[FINAL] Socket Bridge Addendum

[sriram]

Information about STIP/STIP Backfund

1. Can you provide a link to your previous STIP proposal (round 1 or backfund)?

[Socket] [FINAL] [STIP - Round 1]

SECTION 1: APPLICANT INFORMATION Applicant Name: Sriram Vasudevan Project Name: Socket Protocol Project Description: Socket is an interoperability protocol for building cross-chain use cases & apps. Socket offers the most efficient way to transfer liquidity across chains by tapping into all available liquidity sources. Socket has facilitated over $4B+ in volumes across chains and over $1B+ in volumes into Arbitrum since launch. Team Members and Qualifications: Vaibhav Chellani (Cofounder & …

2. How much, in the previous STIP proposal, did you request in ARB?

1M ARB

3. What date did you start the incentive program and what date did it end?

Started on Feb 12, 2024 ended on Mar 31st, 2024.

4. Could you provide the links to the bi-weekly STIP performance reports and Openblocks Dashboard?

Biweekly Report 1
Biweekly Report 2
Final Report

Openblocks Report:
https://www.openblocklabs.com/app/arbitrum/grantees/Socket Protocol

5. Could you provide the KPI(s) that you deem relevant for your protocol, both in absolute terms and percentage change, month over month, for the first of each month starting from October 2023 until April 2024, including the extremes?

Generic metrics: Monthly Numbers for Arbitrum - Highlighted numbers are months when rewards were live!

Daily Protocol Fee: 0 (Socket contracts charge 0 fees for all our users)

6. [Optional] Any lessons learned from the previous STIP round?

On the first grant, we had asked for expected the user rebates portion of our grant(700K ARB) to last us over 3 months, but we witnessed higher users using us than expected and were able to disburse the rewards in less than 5 weeks.

The rest of the grant allocated for Superbridge/Supertoken incentives was not fully utilized since we were not able to work with enough projects as per our original expectations in the allotted period.

New Plans for STIP Bridge

How much are you requesting for this STIP Bridge proposal?

500,000 ARB

Do you plan to use the incentives in the same ways as highlighted in Section 3 of the STIP proposal? [Y/N]

No

[Only if answered “no” to the previous question] How will the incentive distribution change in terms of mechanisms and products?

We will be using the entire 500K ARB requested for user rebates(80% rebates on bridging+gas fees) on Socket API/SDK (similar to our original application) on select Socket partners.

@sriram

Users bridging to Arbitrum One through Socket API/SDK contracts:

Every user that onboards to Arbitrum via Socket via our partner apps(bridging/cross-chain deposits) will have 80% of their total onboarding fees refunded in $ARB. The total onboarding fee includes the total GAS spent + the bridging fee from the underlying bridges

As mentioned in our learnings, we believe the SuperBridge/Supertoken portion of our earlier grant was underutilized and thus feel the best use of the grant would be to incentivize bridging on our API/SDK contracts.

Could you provide the addresses involved in the STIP Bridge initiative (multisig to receive funds, contracts for distribution, and any other relevant contract involved), and highlight if they changed compared to the previous STIP proposal?

Funding Address: 0x952aB7dd815558511bc80A3532D89368130F0809

Funding Address Characteristics: Multi-sig

Could you share any feedback or suggestions on what could be improved in future incentive programs, what were the pain points and what was your general evaluation of the experience?

Overall experience was positive, with no specific feedback

[Matt_StableLab]

Hello @sriram ,

Thank you for your application! Your advisor will be @JoJo.

Please join the LTIPP discord and ping your advisor in the general chat so they can create a new channel and start communicating with you.

[cattin]

Following the ARDC recommendation, we believe that this proposed addendum requires further review by the DAO. Therefore, we challenge its optimistic approval so that the delegates can form an opinion on the merit of renewing the incentives received during the STIP.

We are publishing the review conducted by Blockworks for greater visibility and advice to the applicant to provide an explanation for the concerns raised.

“Addendum extremely barebone and doesn’t discuss events that have taken place during the original STIP in a detailed way (hack, incentive allocation). Reporting during the original STIP was very bad and the impact of incentives is unclear. Funding address still seems to hold ~260K ARB”