I am voting against this proposal.
The idea is well intended but, to me, it starts from a totally wrong premise. We partially covered in the entropy call, will reiterate in the forum: the whole approach here is about making protocol come to the dao, help them, give them a hand, having this back and forth to make everything better.
This vision is totally detached from reality.
As of now
Arbitrum DAO is perceived, by most builders, as a leech entity that is just not helping the ecosystem and mostly dragging it down
Arbitrum, as a chain, has been seen more and more as a place that has lost ground in defi and other key verticals compared to 1/2 years ago
ARB has a token has had lackluster performances, certainly similar to OP and to other low float high fdv tokens we have out there, but this is key in the performances of other tokens in the chain.
I am not mentioning the aboves to just criticize full around, but I am mentioning it to explain why protocols and builders won’t come to us. We are not starting from an advantageous point, as a DAO, and the approach to me should be the opposite: we, as a collective, should start chasing some protocols, likely a very few (and most important ones) at the beginning, understand what they need and understand how we can give them what they need compared to the goals we have as a DAO. And after we create these successfull initiatives, we enlarge the scope out to the point we - hopefully - turn the table in term of reputation, so that builders see us a value added for the chain and not value extracting.
To be clear: I am not saying that the DAO is value extracting. But this is how we are perceived by most builders that have hands down in the chain everyday.
This is the main reason i am voting against this proposal.
Entropy will again point out that the DAO should hold proposals pulling from the DAO’s 2025 Event Budget to a high standard. Letting this budget slowly be chipped away $60-70K at a time reduces the possibility for a larger scale, more professionally organized Arbitrum event to be funded. […]
Lastly, as per the AVI’s latest update , the DAO is still waiting to receive all of the deliverables from the Pilot Program.
I agree that this habit of chipping out money from the event budget is something I don’t personally like. With the current position in the market that Arbitrum ecosyste has, I really think we should focus on the biggest impact possible, and in this sense is likely that 10 events of 60k have less impact than a single event of 600k (quite superficial but you get the idea).
Finally, I am still a bit puzzled of the AVI findings, not only we have to receive all deliverables but I have yet to see a compacted finalized finding. So far I have seen several threads, with several deliverables, and there should be an effort to unify and simplify the findings with then specific follow ups on specific verticals. This is a bit OT here but partially related in the sense that part of the request is tied to the findings of the AVI research.
To conclude, I think the AVI team is well intended. And I don’t want to question their expertise here nor the network that they have build in the last year. But I just think the approach should be different: if we embark in a 3, 4, 6 months adventure in this sense, we will lose valuable time and so we will lose opportunities in a market that is getting narrower and narrower.
Finally, is worth waiting for the SOS goals to come live. It will be way easier for us to understand how we can help protocols if we know what goals we have as a collective.