Entropy has an update on 2 of the recommended applications, Ember and Nuffle Labs. Both have agreed to revise their budgets down by 40k ARB, so each is now requesting 60K and 460K ARB respectively. The scope and deliverables remain largely unchanged and additional information can be found in the comment section of their application on Questbook. Tagging @mcfly who mentioned in their rationale the cost of Ember.
The total request of the recommended applicants now stands at 3,978,200 ARB. The committee will keep its request at 4M ARB so that there is a bit of room for any contingencies. At the culmination of the Stylus Sprint, expected to be Janruary 27th, 2026, all remaining ARB, whether from this unallocated amount or from projects that fail to hit their milestones within the timeline, will be returned to the DAO.
Addressing the questions from @CastleCapital. In summary, the committee believes these applications present promising opportunities to strengthen the Stylus ecosystem. Diving deeper, projects like Pyth, Moving Stylus, Nuffle Labs, Syndicate’s MintVM, Solang, and Ember further introduce Stylus to developers across high-growth ecosystems, including Solana, Move based chains (Sui, Aptos, and Movement), and Uniswap V4. They significantly expand Stylus’ reach and accessibility. The committee’s goal is to create a network effect where developers in these ecosystems recognize Arbitrum as the most cost-effective and scalable option due to Stylus.
Beyond ecosystem expansion, foundational tools like StylusFuzz, Sylow, and CodeTracer provide advanced testing, debugging, and on-chain capabilities, making Stylus viable for high-value projects with rigorous security and performance requirements. This budget increase ensures these strategically important projects receive the necessary support and are opportunities that the committee believes are important to accelerating developer adoption and the long-term maturity of Stylus.
Regarding internal discussion within the committee, there was consensus on the need for a budget increase. Throughout the review process the committee worked to arrange 1 on 1 calls with as many promising applications as possible and synced several times on its own calls. It became clear quite early that there were more high-quality applicants and promising projects than our budget would allow for and in order to fund all of them an increase in the total budget would be required.
Lastly, outside of the funded applicants delivering on their milestones (many of which include adoption based KPIs and/or case studies to demonstrate a use cases with the tooling built), the committee will also be looking at the number of new developers entering the Stylus ecosystem (measured by Open Source Observer) and the increase in total gas consumption of Stylus contracts.