Thanks for the detailed response! some thoughts below
I don’t see this 10% fee being an issue per se, especially since they are routed to public goods. in the case of @EventHorizonDAO , they managed to get a roughly similar amount of 100k ARB or so as payment for integrating their technology.
So we would likely view it as a service provider fee, the main question would be the value addition got by using Octant vs doing the pilot ourself.
This is the key for value addition - creating utility and a sink for the ARB token is the unique value proposition,.
Probably early to talk about the mechanism but something i would love to see is using the yield to buy impact certificates of proven impact from ARB DAO contributors. Some examples are @BlockworksResearch rescuing LTIPP money from negligent teams, @Entropy saving money for the DAO through MSS, etc. Having these up as impact certificates which can be bought from the yield earned would be an interesting mechanism. That also ties in with your own thinking around impact bonds, could you elaborate more on that point?
Now we come to one of the key points - the amount needed. If you suggest a million per year, i think the ETH might be the wrong place given that we have 7.5k in total and there will likely be many providers competing for a share of this pie.
When you are ready, I would in fact suggest making a proposal for utilizing the yield earned from our $30 million RWA purchases for the STEP program, which will be around $1-1.5 million per year.
We are currently letting this accumulate in the treasury, algorithmic allocation of the yield which also creates ARB utility and funds proven impact creators in the ARB ecosystem would be a cool experiment for our endowment.