Overview of overlapping ideas in SOS submissions

[404DAO]

Thank you, TempeTechie, for starting this thread. There’s already been a lot of valuable discussion. To keep our SOS feedback organized and easy to follow, we’ll be sharing our feedback in this thread.

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Our SOS submission feedback is shaped by the DAO-wide calls and communications with delegates, the Foundation, and Offchain Labs (OCL). Our feedback attempts to take in the various viewpoints and opinions regarding the DAO’s future direction, with consideration around the Foundation’s vision for the future of Arbitrum DAO and the evolving role of delegates. During last Friday’s SOS discussion call, OCL shared that under the new structure involving OpCo, they see the DAO’s primary function in idea generation. For this model to succeed, there must be a clear, reliable, and accountable communication channel between OpCo and the DAO.

We recognize that OCL holds institutional knowledge that is often sensitive. Therefore, a mechanism is needed to ensure that critical information is shared with the appropriate stakeholders within the DAO. A framework could help define clear responsibilities around the handling of sensitive information. Without such a structure, the DAO risks duplicating efforts or working with incomplete context, which ultimately leads to low-impact, low-value outcomes.

With that in mind, we strongly support establishing an operational framework to aid in the execution of SOS objectives. Tnorm’s Objective 2 lays out a strong example by proposing operational swim lanes, and SeedGov’s submission is similarly focused on building structural foundations that enable the DAO to play a continued and meaningful role.

In reviewing individual objectives, our feedback prioritizes those that—through public calls with OCL, AF, and community input—align with what we see as the DAO’s clearest priorities:

1. Bringing in more builders and deepening Arbitrum’s commitment to DeFi (essential to Arbitrum winning).
2. Establishing operational accountability (essential to Arbitrum DAO winning).

Accordingly, we’ll focus our feedback on the submissions from @Tnorm, @SeedGov, and @MaxLomu.

Tnorm

We appreciate the broad strokes of Tnorm’s submission—especially the callout to OpCo for establishing metric-driven KPIs. As we’ve seen across governance, delegates are not product experts, and it’s appropriate for them to lean on OpCo and Offchain Labs for technical and performance-related metrics. This kind of coordination can help ensure DAO priorities are grounded in real and meaningful impact.

Tnorm brings a strong DeFi-native perspective to the SOS, which is evident in the emphasis on deepening liquidity across Arbitrum’s yield, leverage, and RWA products; a powerful incentive for attracting and retaining new builders.

We also appreciate the recognition of the need for operational parity across key Arbitrum-aligned entities—including the Arbitrum Foundation, Offchain Labs, Entropy, OpCo, and others. Coordinating across domains like grants, venture investments, partnerships, liquidity management, and protocol integrations is essential for moving from initial funding to go-to-market execution. This aligns closely with what we, 404, Seedgov, and other delegates, are advocating for: coordination channels between the DAO and core operational teams.

That said, we’d encourage Tnorm to go a level deeper. Objective 2 (“An Accountable Operational Framework”) introduces this idea, but remains too high-level. We’d love to see concrete mechanisms proposed:

• Should there be a recurring DAO–OpCo sync?
• Who owns DAO-side accountability?
• Could delegates adopt scoped mandates to coordinate more closely with aligned entities?

We’re also supportive of the concept of swimlanes to clarify responsibilities between DAO stakeholders, but again, this would benefit from more granularity. For example: what does operational responsibility look like in practice for OpCo vs. the DAO vs. the Foundation?

Tnorm’s suggestion to integrate regular performance reviews and decentralized goal-setting is compelling. In many ways, it mirrors this very SOS process. We’d encourage Tnorm to expand on this idea, particularly around what performance reviews would entail: Who would be reviewed? By whom? And how would outcomes inform governance or funding decisions?

Overall, this SOS brings a strong DeFi lens and strategic depth, with meaningful insights on DAO-entity coordination and incentive alignment. We look forward to Tnorm’s revisions.

Seedgov

SeedGov’s SOS is focused and well within their area of expertise—namely, governance participation, incentives, and anti-capture mechanisms. In particular, we appreciate the submission’s synergy with ARB staking as a tool to increase voter commitment and reduce apathy. Their proposal highlights critical challenges in Arbitrum’s governance and offers thoughtful mechanisms to address them. We appreciate their push to build on top of existing tooling like Karma, which feels like a natural next step for the delegate incentive program.

However, the submission would benefit from a deeper reflection on how these mechanisms align with Arbitrum’s evolving governance direction, especially given insights shared in recent SOS feedback calls with the Foundation and Offchain Labs.

As the role of delegates continues to evolve, the DAO may be moving toward a model where delegates act more in a strategic capacity—engaging builders, identifying strategic opportunities, and helping channel projects to the right teams within OCL and the Foundation (e.g., Partnerships). This includes guiding projects to post on the forum, increasing institutional awareness, and serving as a bridge—not necessarily spinning up new DAO work streams or internal contributor groups that risk duplicating existing roles.

In that context, it’s unclear how a delegate reputation system evolves with a new governance structure. What types of actions will be tracked and rewarded? Is this system designed to measure operational contributions (which may soon be out of scope for delegates), or can it evolve to measure activities like builder onboarding and ecosystem growth?

To strengthen this SOS, we suggest:

• Clarifying the implementation path for the a reputation system in Karma under an evolving delegate model. What are the core activities it would track?
• Getting more granular with how SeedGov envisions all of the proposed components coming together in practice.

We encourage SeedGov to outline a clear roadmap for how alignment between the DAO and AAEs can be achieved—ensuring that all parties operate in a coordinated and complementary manner. We appreciate the direction SeedGov is taking and see a lot of potential in this submission. We look forward to the team’s revisions.

MaxLomu

The tagline “attracting and retaining builders should be our obsession” strongly resonates with us — aligning closely with a pillar of our own SOS, which emphasizes building a developer pipeline and community through onboarding and education. A clear, deliberate funnel is essential for sustaining long-term ecosystem growth.

We appreciate the strong emphasis on distribution. Patrick from the Arbitrum Foundation echoed this point in today’s SOS feedback call, noting that Arbitrum should likely avoid building its own wallet—given the resource intensity —and instead pursue partnerships with existing wallets. As Maxlomu put it: “Creating a wallet is easy, reaching 100 million users is not.” Max’s suggestion to onboard partners like wallets, app stores, and portals, potentially through referral programs that share fee revenue, is directionally aligned with this thinking.

We support the objective to deepen alignment with OCL and the Arbitrum Foundation through strategic roadmap sessions and quarterly update calls. Our only concern is around how to responsibly manage sensitive information—and what the right mechanisms are for the DAO, OCL, and AF to communicate effectively without compromising competitive insights or strategic advantage.

Our questions to Max are:

1. How do you envision these sessions being implemented in practice?
2. Would this be facilitated through a DAO-elected committee, a dedicated working group, or another structure entirely?

Finally, we liked the KPIs tied to establishing Arbitrum as a liquidity hub for DeFi, which complements the strategy outlined in @Tnorm’s SOS. As we mentioned in our feedback there, we’d like to see OpCo help refine these KPIs further to ensure they’re grounded, feasible, and structured for maximum impact.

[maxlomu]

@404DAO

• How do you envision these sessions being implemented in practice?
• Would this be facilitated through a DAO-elected committee, a dedicated working group, or another structure entirely?

With the increasing centralization of DAO execution bodies (through AAEs), internal communication should become more streamlined.

The critical element is ensuring consistent communication flow between delegates and AAEs. While not trivial, this is fundamentally an operational challenge that can be addressed once the DAO’s structure is finalized.

Any multinational organization faces similar coordination challenges - I see this as a solvable operational problem rather than a structural one.

[Saurabh]

This represents the view of the GMX Governance Committee and can be found here

GMX Governance Delegate Communication Thread

The following reflects the views of GMX’s Governance Committee, and is based on the combined research, evaluation, consensus, and ideation of various committee members. 1. Execution Logic & Organizational Design 1/ Nine out of ten protocols created by aspiring builders fail to gain long-term traction, amidst the huge ups and downs of blockchains’ hype cycles. Users make projects successful, ultimately. And where the users are, good builders will follow. Gabriel’s proposal stands out by prese…

[karpatkey]

Thank you for this helpful synthesis of overlapping ideas across the SOS submissions. We’re aggregating here our thoughts on the various proposals, in line with the comments we left on individual threads.

Of the aggregated SOS topics summarised, we believe the following should be the top strategic priorities for the DAO:

1. Verticals, Workstreams, and Operational Efficiency

This is a broad category encompassing several critical areas:

1a. Financial Planning and Treasury Sustainability
The DAO currently lacks comprehensive policies for budgeting, capital allocation, portfolio management, and clearly defined financial objectives. While initiatives like STEP v1/v2 and TM v1.2 have begun addressing treasury diversification, these have been largely reactionary rather than strategically planned. We believe the DAO must prioritize comprehensive financial planning, aligning revenue streams with network activities, disciplined budgeting, and treasury diversification—particularly into stablecoins—to ensure long-term financial health and runway. A strategically mobilized treasury is essential to reduce volatility risks tied to ARB holdings.

1b. Workstream Frameworks
Arbitrum’s current fragmented operational structure impairs initiative execution and creates inefficiencies. Lengthy and unclear processes also raise the barrier to entry for potential contributors. We support leveraging Arbitrum Aligned Entities (AAEs) to streamline strategic efforts across the ecosystem. However, as we’ve noted in other discussions, a dedicated DeFi vertical is a significant gap and should be added to Arbitrum’s organizational structure.

1c. Governance Participation and Contribution Tracking
With the sharp rise in votable ARB supply, it’s critical to activate inactive token holders to ensure quorum on key proposals—especially Constitutional ones. We recommend including actionable experiments to simplify voting (e.g., Optimism’s AI Delegate initiative) within this objective. Equally important is boosting the quality of delegate participation. Tools like the governance contribution tracker recently developed by Tally for Uniswap could offer useful insights and should be considered.

2. DeFi as a Core Pillar

Arbitrum’s current position—eighth in TVL—marks a steep drop for what was once DeFi’s leading L2. With competition from heavily incentivised chains, there’s a meaningful risk of further decline. Reclaiming Arbitrum’s leadership in DeFi must be a top priority. We strongly advocate for creating (or reorienting) an AAE focused exclusively on DeFi. This would help ensure DeFi receives the dedicated resources and strategic focus it needs.

3. Supporting Builders

Stylus presents a major opportunity to differentiate Arbitrum from other L2s by dramatically broadening the developer base and enabling new use cases. In a competitive environment, this is a clear strategic edge.

The DAO should invest in cultivating a vibrant and engaged developer ecosystem—one that attracts new talent and supports them with education, tooling, incentives, and community infrastructure. Supporting builders is not just about onboarding; it’s about sustaining long-term engagement and innovation.

[jameskbh]

Thanks for creating this thread! I want to congratulate all submitters on their excellent work and excellent suggestions for moving Arbitrum forward.

I will make my intervention here, not regarding the overlap between the submissions, but to resurface a comment I made at the beginning of this SOS proposal:

Arbitrum Strategic Objective Setting (SOS) – Defining the DAO’s Interim Goals

Thanks for your proposal! Regarding the proposal submission minimum items, I would like to suggest an addition. Expected resources to be utilized. In Lido’s case, we are talking about objectives for one protocol. When thinking about Arbitrum, the spectrum is broader and, two objectives, while perfectly aligned with our MVP, may be competing for the same resources. My understanding is that the 1-year goals are effectively proposals/initiatives to achieve the 2-year objective (the beginning …

I always saw this process, which started with the Unifying Arbitrum’s Mission, Vision, Purpose (MVP) post, as a Strategic Planning exercise.

Source: 6 Elements of Effective Strategic Planning

In this exercise, the MVP would act as the Vision, Mission and Objective (Purpose) levels, and the SOS, the other levels as, AFAIK, there is no other proposal in the pipeline to move down the pyramid.

I believe this view was also shared by @entropy when they stated:

@Entropy

• Once the DAO’s end state goals have been solidified, anyone will have the opportunity to propose a strategy matrix made up of 12- and 24-month focus areas for the DAO through an open process named Strategic Objective Setting (SOS). These areas should have well-established guidelines for tangible implementation and what they aim to accomplish, as well as only have one purpose—optimally moving the DAO towards its end state. This is the step that will allow the DAO to refocus its attention on the most critical deliverables and judge how one-off initiatives fit into its short- to medium-term priorities. Entropy Advisors is working on the SOS proposal in tandem with the MVP, and it will be posted as a subsequent separate proposal with the DAO choosing one matrix of strategies as the winner.
• Combined with financial forecasting, the SOS will enable the DAO to budget itself for the next 12/24 months by earmarking capital to each strategic focus area ratified in step 2. Arguably, the most important aspect of this step is for the DAO to align on how profitable/loss-making it wants to be during the coming year(s). Lastly, with clearly defined strategic focus areas, it should also become simpler for the DAO to begin marketing its efforts since, e.g., a clear identity, as well as narratives, can be built around each of the DAO’s focus areas.

However, after reading all the submissions, I noticed some levels were not addressed, and we stayed mostly at the “Strategy” level. And why is this an issue?

Right now, we don’t have a clear view of two critical items: the budget and the execution.

• How much is each SOS going to cost?
• Who will execute the projects and actions supporting the Objectives laid down?
• How do the proposed AAEs interact with those objectives?
• How will the DAO resort to other parties to execute any Objective not covered by the current structures in place?

Therefore, we now review items without knowing if we can execute them or if enough funds will be dedicated to them. We need to address this.

I believe that we will end with a merged version of all submissions as the way to move forward. While doing “The Merge”, our actual planning for the steps ahead, we must introduce those other items in the final proposal to ensure provision for the actual execution.

Source: What is Strategic Planning and why does it matter?

I hope this makes sense to all. Looking forward to the next steps on this.

[TempeTechie]

Hey James, I’ll try to answer your questions based on the info I got so far via SOS discussion calls.

@jameskbh

• How much is each SOS going to cost?
• Who will execute the projects and actions supporting the Objectives laid down?
• How do the proposed AAEs interact with those objectives?
• How will the DAO resort to other parties to execute any Objective not covered by the current structures in place?

Budgeting isn’t part of the SOS process, at least not at this stage. That will come after the final SOS proposal is confirmed through a vote.

The purpose of this objectives setting exercise is to define what we (the DAO) believe are the key steps Arbitrum needs to take to win. At this point, we shouldn’t limit our thinking too much, or we risk aiming too low. In my view, being overly cautious is a bigger problem than being too ambitious.

The objectives will be executed by AAEs, unless there’s a strong case for a specific objective (or a task within one) to be handled by an ad hoc working group set up by the DAO. Unlike AAEs, working groups don’t have a legal entity (e.g. a company) behind them. They’re also limited in both duration and scope.

Once the final SOS proposal is approved, OpCo will be responsible for assigning objectives to the appropriate AAEs. Our role as delegates will be to oversee progress toward the key results defined for each objective.

If none of the current AAEs can take on a specific objective (or if an assigned AAE isn’t making any progress) then there may be a need for a new AAE, or expand the scope of an existing one (which could include hiring new people).

In some cases, a working group established by the DAO might step in to work on an objective or part of it. Over time, that group could evolve into a new AAE or even merge into an existing AAE.

This is how I think the execution of objectives will look like, and how some edge cases (e.g. an objective without an AAE) could be handled.

[Sinkas]

The following reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @krst, @Sinkas, and @Manugotsuka, and it’s based on their combined research, fact-checking, and ideation.

We want to thank Entropy for designing the SOS framework and to every team that put in the hours to draft submissions and join the SOS calls. The effort to focus the DAO’s priorities is apparent and much appreciated.

As we reviewed the proposals and hosted several SOS discussion calls, we feel that the process of this whole initiative has, in practice, not played out as intended when the original proposal was first put forward. We expected much broader participation, discussion, and collaboration to happen in pursuit of a set of strategic objectives to guide us for the next 1-2 years. The original intentions of the process feel vague in hindsight, as we do not understand how the resulting proposals fit the intended end goal. Although there has been participation from the community, this is the start of the discussion, and not the end.

While some discussions have taken place, we do not feel confident to vote in favor of any single one of the SOS submissions at this time. We are unsure of how each SOS is expected to materialize, even after discussing it with their respective authors, and we do not want to rush into pigeonholing ourselves into something.

Furthermore, it is not clear how the SOS submission we vote for aligns with the intentions of Arbitrum Foundation, Offchain Labs, and any other AAEs, and how they impact the things they are doing.

With the Snapshot vote approaching fast, pressing ahead now feels premature. If we were asked to vote right now, we’d most likely either vote against or, if there’s no option to do so, spread our voting power equally across every submission to effectively abstain.

[paulofonseca]

well… that’s weird. especially coming from L2BEAT.

L2BEAT is one of the largests delegates in here and probably the one with the most context. why didn’t you guys (@krst and @Sinkas) submitted a SOS proposal, or helped craft one that would be clear how it can be materialized or wouldn’t pigeonhold ourselves into something?

you can just do things… you know?