Very bad take, we’ve dropped the ball on not forecasting properly demand for STIP in terms of total ARB required. We’ve allowed for backroom deals and most delegates-connected protocols to meet the threshold and get funded. Arbitrum is not 29 projects. If swift extension with round 2 doesn’t get voted in, it will be catastrophic to rest of the ecosystem projects that can’t compete with others due to zero sum game. You should know better Matt, you guys specialize in research right? How about some research piece on the impact of 100s of Arbitrum projects that will suffer major decline in activity and potentially be forced to seek activity outside of Arbitrum ecosystem because they can’t compete without incentivization. 3 months of time is enough to create permanent damage to ecosystem with negative long term impact. Who knows but this type of unbiased research could actually score you some points for your coalition proposal ( feedback coming soon )
The STIP voting results made it clear, the process favors protocols selected by essentially the top 3 delegators to be winners. This punishes those who are not among the chosen (and those who didn’t submit their STIP proposal in time), with little regard to the value they provide to the ecosystem. As a result, they are destined to be short term losers and might even end up turning lights off for good.
For example, in coming months Uniswap and Sushi will lose volume to Camelot, TraderJoe and Balancer due to incentivization. Premia, Dopex, Rysk and Good Entry will dominate over Hegic, Lyra and other A+ option protocols, yet without incentives Hegic currently organically dominates options category in terms of fees ( top 8 in fees from all protocols on arbitrum in last 30 days per defilama ) . Where is the logic in punishing indirectly Hegic here for example? Why aren’t “research” firms asking those questions? Unless protocols come up with their own incentivizes to compete, they will underperform.
I’ve listened to your spaces on Friday and it seems like you, @maxlomu, Gauntlet and few other large delegates internally agreed to go against any extension plans. To me it looks more like a coup against Arbitrum ecosystem. Please provide some stats on potential positive / negative impact that no additional funding + round 2 will have on rest of the ecosystem. We can’t drop another ball here on all the legit projects that are building in the space and simply want to fairly compete with those that got grants approved and soon to be funded.
To summarize - Arbitrum risks losing builders and legit projects because of zero sum game. You can’t compete organically with incentivized projects hence 29 projects will succumb most of activity in their respected categories, where the rest will suffer drop in activity.
We need to act NOW, without unnecessary delays and support plans for extension and round 2. I’m completely outraged that some of the large delegates don’t see this or choose to turn the blind eye on destructive impact this decision might have on entire ecosystem.