinking the evaluation, allocation and accountability of funding initiatives, in the interest of encouraging more successful contributions from more people.
2. What does success for the Arbitrum ecosystem look like to you in 1-2 years?
Given our recent experience with Stylus, we think unlocking on-chain products and protocols that take advantage of what Stylus enables is definitely a north star and we support this as one of Arbitrum’s main goals.
However, as product people, we would also suggest that most dApps are just too complex for the average user, so there should also be a focus on usability and UX design together with the initiatives to promote Stylus adoption.
Therefore, success in our mind would be to see a large number of applications that simply couldn’t be done without Stylus, which are ALSO user friendly and encourage new user adoption.
3. What does success in Arbitrum look like specifically for your project in 1-2 years?
We are a governance research lab with several products, trying to find PMF, so success for us would be largely around adoption of our products within the Aribtrum ecosystem. Success would be:
40% of voters using the Lighthouse Governance native mobile client to participate in Arbitrum decision-making.
Arbitrum DAO making full use of our Dispatch messaging product to deliver secure announcements to Arbitrum participants at scale.
Our open source Signals protocol being leveraged to surface community sentiment and better inform DAO decisions.
4. What’s one critical improvement needed in the Arbitrum ecosystem to achieve this success?
It again comes back to funding and attention (and getting funding seems to be the best way to get attention). Here is an outline of our experience, and we will leave it to you to come to your own conclusions:
In August 2024, after working on our Lighthouse governance tooling for more than a year, we came up with the idea for our new Signals protocol. We wanted to develop it as an open source, public good, specifically tailored to solve many of the issues we had observed in the governance ecosystem.
In November, we were accepted into the Arbitrum x RnDAO Collabtech Hackathon, and we used the opportunity to build the first MVP of signals. Our work won first place in the competition, and we were eager to leverage that visibility to continue working on the project. RnDAO proposed a “Hackathon Continuation Program” which was embraced by the Arbitrum community, so we decided to wait and see what doors would be opened for us.
Ultimately, we were unable to accept RnDAO’s terms for the continuation program, and it seemed like the momentum from the hackathon just stopped.
We next joined the Uniswap Hooks Incubator, and used the opportunity to build another component on top of Signals. In this competition, again, we won the top prize from Arbitrum as well as a prize from Uniswap.
Arbitrum tweeted about us (https://x.com/arbitrum/status/1908251792971894947). We started getting attention for our project, and multiple Arbitrum supporters recommended we apply for the “Arbitrum New Protocols and Ideas 3.0” grant, as it would be perfect for Signals.
Unfortunately, our application was rejected. (You can see our application here: Signals Protocol by Lighthouse Labs)
As you can imagine, we were quite confused and frustrated at simultaneously being acknowledged for our hard work, but also not being supported in taking it to the next level to see what we can achieve. We would hate to see other new builders have a similar experience and give up on Arbitrum altogether.
TL;DR: We won multiple awards from high-profile programs. Our work was acknowledged by industry leaders. We still struggled to receive follow-up support.
So how can we make it better?
- Raise the bar for constructive feedback for funding applicants.
- Provide additional clarity around what should get funded and why.
- De-couple personal preferences in favour of broader DAO-aligned interests.
- Open up channels and processes for feedback and iteration; binary decisions are problematic. (For example, the Questbook response feels very decoupled from industry feedback)
Thanks again for creating this opportunity for us to share!