First and foremost, we want to highlight that @JoJo has proven himself as an extremely high-quality executor on behalf of the DAO’s grants program, and our decision to vote against has nothing to do with the competency of any particular individual.
With that said, we believe that grants are one of the most important programs the DAO runs, as it is often the first time a new builder touches the Arbitrum ecosystem. Arbitrum DAO should strive to offer one of the best grant programs in the industry. When looking into past results and taking into account the ~$700k in operational overhead, we believe there is room for improvement. As it currently stands, the grants program is too separated from the DAO’s other strategies in our opinion. Given that the Arbitrum Foundation is capable of giving out grants in the interim and that this would be the third iteration of the program, it is time the DAO took a more methodical, professional approach in how it allocates capital for grants rather than rushing to get something put together for the sake of having something.
In practice, we are strongly in favor of creating a DAO-owned, Arbitrum-branded platform for grant workflows. The dYdX grant page is an excellent example of a frontend that the Entropy team admires and believes the DAO can emulate. We would also like to further refine/cement the grant review process to ensure that grant recipients are of high caliber and that there are proper processes in place to ensure that recipients follow through with their original promises.
While this is just our opinion, and our vote is unlikely to change the outcome of the grants program vote, our “Against” vote is in-line with our preference that this iteration of the program should be striving for perfection.