We have voted AGAINST this proposal as we do not believe this is a sensible use of DAO funds. This nearly doubles the initial budget and we feel this is a case of budget creep. It suggests that either: the committee administering this program lacks discipline, or the scoring method is deficient. We also believe this proposal violates the soft funding cap laid out in the initial budget proposal. Either way, if this program were to need additional budget we believe the proper way to do this is for the impact of initial funding to be assessed along with the criteria used for scoring and then another funding round be carried out.
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The following reflects the views of the Lampros DAO governance team, composed of Chain_L (@Blueweb), @Euphoria, and Hirangi Pandya (@Nyx), based on our combined research, analysis, and ideation.
We are voting FOR this proposal in the Snapshot voting.
Stylus has huge potential, and its growth is key to strengthening Arbitrum’s ecosystem. We trust the reviewing committee, and providing additional funding ensures that high-quality projects are not left behind due to budget limits, which ultimately benefits the ecosystem.
The recommended list of projects includes strong applications that, if delayed for another round of funding, could slow down the growth of Stylus. By supporting these projects now, we allow more teams to contribute and help Stylus reach its full potential.
For these reasons, we support this proposal and the teams working to build on Stylus. We look forward to seeing the progress and impact of these funded projects.
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.
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After consideration, the @SEEDgov delegation has decided to “FOR” on this proposal at the Snapshot Vote.
Rationale
As members of the committee, we agree with the recommendation made, although it means almost doubling the budget originally allocated, the reality is that these proposals deserve to be funded by the DAO, just as we believe that the DAO can benefit from the fact that these promising projects/applicants use Stylus.
I voted FOR this proposal. Stylus is one of the key tech advancements of the Arbitrum ecosystem, and we as delegates must incentivize the activity of worthy projects to use these tools to build infrastructure and apps on top of Arbitrum.
While this proposal does double the budget of the Stylus Sprint proposal approved earlier, the committee evaluated and rated these projects as promising in a pool of 147 applications. I see no reason to not support them given the recommendation and the relevance of these proposals.
I also oppose the suggestion of opening another round for more projects to be included. This would complicate the committee’s selection even more. Another proposal for a similar initiative might be opened later to include these, and evaluated more thoroughly with a more relaxed timeframe.
For me, approving this is essential, even with the high investment this activity encompasses.
I vote in favor of this proposal on Snapshot.
Thank you, Entropy, for keeping us informed about the budget update. I believe Stylus will strengthen Arbitrum’s recognition as the top L2 option and keep us in the spotlight for new developers looking to build on it. I trust the committee will prioritize innovative projects that create significant impact.
We vote FOR the proposal on Snapshot.
We showed our support in the previous comment and we acknowledged the committees’ effort to negotiate with the applicants of the projects chosen in the list by reviewing each application in Questbook and its review score/comments. Competitive development platforms require great tooling and middleware to support great applications to be built and this is the area the DAO should invest in.
As in @web3citizenxyz representation. Voting FOR. Below the rationale:
PBC Governance is voting FOR the Stylus Sprint budget increase at the Snapshot Stage.
After reviewing the recommended applications ourselves, we echoed many of the points the Entropy team made in their latest comment - especially regarding the significant potential to draw developers from other chain ecosystems and provide them with a superior development experience / environment. We’re also fans of supporting hook development for Uni V4 - lots of potential there, as Arbitrum’s consistently been the leading L2 for volume. As we’re all aware, Stylus and the EVM+ approach sets Arbitrum apart from other ecosystems, and doubling down on funding (quite literally) here seems rational.
The following reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @krst and @Sinkas. It’s based on their combined research, fact-checking, and ideation.
We’re voting FOR the proposal.
We supported the original proposal to fund the Stylus Sprint and believe that we shouldn’t let budget constraints limit the number of projects we can fund simply because we received more applications than perhaps anticipated. That’s even more true if the projects to be funded through the additional funds are high-quality, as evaluated by the committee.
The 17 approved projects receiving funding from the original budget are already a positive outcome—pending their milestone completion, of course—and the opportunity to fund an additional nine projects that have passed most of the evaluation stages should be treated with the same mindset.
One small clarification we’d like to address is a slight discrepancy between the requested budget of 4,000,000 ARB and the 4,058,200 ARB needed to fund all projects. While we understand the committee might be working with the projects to negotiate and finalize the amounts, perhaps it’s worth clarifying what will happen if they fail to reduce the amount asked - will the budget request be increased before the onchain vote?
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.
The proposal to allocate an additional 4 million ARB to the Stylus Sprint program is a strategic investment in high-quality infrastructure projects and top-tier applicants that were initially excluded due to budget constraints. Funding initiatives from the accepted applicants strengthen Arbitrum’s Stylus infrastructure foundation, ensuring long-term scalability and adoption. With a transparent selection process and oversight by the existing MSS-controlled Stylus Sprint multisig, this allocation is both justified and well-managed.
A few key questions remain:
a) How will funding this tooling impact Stylus?
b) Why was there no negotiation during the initial application process, which could have helped manage the budget more effectively?
c) Will there be a Season 2 of the program, given that many of these projects are infrastructure -focused and will take 6–12 months to complete?
While concerns about setting a precedent are valid, this situation is unique due to the exceptional demand—147 applications requesting 31.92 million ARB—and the strategic focus on infrastructure. The committee has exercised prudence by selecting only high-scoring applicants, ensuring the additional funding is directed toward impactful projects. Given Stylus’s importance to Arbitrum’s growth, approving this proposal allows the DAO to capitalize on high-quality innovation without unnecessary delays. We recommend supporting the projects.
Additionally, we suggest providing further funding or creating an RFP for Stylus developer documentation. A key concern among developers from the Solana ecosystem has been the lack of comprehensive documentation. This gap could potentially be addressed through the Questbook program.
voting Against on the current offchain vote because this is not the right way to do this. This proposal was rushed, the proposer didn’t incorporate feedback from the delegates, and I overall don’t agree with increasing the budget to almost double, without opening applications for other projects to apply as well. As I recommended before, we should invest heavily in stylus, and the right move, in my opinion, is to double down on the program and make a second season of it, with maybe even more budget than the first. But doing it like this is not okay.
At first glance, expanding the budget by 80% seem excessive.
However, as others have mentioned—and especially after testing it—we believe Stylus could give Arbitrum a significant edge over other ecosystems if properly developed.
Given the committee’s work, the selected candidates are likely well-suited to drive this initiative forward.
Running these programs requires time and resources, and a similarly complex selection process for an improvised “Second Season” could set us back, increase costs, and delay progress.
The time allocated to drafting proposals was more than sufficient, and the feedback—whenever requested—was consistently constructive.
Having seen the strong coordination between all parties—DAO, Committee, Applicants and OCL—it would be a missed opportunity not to support an initiative that could become a defining advantage for Arbitrum.
@krst The Sprint committee’s negotiations with applicants have been successful and the total request is now under 4M ARB. We’d like to refer you to the above comment:
The proposal has also now been updated to reflect this change, apologies for the confusion.
@Saurabh thanks for the additional questions.
We believe this is a similar question to the one posed by @CastleCapital, but if this is not the case please let us know. Our response to how these projects impact Stylus can be found below:
The committee has also outlined how each individual application will impact Stylus in this document.
During the application period, the committee provided feedback to several teams that their requests were either too high or needed further justification/detail to explain the budget. This led to some teams updating their application. During the review period, the committee actively negotiated and held calls with teams to bring down their budgets. From the 17 accepted applications, the committee was able to reduce the requests by a total of 1,394,482 ARB and an average reduction of ~18% per application. From the above recommended list, to date the budgets have been reduced by a total 224,300 ARB; however, this number is greatly impacted by Sylow’s need for a budget increase. Without the budget increase the savings would have amounted to closer to 650K ARB. On Sylow’s Questbook application, the committee has posted additional context on the need for this increase and why we think the application is still worth funding even at a higher cost.
Currently there are no concrete plans for a 2nd season of the Stylus Sprint as it is too early to understand if the program should be rerun in the same format. Entropy strongly believes that it is worthwhile for the DAO to continue to support the adoption and growth of the Stylus ecosystem. Future iterations of the program will immensely benefit from many of the funded projects underway currently, though of course they will take some time to ship. For a future program, a greater application focus could make sense from our perspective, though we would still need to see how Stylus’ roadmap and adoption progress.
Voting “For”. While having to expand the initial budget isn’t ideal, it’s clear that this project provides value and there was meaningful review of the projects to avoid a ‘we’re just gonna pay for the sake of paying’ situation. At the end of the day, showing Arbitrum supports these builders is more valuable than the cost savings in sticking strictly to the budget. So in that sense the i think the benefits outweigh any negatives and am for it.
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Thank you for your proposal @Entropy.
I voted FOR in Snapshot despite the comments focused on increasing the initial budget, I believe that allowing these initiatives to go unfunded would be a mistake.
Investing in these projects is an opportunity to make us stronger. I hope we take note of these experiences to improve our planning.
I attempted to vote YES but had technical issues.
After confirmation from Entropy regarding clarifications, I believe allowing this to proceed makes sense, but we need to really stop creating programs and immediately changing the threshold for application. It essentially removes the fear of lose when people apply for grants, incentives etc … since things will just get expanded.
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Thank you for the response!
LobbyFi cast the vote IN SUPPORT of the proposal since the community auction ‘for’ pool has gotten more ETH deposited than the ‘against’ pool.
The Stylus Sprint Evaluation Committee’s request passed favorably on Snapshot:
For: ~156.6m (96.01%)
Against: ~6.2m (3.78%)
Abstain: ~353k (0.22%)
Therefore, Entropy plans to maintain the timeline as outlined in the proposal and has posted the proposal on Tally. The request remains unchanged at 4M ARB.
Voting will begin on Thursday, February 20th and if the proposal passes, funds for the budget increase will be sent to the existing MSS controlled multi-sig for the Stylus Sprint. The recommend applications will then move forward with the Arbitrum Foundation’s compliance process and join the other 17 teams in the Stylus Sprint.
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