The following reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @krst and @Sinkas, and it’s based on the combined research, fact-checking, and ideation of the two.
We’re voting FOR the proposal and opting to contain the research within Arbitrum.
Overall, we’re unsure how valuable the research will be in terms of using the insights for something actionable and who it is being done for. It might be the case that we’re doing research for research’s sake.
However, we believe that just interviewing builders will be a net positive and will help us learn more about them, as right now, we don’t have anything. With that in mind, we think the proposal’s overhead is reasonable compared to the potential value we can get by learning more about builders on Arbitrum. We do want to note, however, that we do not understand why there’s a bonus included in the compensation, nor do we understand what the expectations are for the bonus to be given. By default, we assume that the bonus will not be delivered unless doing the research itself proves to be extraordinarily impactful (which we find rather unlikely). We suggest that this is further clarified before the onchain vote.
That being said, we do not yet see the point of expanding into other ecosystems, as comparative research can be tricky. We believe focusing on Arbitrum is far more reasonable, and we could revisit the possibility of research in other ecosystems if the research on Arbitrum yields some actionable, valuable insights.