Arbitrum DAO Grant Impact Report
Executive Summary
Salt is a decentralised treasury coordination platform that turns self-custodied wallets into programmable, co-managed accounts. It combines decentralised MPC (dMPC) with a policy-driven agent layer, enabling institutions, DAOs, and funds to automate treasury management, yield routing, and delegation, without giving up custody and increasing operational security.
We’ve spent a lot of time over the past 6-12 months, battle hardening our infrastructure, so that we can enable both users on our main Salt application but also SDK fintech users who utilise Salt’s dMPC under the hood for their own products to get access to not only exceptionally fast, reliable MPC but also MPC that preserves privacy at every step. This focus on delivering institutional grade custody tooling has led to much interest and several commitments to use Salt amounting to over $125M.
Overall, we’ve been strengthening the case for Arbitrum to be the premier venue for onchain capital allocation and custody, so much so that when we architected and built our recovery app, an open source application that lets users reconstruct their PK independently of Salt at any point, we decided to store the encrypted key material on Arbitrum.
The funding has been immensely helpful in allowing us to pursue our technical goals and implement key features of Salt that otherwise are pushed to the back in a more typical grant arrangement. This expedited several elements of our dev calendar that allow us to go to market with a much stronger product.
Performance Against KPIs
| Projected | Actual | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| TVS (Total Value Secured) | $8M | $125M+ (in 12 months) | |
| TVL (on Arbitrum) | $5M | $25M-$30M (in 12 months) |
Explanation: LOI commitments from several partners, either launching exclusively through Salt, or placing a portion of their treasury on Salt
Qualitative Impact & Community Feedback
Quote from builder on Salt’s SDK
‘What I loved most was how clean the Salt model is. Policies are explicit. Decisions are explainable. Approvals and rejections surface directly to users. Setup was very straightforward, the dashboard was very easy to use, and it allowed us to integrate Salt across our entire system without rewriting huge chunks of the app.’
Quote from ex-pro trader at STS Digital
‘Salt lets me run my on-chain trading the way I always wanted to: no single point of failure, but no drag on execution either. I used the SDK to approve an agent wallet on HyperCore, locked the account down to a tiny set of whitelisted addresses and approved contracts, and brought my OpenClaw agent in as a co-signer to validate every transaction against deterministic rules. Roboguardians co-sign from a private server I control. It was simple to set up with a well-documented SDK. Salt gives me institutional-grade custody controls without slowing my trading down, no single point of failure, and I sleep well at night.’
Most significant, non quantitative outcome was the build of the open source recovery app hosted on Arbitrum, this paves the way for users to interact with Salt without any need for trust in Salt. Gone are the days of vendor risk with Salt, as our recovery app emboldens the trustless spirit in crypto.
Financial Summary
Grant funds were used to fund the hire of a new developer that could expedite the build out of our authentication and recovery flow on Arbitrum, in conjunction with our existing dev team we were able to fully deliver our earn infrastructure which will enable smoother integrations of future Arbitrum ecosystem yield sources.
Future Plans & Continued Ecosystem Alignment
We intend to finish our frontend and announce our public launch that will enable all onchain users to interact and benefit from our permissionless model of MPC without sacrificing performance. We’ve secured meaningful partnerships with several flagship SDK power users building fintechs on Salt, ranging from Paros (an institutional execution layer), Hu (an identity monetisation app) to Armada (a privacy pool primitive) and more.
Arbitrum continues to remain a key hub for the DeFi ecosystem and as our earn page matures we will be listing markets and venues that highlight novel, reliable streams of yield. Both our recovery app and user authentication flows run through Arbitrum such that when users lose access to their accounts the key shard stored on Arbitrum are used to reconnect users back to their funds either independently or through Salt.
Final Remarks
Castle Labs were great to work with, incredibly supportive and also very much keeping the ethos and spirit of crypto alive, which is harder to come by nowadays.