LTI Pilot Program Position Application Thread

Background

Name: padzank | Thales

Position I am applying for: Application Advisor

TG: @padzank

Twitter: https://twitter.com/padzank

Affiliations (Currently I am working with, invested in, etc.): Thales Protocol Growth, Strategy, Risk Management, Product Owner and Business Development

Why You

Why would You be the best candidate for this position?

As a professionally employed Growth lead of a successful onchain protocol for 3 years, I have acquired a deep knowledge base of onchain projects, protocols, networks and most importantly Governance Structures. I also have an active BD relationship and open comms channels to the majority of the most prominent ones. My responsibilities over the years have been designing tokenomics and incentive programs, designing governance structures and participating in governance structures, acting as a bridge between core team members and users/community, designing UX flows as a Product Owner and broad public relations.

I possess a multi year experience as a successful Writer, Editor and Applicant in various Delegated Governance structures. I have personally written:

With hands-on experience in Delegated Governance, I have a pretty deep understanding of what constitutes an honest, productive and value-adding grant proposal. With my participation in public discourses over the years, I am confident in my abilities to work with councils and teams, recognize issues and provide constructive and precise feedback. Other than Delegated Governance comms experience, I have also written and built countless official documentation pages, official Blog Posts and have multi year experience in Community Comms and Public Relations in Defi.

My experience in Business Development role over the years have honed my skills of understanding the ever-changing growth venues for protocols and for networks. I maintain a close working relationship with many prominent entities, teams and projects, such as (but not limited to) Offchain Labs, Arbitrum Foundation, Optimism Foundation, Base Network, Polygon, ZkSync, Chainlink, LayerZero, Synthetix, Biconomy, Particle etc. Roadmaps of the L2 rollup space are clear to me and I know what are the key points to focus on so the grant programs are effective in bootstrapping long-term growth. I have seen my fare share of growth bootstrap attempts, failures and successes of token incentives via various mechanisms, studied feasibility of many of them and can say with confidence that I can contribute to optimizing the LTI program through this Application Advisory role.

What do you think a good incentive application looks like?

There are three key focus points that a high quality grant application must nail down before it’s considered for approval:

  • Clear and precise description of the applying project, its current growth and development status on the Arbitrum Network

    A good incentive application must convey information about the applying project in a manner that is easy to understand but also precise. All readers need to be helped to form a crystal clear picture of the project current state to minimize non-constructive misinformation discussion, preserving the focus of discussion on the grant itself and how it ties to the project’s sustainable growth on the Arbitrum network. This point is detrimental to the success of not only the project’s application but also the entire LTI program decision making.

  • Clear and precise outline of how the grant can bootstrap the applying projects long-term growth on Arbitrum, how it combines with it’s roadmap and how will it positively impact the growth of Arbitrum ecosystem entire.

    After sufficiently conveyed data on the project’s status, growth and goals, the next detrimental point is usage of the ARB grant itself. There needs to be a high quality outline on the precise venues of incentivization backed by strong arguments around high effectiveness, high efficiency and sustainability. There also needs to be a show of solid understanding on how to not leave room for anyone gaming the incentives to preserve the long-term quality, which is especially important for the LTI program.

  • Arguments on how the applying project can sustain the bootstrapped growth after the grant funds are depleted.

    This third key point ties the first two points to a conclusion. This point combines the gathered information about the project itself and the planned ARB emissions to reach a conclusion why it’s worthy to support the project in question with a long-term oriented grant. It requires strong arguments on the long-term project value for the Arbitrum network, alignment to Arbitrum long-term strategic goals and self-sufficiency in scaling.

What are your goals for this program?

My goal for this program is to use a combined effort of all relevant management parties to set a norm of how a successful community-ran long-term ecosystem bootstrapping should look like. By analyzing previous program executions (internal and external) to evaluate optimization points and isolate successful aspects, this program has an opportunity to evolve the Arbitrum Ecosystem to a sustainable long-term growth and I want to participate directly in making it a reality.

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