Blockworks Advisory ARDCv2 Application
Below is an ARDC application submitted by Blockworks Advisory (a new Advisory arm spun out of Blockworks Research). You can find a link to the full application here.
Thanks to @Immutablelawyer and the Axis Advisory team for leading this initiative!
Applicant Information
- Name of Applicant & Applicant’s Representative [If Applicable]:
- Blockworks Advisory
- Representatives: EffortCapital, magicdhz, GoldDefi, 0xMims
- Blockworks Advisory
- Email Address:
- Blockworks Advisory: advisory@blockworks.co
- Telegram Handle (if applicable):
- Blockworks Advisory representatives:
- @effortcapital, @magicdhz, @carolinagold, @Mims0x, @rmalakaib
- Blockworks Advisory representatives:
- Role being applied for: Research-Oriented Member
- Hourly Rate (in USDC): $195/hr per individual
Background & Skills
Please provide a brief overview of your experience in the digital asset industry, particularly within the Ethereum & Arbitrum Ecosystems. Include your involvement in any relevant projects or contributions to the ArbitrumDAO, or other Ecosystems. (400 words max)
Blockworks Advisory is a dedicated team spun out of Blockworks Research to help protocols and their communities sidestep pitfalls and accelerate their path to success. Blockworks Advisory is rooted in the knowledge we’ve gained from the 2.5 years of delivering institutional-grade, data-driven research and analysis under the Blockworks Research brand.
Our Research arm has authored many industry-leading reports on Arbitrum, its ecosystem, and the rollup landscape more generally.
Some examples include:
- An Overview of Arbitrum vs Optimism
- Arbitrum Styles: The Dual VM
- An Analysis on ARB Staking
- Sequencers: The Key to the Rollup Investment Thesis
- An Analysis on Timeboost Revenues
- Vertex: Edge of Tomorrow
- GMX V2: Improved UX and LP Risk Management
- Radiant Capital: A Novel Approach to the Lending Market
As a delegate, Blockworks Advisory actively contributes to the Arbitrum DAO, participating in community calls, discussions, and proposal evaluations. Our notable contributions as a delegate include highlighting key points in AIP-1, developing resources like the original STIP spreadsheet, and authoring the original Arbitrum Coalition proposal that ultimately led to the creation of ARDC. Our engagement and contributions to the Arbitrum DAO as a delegate reflect our commitment to advancing the ecosystem through informed analysis and active participation.
As a Research Member in ARDCv1, some of our contributions included extensive operational and statistical analysis on both incentives programs (STIP and LTIPP), recovering/saving over 3.7M ARB worth of misused or unallocated funds for the DAO and Foundation (examples: Furucombo and Synapse), and providing context for important conversations around Timeboost. You can find all of our contributions from ARDCv1 here.
Explain how your skills align with the role you are applying for and describe your methodology for fulfilling your duties. How will these skills help you effectively contribute to the ArbitrumDAO?
The Blockworks Advisory team has a diverse background ranging from portfolio management and high frequency trading to economic modeling and business development. The team is deeply crypto native, with a combined 20+ years in the industry at both a professional and personal capacity, has a strong understanding of the competitive landscape of L1 and L2 ecosystems, and was hand selected to be on the inaugural Blockworks Advisory team during the spin off from Blockworks Research. The Blockworks Advisory team also collaborates with the Blockworks Analytics team, who are well known throughout the space as one of the strongest analytics teams in the crypto space, to surface information that empower protocols.
As research advisors to the DAO, we’ll leverage our position as an active and well-resourced delegate to understand the needs of the DAO. We’ll communicate with major stakeholders (supervisory council, delegates, Foundation, OCL) to prioritize where we should concentrate our resources. We’ll then scope out the work to identify the needs and timeline and coordinate with various people internally to deliver results, such as our inhouse analytics and quant teams to gather, prep, and analyze data (if applicable). After our work is published, we’ll communicate with the major stakeholders to answer any questions and gather feedback.
We also created the most comprehensive Arbitrum data dashboard that provides analytics on important aspects of Arbitrum’s onchain activity and financials. We recently launched an update to the dashboard that provides in-depth coverage for Arbitrum DAO’s financials. Leveraging our platform and crypto-native experience, we do our best to drive insightful, fundamentally sound metrics for protocols and investors. Below are screenshots of the analytics platform for Arbitrum to show the extensive data we collect that would help inform the work we do for ARDC.
Motivation
What motivates you to join ARDC, and what do you aim to achieve as a Working Member? (400 words max)
We recently officially announced the launch of Blockworks Advisory at our Permissionless III conference. We want to apply everything we’ve learned–as a crypto-native events, media, and research company–to advise the most important aspect of the industry: the protocols themselves. We view Arbitrum as a key partner in our mission to install stronger fundamentals and drive legitimate adoption for crypto, more broadly.
Arbitrum is a crucial participant in the Ethereum ecosystem and, more importantly, in executing Ethereum’s rollup centric roadmap. There are a number of really important topics and challenges that Arbitrum will confront throughout ARDCv2. Among others, the areas that we are really keen on are Timeboost and incentives/grants.
Timeboost
MEV is a critical component of blockchains and their censorship-resistance properties, and Timeboost introduces a very unique construction, which has already garnered mixed reviews from researchers, traders, and application developers.
While it should generate more revenue for the DAO, it will present new challenges and potentially vulnerabilities to the ecosystem, to which the DAO must be informed in order to make the appropriate decisions regarding adjustments to Timeboost’s parameters. As the chain generates more MEV and attracts new kinds of participants, we look forward to being a research partner with the DAO, to surface key information and analysis to guide the DAO to make informed decisions on Timeboost’s policy, and to scale onchain activity.
Incentives and Grants
Incentives and grants are critical for bootstrapping users, growing a protocol, and developing the community and technical stack. However, incentive programs and grants can be very wasteful. We have performed extensive operational and statistical analyses for Arbitrum’s incentive programs and look forward to working with the DAO, relevant partners, and applications, to apply the lessons learned, and to drive sustainable activity and growth.
We think that a well-run incentives program and the advent of Timeboost could be a positive boon for Arbitrum, and feel confident that we are in a position to advise on both fronts.
We are also positioned to advise a grants program given both our experience as admins and reviewers of grants programs in other ecosystems and as users (in the trenches) across various VMs.
All in all, we want to leverage our deliverables, platform, and experience to drive impactful proposals, surface forum discussions and topics, and increase governance participation.
Research Initiatives
Describe your experience conducting research-oriented initiatives within the digital asset industry, more specifically (and if applicable), research related to the Arbitrum tech-stack. Explain how your previous experience can translate to an added value contribution to the ARDC & the ArbitrumDAO. (500 words max)
As aforementioned throughout the application, our team of analysts delivers institutional-grade, data-driven research and data analytics spanning a broad range of categories in crypto. We have worked closely with some of the largest protocols and institutions in the space, including the Solana Foundation, Lido, Ethena, and a growing list of partners.
Here are some examples of our Advisory work:
- Arbitrum
- LTIPP analysis
- STIP analysis on sequencer revenues
- Timeboost analysis and revenue projections
- A complete list of ARDCv1 deliverables can be found here.
- Avax
- Ethena
- Public Protocol Dashboards
Given our experience covering a wide range of protocols and categories in the space, we’re confident in our ability to offer protocol agnostic advice that drive ecosystem growth and revenue for the DAO. Working with Blockworks Advisory, the DAO will also be able to leverage our extensive resources to drive more participation and meaningful discussions in the community.
Project Management & Collaboration
Describe your project management experience (This could include project management in other ecosystems you have operated in, management of initiatives, etc.) (300 words max)
Creating a leading crypto media, events, and research brand requires high-agency talent throughout the company that excel in project management. The entire Blockworks company is perpetually executing on high priority projects in a fast-moving industry that leave little room for error. More specifically, our Advisory team has extensive project management experience in both the crypto and traditional world.
Effortcapital, Head of Advisory, has over seven years of project and program management experience working across cross-functional teams in the energy industry where he spearheaded multiple $100M+ construction programs. He also led the project management function for the Cosmos Hub’s tokenomics grant where three teams, including Blockworks, performed mechanism design and governance research for the community over the span of a quarter.
Additionally, made evident by our contributions in ARDCv1, the rest of the advisory team has demonstrated the ability to collaborate and deliver analyses as needed. All deliverables can be found here.
Scope of Work
Outline the tasks and key deliverables you propose, covering one-third of the 6-month term. Demonstrate your understanding of the most pressing needs within the ArbitrumDAO and how your work will support its strategic goals. Per the recommendations of the procurement committee, we have highlighted a deliverable within our scope that we believe will take 2 months of labor and communications to complete (Unified Incentives Framework). (500 words max)
1. Unified Incentives Framework (Incentive Program Design Assistance)
Through our initial ARDC STIP work, Blockworks Advisory is uniquely positioned to assist in the development of the next incentive program scheduled to launch in 2025. Blockworks Advisory could work closely with the Incentives Working Group and other major stakeholders to create a Unified Incentives Framework that applies previous best practices and lessons learned to optimize ROI in various objective functions. While we will not administer the incentives or perform the operations (management, etc) we will help structure the proposal, and the program for the greater good of the ecosystem leveraging research accomplished. As the embargo on incentives ends in Q1, this would likely be our first deliverable, and would span 2 months worth of time in our term. Additionally, we believe this deliverable to be of great value to the DAO, given the DAOs past initiatives, STIP and LTIP, and the likely continuance of incentives post-embargo. The Foundation has also weighed in and has provided incentives as a suggested area of work for the Research member:
Below are other deliverables that we can work on in addition to or besides the Incentive Framework.
2. Timeboost Revenue Allocation Framework
While Timeboost is an innovative solution coming to Arbitrum that will likely be a positive catalyst for DAO revenue, there hasn’t been a community-wide discussion on how the revenue should be allocated and whether it makes sense for the DAO to capture all proceeds or redistribute it to impacted LPs/protocols.
3. Orbit Chain Strategy
Provide the DAO with a path towards aligning the ARB token with the growth of the Orbit tech stack, taking lessons learned from other ecosystems (Cosmos, Polkadot, Optimism, zkSync, etc). Outlining a procurement vs ownership model where we identify what products/services the DAO should own (e.g RaaS, block explorer, data indexing, etc).
4. General Data Services
Similar to the Multisig Support Service proposed by Entropy Advisors and R3gen Finance to reduce operational spend and increase proposal efficiency, Blockworks Advisory could become a shared data service provider that any Arbitrum working group or initiative (including the Foundation) could tap into to fulfill all data needs. We have the most comprehensive Arbitrum data in the industry, including DAO financials, and can leverage this to empower the various stakeholders in the community.
5. Developer-centric Strategy Framework
In last year’s Developer Report from Electric Capital, Arbitrum saw a troubling decline in active developers in the ecosystem. This deliverable would be outlining the developer pipeline specifically in regards to Arbitrum, and provide suggestions for where DAO funding could possibly aid in the development process.
6. Financial Audit of Arbitrum Grants Programs
The Arbitrum Grants program is expansive, and a financial audit would simply be a retroactive analysis of the Arbitrum Grants program to date to determine ROI for the ecosystem.
Please also elaborate as to your capacity to execute, including how you intend to allocate resources for the remaining term, with regard to ad hoc or flexible tasks that the Supervisory Council may put forward. Please also describe how you would plan to satisfy this should the ARDC be extended for an additional 6-month term. (300 words max)
As described throughout aforementioned sections, as research advisors to the DAO, we’ll leverage our position as an active and well-resourced delegate to understand the needs of the DAO. We’ll communicate with stakeholders and relevant parties to prioritize where we should concentrate our attention. We’ll scope out work to identify the needs and timeline and coordinate with other teams internally to deliver results. For instance, we’ll work closely with our inhouse analytics and quant teams to gather, prep, and analyze data (if applicable).
Given our existing business lines, research capabilities, and dedicated team, Blockworks Advisory is well positioned to fulfill the responsibilities of the ARDC for the entire term and beyond, should there be an extension.
The advisory team has demonstrated the ability to collaborate and deliver analysis as needed, on both an ad-hoc basis and an independent basis. We are also innately familiar with the needs of ArbitrumDAO, its key stakeholders, and have a proven track record of providing value to the DAO. All deliverables can be found here.
Conflict of Interest
Please disclose any potential conflicts of interest and how you plan to handle situations where they might arise. (250 words max)
Much like our Media and Research arms, Blockworks Advisory strives for objectivity and being grounded in data-driven decisions. While we believe there are no conflicts of interest today, we think its important to note that we are advisors and/or delegates for a growing list of protocols, including and not limited to: Uniswap, Jito, Lido, Wormhole, CoW Protocol, Polygon, Avalanche, and Ethena. We strive to be transparent with our engagements, and will update the DAO and relevant parties as necessary.
Summary
In summary, please highlight your key qualifications and explain why you are a strong fit for the role. (500 words max)
Over the past two and a half years, Blockworks Research built a reputation for being a leading source of information for deep technical, protocol-specific research. Blockworks Advisory spun out of Blockworks Research and was built to apply the knowledge we’ve gained from delivering institutional-grade, data-driven research and analysis to advising protocols.
We have a deep conviction in this space, and one of our guiding principles is that every year, more liquidity will move onchain, and we want to leverage our distribution and crypto-native expertise to drive this future. In order to do this, we have to go even deeper and work directly with protocols themselves.
We’re excited about the Arbitrum ecosystem as it introduces Timeboost and grows the Orbit ecosystem, and we’re confident our experience from ARDCv1 proves our steadfast partnership with the Arbitrum ecosystem and our ability to address the aforementioned scope of work in ARDCv2. We view Arbitrum as a key partner in our mission to install stronger fundamentals and drive legitimate adoption for crypto, more broadly.