[RFC] Fund The Stylus Sprint

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

We are voting FOR the proposal.

Stylus is already a huge differentiator between Arbitrum and other L2s and will potentially enable thousands of developers to build on/for Arbitrum without having to know solidity. Creating and funding a Stylus Sprint is a great opportunity to build on the momentum of Stylus’ launch and offer support to builders looking to come to Arbitrum.

Having said that, some points should be discussed before the proposal is submitted for an on-chain vote.

For example, we need clarifications on the current committee setup and compensation. While we are not against committee members getting paid and not waiving their compensation, we’re curious why they are getting paid for 15 months (60 weeks) when the work outlined is spread over 12 weeks. What are the expectations from a time commitment and resources perspective for the remaining 48 weeks that justify a 5,000 ARB monthly compensation for the entire sprint duration?

Additionally, since 2 of the committee members are from OpenZeppelin, does that mean that OpenZeppelin will be excluded from participating in the sprint? If so, is it good for the program to have one of the most competent teams excluded?

Last but not least, we’re not convinced about the decision to award the grantees using ARB instead of stables, especially when the grants are to be made in milestones that might span up to a year and the grant is probably supposed to cover development costs. We are aware of the challenges that come with converting ARB to stables, and we understand that having awards in ARB is meant to create alignment but it’s worth discussing it more before the onchain vote since:

  • Grantees will probably need to sell ARB to cover the costs anyway
  • If ARB’s price continues to decline, grantees might end up not be interested to finish the projects they started due to costs significantly exceeding expected payout.
  • Questbook uses $ denominations, not ARB - is it even possible to denominate grants in ARB using Questbook? The worst solution would be to denominate grants in $ but pay in ARB, as we’ve already experienced several times already.

Overall, we’re supportive of the direction, but we want to address the aforementioned points before voting in favor of the proposal onchain.

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