[Castle Labs] Arbitrum Unlocked - Final Impact Report

CastleCapital · May 16, 2025, 6:27pm

Executive Summary

The Arbitrum Unlocked campaign, led by Castle Labs and funded under the Questbook S2 grant (Education, Community Growth, and Events domain), successfully delivered a four-month educational initiative focused on Arbitrum’s ecosystem, technology stack, and DAO governance.

Over the course of the campaign, we met 100% of our deliverables across four milestones:

16 Newsletter Segments
4 Research Reports
2 AMAs/X Spaces

In aggregate, Arbitrum Unlocked generated:

358,123 total impressions
28,214 newsletter opens
2 X Spaces with 252 total attendees

Our strategic focus on different tags, timely posts and multi-format distribution has helped maximize organic reach and community engagement.

The main learnings from this campaign include:

Reducing the cadence of the newsletter from weekly to bi-weekly to ensure content feels more organic
The content targeting the Arbitrum ecosystem (vs. DAO & Tech Stack) outperformed
X Spaces have underperformed: we believe these are only worth it with support from official Arbitrum accounts
Broader support from the ecosystem (AAEs, protocols, etc.) can boost content distribution and impact

The following sections present a detailed report on the deliverables and impact of our campaign.

Overview and Milestones

Arbitrum Unlocked has delivered a total of:

Thread	22
Weekly Newsletter	17
Tweet	7
X Article	8
Long-Form Blog	4
X Space	2

Aside from the newsletter segments, reports, and AMAs, every newsletter’'s weekly segment, “Arbitrum Corner”, has also been repurposed on our X channels, as well as many other single posts and repurposed long-form content.

Our campaign had 4 key milestones, each four weeks long:

4 Arbitrum segments in the Chronicle, 1 Research Report - all repurposed for distribution on X
4 Arbitrum segments in the Chronicle, 1 Research Report, and 1 X-hosted Panel Space - all repurposed for distribution on X
4 Arbitrum segments in the Chronicle, 1 Research Report - all repurposed for distribution on X
4 Arbitrum segments in the Chronicle, 1 Research Report, and 1 X-hosted Panel Space - all repurposed for distribution on X

Below is an overview of all the deliverables published, divided by milestone and format.

Milestone 1:

Newsletter segments:

Research Report:

An Overview of Arbitrum's DeFi Ecosystem

Threads, Tweets and Articles:

Milestone 2:

Newsletter segments:

Research Report:

Arbitrum’s Path to a Stage 2 Rollup: How BoLD Enhances Dispute Resolution, Validation, and Security

X Space: https://x.com/i/spaces/1ypJdZeLYRLKW
Threads, Tweets and Articles:

Milestone 3:

Newsletter segments:

Research Report

A Comparative Analysis of Arbitrum’s Positioning within the Layer 2 Landscape

Threads, Tweets, and Articles:

Milestone 4:

Newsletter segments:

Research Report

Arbitrum Chains: Scaling on Your Own Terms

X Space:

https://x.com/castle_labs/status/1915095903309795493

Threads, Tweets and Articles:

Data, Metrics and KPIs

The main metrics and KPIs we took into account for this grant were:

Number of deliverables successfully submitted
X Impressions
X Engagement
X URL Clicks
Email/Blog Opens
Unique Email/Blog Opens
Email/Blog Clicks
X Space Attendees

The full dataset, which delves into all facets of the campaign, can be found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1x-fJBp2CNSlgIwJtU1cEo1zdDeasTM3Ca96qSc9Tdyc/edit?gid=1514191120#gid=1514191120

Here’s an in-depth data overview of our impressions and metrics, divided by milestone:

Here’s another overview, this time according to content format:

Threads have brought over 50% of the total impressions for this campaign, signalling the importance of content repurposing on X as well as focusing on those to bring the most impact to the content produced. However, when we account for metrics per post, X articles had higher engagement and impressions than Threads:

Below you can observe the cumulative impressions and newsletter opens.

X Impressions (358k):

The spikes in the X impressions are due to broader support from either:

Arbitrum official account
Protocols retweeting our ecosystem content

This showcases the importance of this kind of support, which will also be reflected in our learning later on.

Newsletter Opens (28k):

Our newsletter has been growing consistently since the beginning of the campaign, going from 2700 to 3000 subscribers. During this time we have managed to keep our open rate around 30%. Here is an aggregate of the cumulative newsletter opens which included an “Arbitrum Corner”, our weekly segment on Arbiturm.

X Spaces:

1152 impressions
252 attendees

Spaces have drastically underperformed in terms of impressions, compared to other formats.

We have encountered challenges in gathering strong tractions and interests in the conversation carried out in the spaces, if not from a very specific and Arbitrum-focused niche of users and protocols.

Expanding below that would require broader support from official channels or participation from other protocols within the Arbitrum ecosystem.

Nonetheless, the main value and impact of spaces should not only be analysed through their impressions. While we only had 252 attendees across 2 spaces, those have been interesting opportunities of conversation on Arbitrum’s interoperability push, and an AMA with Jojo, the grant manager for the D.A.O. grants, where protocols applying had a change to ask questions about the program and clarify their doubts.

With this regard, we believe that the X spaces conducted have delivered the value expected.

Learnings

Impressions by tag:

Timely content is key: not surprisingly, the most timely content appears to perform better. This mostly translates into either ecosystem protocol updates or new tech developments within the system.
Ecosystem appears to consistently outperform Tech stack and DAO, generating almost half of all X impressions. This type of content is also better suited to being shared and quoted tweeted by others on X, boosting distribution.

This is reflected in the average X impressions per post, with Ecosystem having about 15k impressions, while Tech stack and DAO are both around 7-8k.

Here’s a more detailed overview of the cumulative impressions by tag, where this difference becomes more evident:

Here’s how we have divided our deliverables across the different Tags (Eco, Tech, DAO):

Impressions by format:

Regarding the different formats we have used during this campaign, threads appear to overperform, generating 53% of total impressions, while Spaces only contribute 0.3%.

Nonetheless, when we consider the X impression rate per post, X articles have been the most effective way to distribute content.

One of the main learning from this campaign was exactly the difficult role of X spaces in generating engagement and impressions. For this reason, we believe they are only worth pursuing together with participation from an official Arbitrum account and perhaps a cross-marketing campaign with a space announcement. This is especially important to attract the right audience to the space.

Some of the additional learnings from this campaign also include that closer coordination with Offchain Labs and Arbitrum Foundation can lead to much better results in terms of both timely content and support in distribution.

While Castle’s organic impressions and engagement have contributed to over 300k impressions, content distribution can benefit from closer collaboration with the main actors within the ecosystem.

Main learnings can be summarized as:

Cadence Adjustments: Reducing the cadence of the newsletter to bi-weekly (sweet spot)
Content Focus: Ecosystem outperformed other Tags, signalling demand for this kind of content
X Spaces underperformed in reach (highlighting the need for more support), but delivered qualitative value through niche conversations.
Distribution Boost: Content amplified by Arbitrum-affiliated accounts or protocols had significantly higher reach.
Multi-format distribution: Threads contributed over 50% of total impressions, but X Articles had the highest engagement rate per post.
Format Prioritization: Tweets and single posts appear particularly well suited to capture timely narratives and events and are easier to deliver and read. We will leverage a combination of short and long-form content, as it is more effective in capturing attention: long-form reports should be followed by shorter and more targeted pieces, focusing on the general narrative, a problem/solution structure, etc. At the end of this, single posts and tweets reinforce the campaign by tackling smaller updates and timely narratives that might be otherwise overlooked. Within this context, we invite you to have a look at our RWA post as an example of this, which has performed very well.

Conclusion

Castle Labs has completed the Arbitrum Unlocked educational campaign, according to the Milestones defined in our application and the overall Arbitrum Education, Community Growth, and Events 2.0 grant vision.

Our campaign has centered around the delivery of high-quality content aimed at:

Highlighting the main ecosystem developments within Arbitrum
Abstracting away the complexity of Arbitrum’s tech stack and upgrades, such as Stylus and Bold, to make them more accessible to both new and existing users and developers.
Critically analyzing the main events and proposals within the Arbitrum DAO governance forum.

Distributing content through Castle makes Arbitrum accessible to our network of builders and developers, acting as an amplifier and facilitator between Arbitrum and the broader crypto community.

We believe this campaign has been a success, and it has empowered us with new insights that we can apply to future ecosystem and protocol content campaigns.

While we have faced challenges such as X space engagement and distribution constraints, our content has organically reached over 358k impressions and 28k newsletter opens, with a 100% completion rate for our milestones and deliverables.

The program has reached both new and existing builders and users, expanding awareness and knowledge of Arbitrum’s ecosystem, tech, and DAO governance.

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