The 5 member council worked together to create a single application template and rubric they would all use. This was done in the presence of the advisors so the advisors would know what the council was looking for to make sure they were guiding protocols in the correct direction.
During the screening period
In the initial review, each application was randomly assigned to three council members. The council members separately reviewed each application and gave either a yes or no along with some feedback for why this decision was made. Each council member had slightly different ways of looking at applications but all were guided by the rubric they created together.
After the initial review, any applicant who got 3 yes votes automatically passed the screening period. Any applicant who got 3 no votes automatically failed the screening period.
Applications that had at least 1 yes and 1 no vote in the initial review were reviewed by a randomly selected 4th council member. If at this point the application had 3 yes or 3 no votes it was accepted/rejected. If it was tied 2 yes votes and 2 no votes the fifth council member was used as the tie breaker.
Results
Below are tables of the applications recommended and not recommended by the council along with the ARB that was requested, and how many yes votes they got.
In total 77 out of 163 applications were recommended for a total amount of 26,414,599 ARB
Any protocol that was recommended by the council will automatically move to a snapshot vote at the end of this week where the DAO will make the final decision of if their incentive application will be funded or not.
Should the DAO feel an application that was not recommended by the council should be funded, any delegate with sufficient voting power (500K ARB) may post a snapshot requesting to fund said applicant just like they would any other DAO proposal.
As a reviewer, we want to say this was a very strong cohort of applications â particularly considering this is the first iteration of the Long Term Incentives Program. We attribute this to the vibrant, hard-working community on Arbitrum that produced the applicants, as well as the inclusion of advisors in the program. Each applicant was assigned an advisor to help them ensure grant plans were complete and as strong as they could be. This is a major benefit that is not typical in most crypto grants programs.
We hope that this program will continue with future grants cycles. The quality of grant plans will only improve from here â it is common in other grants programs for applicants to revise and resubmit successfully if they didnât get initial approval. In fact, this makes up a significant portion of approved grants elsewhere, and multiple rounds of feedback create some of the strongest grants plans that hone in on the specific strengths of applicants, focus on the goals of a grants program, and construct creative and robust execution plans. If Arbitrum governance is willing to extend this pilot into a permanent program, we definitely recommend that applicants reapply!
And of course thank you to the wonderful advisors that helped applicants (their positive impact was clear when comparing initial drafts with those that were submitted for final review), the other council members, and StableLab for administration of the program.
Whatâs the rationale behind awarding Uniswap 1 Million $ARB while voting against arbitrum native protocols that could actually use a grant for growth? Some very questionable decisions here.
If I had to take an educated guess, I think the idea is that Uniswap incentives are going to attract more large-sized capital to Arbitrum that is currently deployed on other chains. In other words, if LP yield is 20% higher on here for Uniswap, whales have a real incentive to re-deploy on Arbitrum from Polygon or Mainnet or Optimism, etc. People with big bags arenât going to migrate a six-figure LP position to some degen project with 2m TVL, the risk isnât worth an extra 10 percentage points of yield.
A little more liquidity on a few uniswap pairs is imo not worth denying 10 smaller projects an opportunity to foster significant growth. This program was initially intended to do exactly that iirc.
40M ARB was allocated for this but only 26.4M ARB was approved. There are several really good projects that requested a reasonable amount of ARB and itâs surprising they werenât approved considering just over half of the allocated ARB will actually be used.
I think the idea is not that it will attract a âlittle more liquidity.â You could see the liquidity 2x or 3x on big pairs like ARB-USDC or ETH-USDC. That gives more headroom for big trades to happen without meaningful price impacts and attracts more large volume/size trades to the chain. The externalities of having more money on chain are going to indirectly create more demand for smaller market cap projects. Youâre underestimating the impact whale money influxes can have on a chain. We donât need 25 GMX forks. Artificially propping a bunch of degen projects that will be abandoned within a year and have no capacity for sticky TVL is a pretty short-sighted use of funds.
Hello everyone. Iâve read this proposal and Iâd like to express my gratitude to the Council for their hard work! While reviewing it, Iâve come up with a few questions, and I would appreciate it if you could provide me with answers to them:
What criteria did the Council use when approving or rejecting specific proposals within the LTIPP program?
How will projects approved for funding receive their financing, how will they manage these funds, and what will be the process for reporting on their expenditure?
What mechanism will be used to determine that funded projects align with the goals of the LTIPP program and are achieving the expected outcomes? What indicators will be used to assess the effectiveness of fund allocation?
Some of these projects have been building for a year+. Arbitrum gains next to nothing from some whales trading/farming but loses a lot from telling native builders theyâre less worthy of support than already massively profitable & dominant players like Uni.
âWeâre deploying on Arbitrumâ is one of the more bearish things you can put in your pitchdeck already, Iâm afraid this LTIPP will worsen this further.
Hyperliquid literally built the number one DEX in a few months while relying solely on Arbitrum liquidity. Maybe itâs just that the level to make it is higher than it used to be and some âdappsâ have a hard time accepting this.
If this was it, many protocols would enjoy their success. Weâve seen STIP recipient protocols combine both token and arb incentives with very little result.
The point is: If you bring something new to the table then people will come and stay on your platform wether you are on Arbitrum or not.
Arbitrum grant program should only help funding projects that are able to retain their users past arb incentives.
Following the recent posts on twitter questioning GMXâs involvement with Arbitrum governance, thought it best to clarify the role the GMX Grants Committee (GGC) had after being elected to the LTIPP Council here on the forum.
GGC was involved along with all council members and advisors in setting up the Rubric process and moving forward with the first council-based recommendations for Arbitrum incentive grants. GGC shared with the advisors and council that from our side support of grants beyond 1.0m would need to be exceptional and would be looked at much more critically, given that (i) this was a short-term pilot program, and (ii) it was the first time for this council and (iii) the Dao delegates were relying on the council for this vetting. You can see that the vast majority of proposals scaled their ask down towards the $1m mark, including large protocols with a track record of activity on Arbitrum, such as Uniswap and Pyth. I give the Advisors and council credit for navigating this difficult process.
GGC self-identified a number of protocols that pose a conflict of interest as competitors to GMX, and as such, GMX was removed from the initial assessments of those protocols. GMX only ended up being sent a list of proposals to vote on only if we were the 5th vote, meaning the proposal had not already been rejected or accepted by a majority and as we understood thus could not potentially move forward without another positive vote. In that context we did review and voted on COI protocols, doing so as even-handedly as possible, supporting some (2 proposals) and declining support on others (3 proposals, including Synthetix).
I am sharing this information because itâs important, especially in the early days of the DAO and generally within the Crypto space, that we acknowledge conflicts of interest do exist and do our best to disclose them so that our motives and actions can be properly judged.
The process now moves to the delegates to determine what to do with both the recommended, non-reocmmended and potentially amended proposals.
Speaking individually as a delegate, if proposals from LTIPP that didnât secure the support of the Council do come to the DAO even those that GGC didnât vote for, I will absolutely consider supporting them â if they have reasonable proposals in terms of size and use of incentives and show long-term commitment to foster the growth of Arbitrum.
We need many people to help grow Arbitrum, and look forward to both keeping those that are here, and having new builders join the community as well.
