The proposal has now passed with over 97% in favor of moving forward with the Stylus Sprint! Thank you all for the well-thought-out feedback and support for the proposal. We will be pushing the timeline back 1-2 weeks before moving to Tally to address some very valid feedback around necessary, albeit minor, changes to the proposal. Changes that will likely be made include:
- An inclusion of a rough draft of the application template and grading rubric. A high-quality application template will be of the utmost importance in the likely scenario that the program is a major success with more applicants than expected. These will be clear and strict, and applicant non-compliance consequences (ineligibility) will be enforced.
- An additional member of the evaluation committee will be added to the program. Specifically, we will be looking to add a member with existing experience in the DAO’s grants programs. With 6 total members, we’ll ensure that the program has a tie breaker mechanism or attempt to add a 7th member as well.
- Though we will not add a “cap” to the max request, we will make clear that larger requests over 10% of the budget, that are deemed quality, have a likelihood of being sent to the DAO instead of included in the program dependent on the total ARB requested in the program and quality of the applications.
- We may opt to enable USD denominated requests from applicants, though this will require more discussion with delegates before being an included change. There is a tradeoff in this approach but could be addressed by sending ARB first to a foundation-controlled address for conversion.
Additional considerations:
- A marketing push is currently being coordinated with members of Arbitrum’s marketing community. This is a major focus of the program and will not be ignored. We appreciate so many astutely pointing out its importance, we agree. This has been in the works since even before the proposal’s completion and we apologize for not giving more clarity or insight into it being worked on. Additionally, a big component of the success of the program will be community members reaching out to their networks: whether protocols or traditional devs well fit for the program so we would like to call on all to help out bolstering the applicant pool.
- Regarding the comment about vulnerabilities, the OZ critical bug is in the SDK not Stylus itself. Teams are already shipping with Stylus today without hindrance. Additionally, the SDK is expected to be completed (and shipped) within the next few weeks (before the Sprint would start).
- This proposal will be utilizing the MSS. Per the language of the proposal “Funds will be sent to an MSS-secured multisig,” but there is clearly a miscommunication on our part since many read it differently, so this will be addressed more clearly, directly, and without room for misunderstanding. Language will be included around the “Payment Approver” role as well to make sure the MSS has all necessary information.
- RPGF is something we considered along with many other ideas for verticals to include in the program but we decided to hone in the focus of the proposal and not try to do everything at once. There is a lot of work to be done to make Stylus a tech stack anyone can easily use with proper incentives and this proposal by no means will solve them all. That said, it’s a kickstart to getting some of the most pertinent work done. One solution could be budgeting an extra amount of ARB, maybe 2.5M, for the RPGF in this same proposal so it can already be marketed. Then we can figure out specifics at some point in the future regarding how we’ll distribute those funds which would require an additional Snapshot proposal. This is just an idea, but we will explore if it is something that the DAO desires.
- The 5000 ARB per month per member of the evaluation committee will likely be substandard pay at the beginning of the program (12 weeks) and high pay for the rest while milestones greenlighting becomes the majority of the scope of work. We will model out the expected workload per evaluation committee member over the whole program (in different scenarios dependent on # of applicants) tied to the current USD valuation of the total pay.