Non-Constitutional
Proposal: Launch Arbitrum App Store & Builder Communities Hub on Common Ground
Abstract
Even tier one ecosystems like Arbitrum fundamentally face a critical distribution and discovery challenge. Finding and engaging with quality communities and applications remains fragmented across disconnected platforms. Meanwhile, the “mini apps” trend is revolutionizing how users discover and interact with blockchain applications.
This proposal introduces Common Ground (https://commonground.cg) - a social application featuring the world’s first community-driven app store, designed for the Arbitrum Ecosystem.
Common Ground includes similar communication platform features to Discord and Slack, enabling communities to chat across multiple channels. However, we enable 3rd party applications to be displayed and run natively in the UI. As such, Common Ground enables communities to curate their own app store. By replacing Discord with Common Ground, Arbitrum can drive its existing, organic traffic to discover the Arbitrum protocols and apps!
The Problem: Arbitrum’s Distribution Gap
As highlighted in recent discussions about mini apps and ecosystem growth, Arbitrum faces several challenges:
- Fragmented Discovery: Quality Arbitrum apps are scattered across disconnected platforms with no coherent discovery mechanism
- Limited Distribution Channels: Developers struggle to reach users outside of airdrop farmers on twitter, and even those are becoming expensive to reach
- Community Isolation: Arbitrum communities operate in silos without meaningful interconnection, be it in telegram, discord or X.
- User Onboarding Friction: New users face overwhelming choices with little social curation or guidance, with less sophisticated users having no clear starting point
The recent mini apps discussion demonstrates clear appetite for innovative distribution channels.
Additionally, builders often complain about Arbitrum’s lack of “community”, preferring Solana or Base instead for this reason.
Introducing Common Ground
Common Ground is a Web3-native platform that combines social coordination with embedded application distribution. Unlike traditional social platforms that treat apps as external links, Common Ground makes apps native citizens of community spaces.
Here’s an example of Common Ground natively running Camelot (click to watch)
The Web3 Coordination Layer
Common Ground solves key coordination problems for web3 ecosystems:
- Community-focused communication: Common Ground is to Slack and Discord what Farcaster is to Twitter. We provide community-focused UX, offering community builders more control over how they design their spaces, and community members more intimacy and focused feeds on the community of their choosing.
- Community discovery: Common Ground was specifically designed for Ecosystems such as Arbitrum that contain multiple projects and associated communities. Common Ground’s UX allows for members to easily discover other communities in the Arbitrum Ecosystem e.g. Azuki, GMX, etc, could each have a community linked to Arbitrum’s community.
- Composability and UX integration: Web3 UX is fragmented across applications, creating broken workflows and user fatigue, leading to adoption challenges for new applications. Common Ground solves this via composability: natively integrating applications and web3 primitives akin to how Farcaster offers primitives like identity and wallets for (mini) app builders to experiment with, Common Ground also makes easily available primitives like identity, wallet management, authentication & role ownership to apps. We also provide ecosystems the ability to extend core primitives with their chain-specific functionality and onchain data.
The Arbitrum Advantage:
Unlike Solana or Base who benefit from a strong sense of community, Arbitrum has a great DeFi ecosystem but lacks social coordination. Common Ground turns Arbitrum’s app diversity into a discovery advantage, not a fragmentation problem.
Common Ground is specifically suited for Arbitrum:
- Arbitrum-Native: Leverage existing apps like DEXs, games and marketplaces, which can be easily embedded and publish new apps purpose-built for Common Ground (the process is incredibly simple and fast! Even non-developers can do it with vibe coding - tutorials and live lectures are being provided on Common Ground). And also Arbitrum-based primitives like ID (collaboration with RnDAO’s ID project), wallet, etc.
- Community-Centric: Apps exist within social contexts, not as isolated experiences. This enables interesting possibilities for social games, SocialFi, and CollabTech applications (coordination around work, governance, etc).
- Curated Discovery: Users are organically exposed to a community-curated registry of apps, no need to rely on noisy social feeds for distribution.
- Ecosystem Network Effects: Apps in an ecosystem benefit from community-to-community discovery e.g. Azuki members love an app and share it with Camelot folks.
- Support Arb token: a Uniswap/Camelot/etc pool to purchase Arb tokens can be natively integrated into Common Ground, leading to community members having easier access to hold Arbitrum if they so desire.
- Developer-Friendly: Full Web3 integration without platform restrictions via iframes, allowing you to natively run most applications with no or minimal modification. (Some guardrails have been put in place for users’ security, e.g. no ability to create new passkeys within the iframe).
Say hello to the “Arbitrum App Store”
- Instant Distribution: Arbitrum apps gain access to a growing network of engaged Web3 communities
- Social Proof (reviews and stats): Community adoption creates credible signals about app quality and utility - instead of coordinated KOL posts on X, users discover apps by seeing what their friends use and people in their favorite communities
Key Features
- Embedded App Execution: Apps run directly within community contexts as secure iframes.
- Community-Driven Curation: Communities discover, evaluate, and recommend apps to each other.
- Cross-Community Network Effects: Apps published by one community can be adopted by others, creating viral distribution.
- Native Web3 Integration: Built-in wallet support, on-chain identity, and seamless transaction flows, powered by Arbitrum’s wallet & chain ecosystem.
How It Works
- Community Publishing: Any Arbitrum community can develop and publish apps to the Common Ground App Store
- Cross-Community Adoption: Other communities can discover and install these apps with one click
- Contextual Integration: Apps run within community spaces, creating social and collaborative experiences
- Network Effects: Popular apps spread organically across communities, rewarding quality developers
Example of Arbitrum mini-apps that can be built:
- Co-founders Matchmaker
- Job/bounty board for the Arbitrum ecosystem
- Proposal Summaries + Voting Reminders
- Grants and opportunities Ginie: describe your project status and get connected to the right opportunities in the ecosystem
- Quests + Learning App: rewards for learning about Arbitrum and its communities.
- Launchpad app: akin to friend.tech
Proven Traction and early Product-Market Fit
Common Ground is live with compelling early signals:
Our KPIs
- 60,000+ Registered Users: Substantial user base already engaged with Web3-native coordination
- Organic Growth: Recent surge in usage from US-based communities, particularly students who chose Common Ground over blocked traditional platforms
- Real Usage: Daily active users engaging in messaging, calls, forums, and embedded applications
- Community Migration: Established Web3 communities are actively migrating to the platform
Specific Benefits for Arbitrum Ecosystem
For Users
- Unified Discovery: Find quality Arbitrum apps through trusted community recommendations (social curation).
- Social Context: Use games, defi, and collaboration apps alongside friends and community members.
- Reduced Risk: Community-vetted applications with transparent usage patterns.
- Seamless Experience: No wallet switching or complex setup procedures.
For Builders
- Built-in Distribution: Access to engaged Web3 communities from day one
- Network Effects: Apps can spread virally across connected communities
- Community Feedback: Direct user engagement and iteration opportunities
- Revenue Opportunities: Community-driven monetization and support models
For Arbitrum Communities
- User Engagement: Access to unique applications that enhance member engagement
- Community Discovery: ecosystem members can more easily discover your community, instead of getting lost between disjointed and clunky Discord servers.
For Arbitrum Ecosystem as a whole:
- Foothold in the Social(Fi) market: via supporting an Arbitrum-native project to gain traction and grow. And composability with other gaming, defi, and collaboration apps to support those clusters.
- Convert traffic into holders and users: via native integration with DEXes and Arbitrum apps, instead of Discord’s dead end.
- Consolidation of the Arbitrum community: a supportive place for builders, instead of builders picking Solana or Base.
The Roadmap for Common Ground + Arbitrum:
Phase 1 - Trial (1-3 months based on feedback): Create two Arbitrum communities in Common Ground and try it out: one as a parallel to the delegate telegram group another as a parallel to the Arbitrum Discord. (Our telegram bridge ensures synchronicity and reduces the pain of migration). Provide us with feedback and help us prioritise.
Phase 2 - Migration (1-3 months based on feedback): migrate Arbitrum’s Discord and/or Telegram group (based on analysis from trial) to Common Ground, sunsetting the previous instance and officially redirecting traffic to our application. This step requires coordinated action to form the new habit; as such, we’ll do a vampire attack on Discord:
- Incentives for early adopters of platform and Arbitrum (mini)Apps
- Bot integration to mirror telegram chats
Phase 3 - Ecosystem Pub Craw & regular operation (6-10 months): event to promote communities in Arbitrum, where each project hosts an event to share what they do. Members of the ecosystem can crawl from event to event and discover the ecosystem. We did this with Lukso ecosystem, and it was a great success for people to learn about all the communities and projects in their ecosystem (see here).
The outcome : Arbitrum creates an exciting hub where members organically discover the projects in the ecosystem and the people behind it. From there, they can seamlessly engage with Arbitrums’s games, DeFi, CollabTech, etc, now with social context and an embedded trust layer. Arbtirum develops a discovery advantage to offer to its builders and the community grows!
The Ask
Token Swap and marketing support
- Arbitrum does significant support to drive awareness via marketing channels for Phase 2 and Phase 3 (pending approval snapshot vote after Phase 1 of this being ready). This includes 2-3 tweets during the launch of Phase 2 and 3, including the main Twitter account and sharing with Arbitrum Ambassadors. No endorsement beyond announcing the initiative is required i.e. Arbitrum is not responsible for Common Ground’s actions.
- Arbitrum covers the cost of mini-grants for Arbitrum-specific mini-apps: Common Ground facilitates this program to encourage adoption by builders and maximum value to Arbitrum: $10,000 for Phase 1.
- Arbitrum purchases ecosystem subscription to sustain the core Common Ground developers to ship continuous improvements based on the arb community’s feedback: $100,000 for 1 year.
- Arbitrum covers the cost of migration incentives (pending approval snapshot vote after Phase 2). The incentives allocation formula is to be released after the fact to reduce farming. $50,000 for phases 1, 2 & 3.
In Return : The Arbitrum DAO, Arbitrum communities, and community members receive the equivalent amount of the subscription fee in $CG governance tokens (as per the last investor valuation). This innovative form of web3-aligned SaaS subscription creates stakeholder buy-in on the side of the Arbitrum ecosystem and sustains the dev team behind Common Ground for the long term.
- Arb Foundation will receive and hold $100,000 equivalent in $CG tokens for at least a year (with the ability to transfer to other Arbitrum-affiliated entities under equal terms).
- Common Ground distributes $50,000 equivalent in $CG tokens as incentives to individuals & communities, based on sybil-resistant airdrops for using the app / building new habits / bringing more users and projects.
Payment process & schedule:
Arb equivalent (US $160k) +50% buffer sent to Arbitrum Foundation for conversion to stables and payments as per the schedule below. Remaining Arb returned to the DAO.
- Mini grants: USD equivalent 10k at kickoff. Not to be used by the Common Ground team, separate wallet for traceability.
- Subscription: USD equivalent 100k as a 1-year stream to the Common Ground team.
- Incentives: USD equivalent 200k at kickoff and 30k after completion of Phase 2. Not to be used by the Common Ground team, separate wallet for traceability.
The Arbitrum Foundation can cancel the deal with 1-month notice at their discretion (or transfer responsibility to an Arbitrum-affiliated entity, e.g. OpCo, Entropy, etc).