The below response reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @krst and @Sinkas, and it’s based on the combined research, fact-checking and ideation of the two.
As mentioned on several occasions already, we would like to raise delegates attention to the Delegate Domain Allocator Grants program run by Questbook (as voted in that proposal).
Although this grant program was officially launched on 5th October, 2023 and should theoretically end sometime around April (it was originally scheduled to last 6 months), we can already consider it completed in the sense that there are no more funds available. All 4 domains have either fully allocated their budget or have commitments to allocate to current applications and have no capacity for new ones.
From one point of view, this is a positive outcome. Personally, I stand corrected bacause I admit that during the discussion on this proposal, I had concerns about whether this program would be able to attract enough valuable projects.
From the other point of view though - this means that we do not have a general grant program run by ArbitrumDAO that could address projects looking for some kickstart funding. This is an issue as 1. we should aim for some kind of continuity grant offerings so that dedicated prospective buidlers do not have to look for grant programs in other ecosystems, and 2. ETHDenver with its BuidlWeek is just around the corener, we want to attract new buidlers there to buidl on Arbitrum, but we don’t have any grants for them to continue buidling after the hackathon.
Having said that, we think it’s high time to review how the DDA program went, what was funded, was it effective, etc., and think about follow-up funding, but first discuss possible improvements and necessary changes.
In order to facilitate this process we proposed DDA team to have at least two calls this week - one so that they present to the DAO what they have funded and give comments to those choices, second to discuss DAOs feedback and suggestions.
First one took place on Monday, 5th of February and has been recorded:
- the recording is available here: Questbook DDA Grants Program - review of funded applications (2024-02-05 16:04 GMT+1) - Google Drive
- the chat log can be found here: Questbook DDA Grants Program - review of funded applications (2024-02-05 16:04 GMT+1) - Google Drive,
- and the automatic transcript can be found here: Questbook DDA Grants Program - review of funded applications (2024-02-05 16:04 GMT+1) - Transcript - Google Docs,
You can also check the documents that were discussed during the call:
- JoJo’s presentation: Questbook - New Protocols and Ideas - Google Slides
- Flook’s presentation: Questbook Gaming Domain: Demo Day - Google Slides
- Juandi’s presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1wOsbnVQyJXx1dbpDHjFMVg5UG6h4UmyzWiecW1xnRZA/edit?usp=sharing
- Cattin’s presentation: TBD
- Srijith’s (program manager) presentation: Tome
Furthermore, Srijith prepared a financial report for the program: Arbitrum Transactions - Google Sheets
You can find the details of all funded applications on the Questbook platform: https://arbitrum.questbook.app/
You can find some additional information in the DDA team reports that were posted semi-regularly on their program thread, there are also some interesting comments from other delegates that we find valuable: Arbitrum DAO Grants Domain Allocator Nominations - #78 by Blueweb
We encourage all delegates to get accustomed with the Monday call recording and the sources mentioned above and most impotantly - to join the discussion tomorrow, on Thursday, 8th of February at 3PM UTC on Google Meet: meet.google.com/onh-aedo-xwu
We will be posting our own summary and DDA program assessment soon.
