Plurality Labs monthly report: January 2024
TL:DR:
Welcome to our monthly status update. This ongoing report series will serve as both a monthly summary of our work and it creates an ongoing record of our progress. Additionally, this report is intended to be a transparent clearinghouse of information related to the operations of the Plurality Labs grants program. To enable this, this update focuses on program updates, financial details, Milestone 1 deliverables update, and we close with news you may have missed.
Table of Contents:
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Program updates
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Finances & grant spending
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Scorecard delivery
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Community engagement
1. Program updates:
This section provides a series of brief updates as to the progression of our currently active suite of Arbitrum Plurality Grant Programs. For real time updates and data regarding past programs, please see our program tracker where you can find detailed program descriptions, grant allocation updates, objectives, milestones, and more.
Our Biggest Mini-Grants Yet - Powered by JokeRace
The Mini Grants Program successfully completed three “mini” grant rounds in January and is currently in the midst of Round five, themed "Bridging the Gap to TradFi”. This latest round is actively accepting submissions until February 15th at 9am EST. This program will conclude in mid March.
-Week 1: [CLOSED] Empowering Web3 Communities 11 (January 15-19, 2024)
-Week 2: [CLOSED] Play to Earn, Reimagined 7 (January 22-27, 2024)
-Week 3: [CLOSED] The Future of Identity in Web3 10 (Jan 29 - February 2, 2024)
-Week 4: Scaling DeFi for the Masses 3 (February 5-9, 2024)
-Week 5: Bridging the Gap to TradFi (February 12-16, 2024)
-Week 6: Sustainability in the Blockchain Age (February 19-23, 2024)
-Week 7: Unleashing the Power of DAOs (February 26 - March 1, 2024)
-Week 8: The Next Frontier of NFTs (March 4-8, 2024)
- Read the latest update on the forum: here
- See a synopsis of program details from Lampros Labs Dao here
- And see the program tracker here
RnDAO Program
RnDAO is in week four of its program, with Fellows currently engaged in crucial discussions with customers to understand their needs and validate potential solutions. They are currently facilitating a 12-week program for six fellows aimed at validating potential problems to ensure that the solutions developed are sustainable and not quickly abandoned. This Fellowship serves as the initial phase of the entrepreneurial journey, which will be succeeded by the Venture Building program. In this subsequent phase, teams will collaborate with RnDAO to create and deploy solutions based on Arbitrum. Presently in its fourth week, the fellows are actively engaged in discussions with potential customers, a critical step in understanding and addressing the needs of their target market.
Entrepreneurship: ArbitrumDAO Co.Lab entrepreneurship program is looking to fuel a promising collaboration tech venture with 50k ARB tokens and $100k’s worth of hands-on network support. Apply today: : https://forms.gle/TDNqXHuEnfS5bEX28
- Read the latest update on the forum: here
- Read about the 6 grantees & there projects here
- See a presentation on the program here
- And see the program tracker here
Grant Ships Program
Grant Ships spent January building and resolving challenges related to their graph indexer and IPFS indexing resulting in development workarounds. Efforts are underway to enhance the accessibility of FeedEvent items, enabling detailed tracking of in-game events for comprehensive on-chain activity reporting. The team has also begun to run weekly meetups to attract potential operators and to explore the idea of a beta phase for the gaming sector.
Help needed: Grant Ships is encouraging more community involvement at their meetups to help refine the approach for the upcoming beta round. Grant allocation expertise and people willing to give it a try in our beta round! Grant Ships is only a framework to support good grant giving. If you know what it takes to allocate funds in an effective way, please come share your thoughts and get involved! Sign up link: Grant Ships Meetup
- Read the latest update on the forum: here
- Join the beta round / apply here
- And see the program tracker here
MEV Research Program
The team is advancing the MEV program with Plurality Labs’ support to establish the Plural Research Society and its tools. They’ve built key components like a landing page and voting UI, detailed on GitHub. The are set to host an event on May 22-23 at ETHBerlin, with a preliminary session in March.
Open Data Community (ODC) Program
The Data Grants/Intelligence team is progressing towards their objective of crowdsourcing useful analysis and projects in the realm of grants analysis and influence networks. After setting a target of 20 issues by the end of February, starting from just 6 at the launch, they have exceeded this goal with a total of 22 issues. To manage the successful response, the issues have been organized into two categories: data gathering and data analysis, each with corresponding bounties. The team has set submission deadlines of March 3rd for data gathering and March 24th for data analysis. They are also compiling their learnings and methodologies, including platform configurations for Github, Discord, and others, which will be detailed in their concluding report.
- Read the latest update on the forum: here
- Read their lessons learned document here
- And see the program tracker here
The Arbitrum Matching Fest on Arbitrum One Program
This program provides funding to matching pools for rounds which choose to run on Arbitrum One. The goal is to further develop the Arbitrum ecosystem in a pluralist way by leveraging the Gitcoin protocol. The approach involved funding rounds launched during GG19 to ensure an optimal experience for round owners that are introducing their communities to the Arbitrum ecosystem for the first time.
The data for each Round can be found on chain and viewed here:
-ACS Round
-TEC Round
-Governance Research Round
-1InchLatam Round
-Earthis Round
-Despace Round
Allo Hackathon Program
Allo Protocol Hackathon ran from December 8, 2023, to January 10, 2024. With 303 participants, the hackathon was a hub of creativity and dedication, resulting in 86 unique projects across three challenges. The success of these submissions has the Allo Protocol team looking forward to future collaborations, aiming to further nurture the growth and collaboration within the Allo Protocol and Arbitrum ecosystems. Final payouts for this program will happen in February.
Firestarters Program
The majority of currently-active Firestarter projects are nearing completion, with the exception of one new project initiated in January and outlined below. As a reminder, grantees included: Grants application flow / platform, Grant Operations database, Finance & Transparency Report (R3gen) Omni, Trusted Labs Procurement Framework & Security Service, Treasury & Sustainability Working Group.
Updates
-ArbitrumDAO Procurement Committee has been established link here
-Arbitrum Stable Treasury Endowment Program proposals was passed led by the Treasury & Sustainability Working Group: update here
-ArbitrumDAO Sync Platform project was kicked off: see the details on the forum here
- For more details, see the program tracker here
Gov Boost
This program grants funding to projects working directly to increase Arbitrum DAO’s ability to effectively govern its resources. This program was designed by Plurality Labs to use different decision making modalities to fund needed research and milestone based work and to anticipate the future needs of Arbitrum DAO. In January, several of these projects successfully reached the finish line, with one new project joining the program.
Updates:
-Hats Protocol: Hats Protocol, in partnership with Gnosis Guild, has enabled Treasure to give more voice to its DAO community through the formation of an Arbitrum Council (ARC). ARC members are now able to represent Treasure in Arbitrum DAO governance and vote with the delegated $ARB in a safe and secure way, both via onchain votes in the Arbitrum Governor (via Tally) and offchain signaling in Arbitrum’s Snapshot space.
-Ethelo Program Review: Ethelo has concluded the program review via the Ethelo’s Community Engagement and Evaluation System. A significant majority, with 247 respondents (98%), reported they would recommend the Arbitrum DAO. Similarly, the Ethelo evaluation process was found useful by 239 respondents (94%). When rating the Ethelo process, the average score stands at 9.02 out of 10, reflecting an exceptional level of approval and satisfaction among the respondents.
-Open Source Observer recently achieved their second of three milestones by expanding their directory to include more than 200 leading projects on Arbitrum in diverse fields such as DeFi, gaming, and developer governance tools. This expansion comes with up-to-date, fully indexed information from both on-chain and off-chain sources. In celebration of this milestone, Open Block Labs has released their first analysis on the state of Open Source Software (OSS) on Arbitrum: https://docs.opensource.observer/blog/arb-ecosystem-analysis
-Helika updated their forum post to provide additional details on their Arbitrum Insights report;https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/helika-plurality-plurality-labs-arbitrum-insights-report-phase-i-deliverable/20660
-Karma - Karma GAP recently concluded a month-long decentralized review campaign, enhancing the Arbitrum DAO grant management process. This initiative imported and categorized 160 Arbitrum DAO-funded projects, leveraging insights from four weekly workshops attended by around 30 grantees and program managers. The campaign’s highlight was the review of 70 grantee profiles and over 2500 evaluations. Recordings can be found here: https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/grantee-help-session-prepping-for-decentralized-reviews/20501/3
-GovHack ETHDenver - Supporting the EthDenver Arbitrum activation, this is unique opportunity to roll up your sleeves and work side by side with fellow Arbitrum contributors to build workstreams, design frameworks and ultimately ship proposals IRL. For more information on this proposal - you can find the update on the forum here.
Meta program development: Coaching
This month, we focused on enhancing the value and engagement of our programs and grantees within the Arbitrum DAO community through targeted coaching sessions. Feems helped our active programs and grantees in refining their milestones and communicating their value to the DAO. We increased communication and transparency via the forum and planned upcoming public sessions to deliver a clearer understanding of how grantees contribute value.
2. Finances & grant spending:
As expected, grant spending increased during January as all of our grants have now received initial funding and are either completing or moving on to milestone delivery.
To date, we have allocated 89% of our initial grant fund and paid out 1.182M ARB, or about 42%. The remaining allocated-but-unpaid ARB will be paid out as those programs move to completion or hit planned milestones.
Program spending:
Below is the budget breakdown for each of our 12 programs. To note, both the Allo on Arbitrum Hackathon & the JokeRace “biggest small grants yet” show zero spending in January, but payments begin in February.
- Link to detailed worksheet
Spending detail for the month of January:
Find below a link to a document that details funds distributed from the multisig in January.
- Link to detailed worksheet
3. Milestone 1 delivery scorecard:
In AIP - 3 Fund the Arbitrum Grants Framework Proposal Milestone 1, the team outlined a set of five top level deliverables consisting of about 20 sub points. We have learned a lot as we have worked against those deliverables and we are pleased to provide this view. As we look forward to the next segment of work, we will double down on the higher value deliverables and remove those that no longer make sense.
Our current tracking of the 20 deliverables, 3 are red, 10 are yellow & the remainder are green. This worksheet changes on a weekly basis and informs how we think about moving forward.
- Link to detailed worksheet
4. Plurality labs: community engagement:
We have a lot of moving pieces, icymi listen in to some of the news generated by Plurality labs over the past month. Our content carousel includes some of our best engagements over the month
- Link to content carousel.
In closing:
In January we committed to the community that we would step-change our communications. This monthly report is the next step in that journey of providing transparency in operations. Our initial focus has been on program updates, financial details, Milestone 1 deliverables, and news you may have missed. We will continue iterating on this format, but if you have suggestions on how to make this more usable, please reach out.
How to keep updated:
-Find the latest status of programs and projects on our program site
-Get real time input updates on our Thank Arb twitter account:
-Find our monthly updates posted here on the forum