[SOS Submission] 404 Gov - Strategic Objectives

DAO Programs & Initiatives Strategic Objective Settings (SOS)
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[SOS Submission] 404 Gov - Strategic Objectives: Empowering the Next Generation of Arbitrum Developers

Summary

This strategic objectives setting matrix focuses on how the Arbitrum DAO can catalyze a developer ecosystem that propels Arbitrum to become the premier platform for building onchain applications. Our strategy is built on three core pillars:

  1. Developer Excellence - Funding and coordinating world-class tools, documentation, and infrastructure that make Arbitrum the most accessible and powerful platform for builders
  2. Developer Pipeline & Community - Supporting programs that attract, educate, and retain talented developers from both crypto-native and traditional backgrounds
  3. Building for Institutional Adoption - Positioning Arbitrum as the leading platform for privacy-preserving institutional applications through advanced cryptography

MVP Connection

At its core, our SOS builds on the DAO’s mission to “empower people with the freedom to build their best onchain world” by translating that ethos into actionable objectives for the developer ecosystem. By centering strategic investment around developer excellence, a robust onboarding pipeline, and institutional-grade infrastructure, our SOS transforms the mission into objectives for attracting the exact people who will build their best version of the onchain world.

From the purpose lens—“defend and guide the Arbitrum ecosystem”—this proposal advances the DAO’s stewardship mandate by ensuring Arbitrum remains the most attractive and resilient home for builders. Rather than pursuing fragmented initiatives, the strategy coordinates across the developer journey, ensuring tools, education, and long-term support systems are not only available but also best-in-class. The focus on privacy-enhancing tech and institutional-grade readiness speaks directly to the vision of Arbitrum becoming “home to the universal shift onchain.” By investing in institutional-influenced applications and unlocking adoption pathways that appeal to both crypto-native and traditional sectors, our SOS reinforces Arbitrum’s aspiration to be the go-to ecosystem for the next wave of global onchain migration.

Rationale

Understanding Arbitrum’s Current Position

Arbitrum has established strong foundations:

  • Technical excellence with Arbitrum One and Orbit, offering complementary approaches to scaling
  • Stylus opening new frontiers for Rust/C developers to build high-performance applications
  • Decentralized governance structure with direct control over treasury and protocol upgrades
  • Strong existing ecosystem with particular strength in DeFi applications
  • Brand recognition attracting curious developers

However, we face increasing competition:

  • Other L2s and emerging chains aggressively targeting developers
  • Base leveraging Coinbase’s distribution advantage
  • Competition on latency: Unichain and Base introduced 200ms block times with flashblocks and MegaETH plans to launch with 10ms block times
  • Solana offering excellent developer experience with dedicated funding
  • Growing complexity of the blockchain landscape making onboarding difficult
  • Developer mindshare competing against other tech industries such as AI

Arbitrum User Evolution

The current Arbitrum user is predominantly:

  • Crypto-native with deep technical understanding
  • DeFi-focused with emphasis on trading and yield
  • Values decentralization, privacy, and censorship resistance
  • Technically sophisticated with high risk tolerance

The future Arbitrum user includes:

  • Institutions and traditional finance participants
  • Stablecoin-focused businesses and consumers
  • Crypto-curious mainstream users
  • Application developers requiring compliance, privacy, and security

The DAO must strategically allocate resources to serve both current users and expand to new segments. This requires coordination between ecosystem actors with different expertise and focus areas.

Strategic Direction: The Developer Renaissance

We’ve chosen to focus on developers because:

  1. Economic Reality: With abundant blockspace across chains, the scarce resource is talented developers who can create valuable applications that drive adoption and usage.
  2. Competitive Advantage: Arbitrum’s technical excellence and governance structure create the foundation for a developer experience that other chains cannot easily replicate.
  3. Multiplier Effect: Every developer we successfully onboard can create applications serving thousands or millions of users.
  4. Sustainable Growth: Rather than short-term incentives, focusing on developer experience creates long-term sustainable growth.
  5. Institutional Opportunity: By leveraging Arbitrum’s capabilities for privacy and security, we can attract the next wave of institutional adoption.

1-Year Strategic Objectives & Key Results

Objective 1: Fund a comprehensive developer excellence program that makes Arbitrum the most accessible blockchain platform to build on

What the DAO enables:

  • Fund development of essential blockchain tools and documentation, with Stylus as a focus
  • Support creation of comprehensive documentation including tutorials, SDKs, and advanced implementation frameworks
  • Coordinate resource allocation between complementary infrastructure initiatives
  • Establish metrics to track growth in active monthly Arbitrum developers, with segmentation for relevant developer sectors (for ex. Stylus)

Key Results/Success Metrics:

  1. Deploy >$5M+ in funding for Stylus infrastructure, tooling, and documentation, with metrics tracking utilization and effectiveness
  2. Fund the development of 20+ essential Stylus libraries

Objective 2: Catalyze a world-class developer pipeline and community

What the DAO enables:

  • Fund technical education and onboarding initiatives
  • Coordinate programs connecting different developer communities, targeting new and existing developer hubs, including University developers

Key Results/Success Metrics:

  1. Fund an Arbitrum Developer Academy with specialized tracks for different developer backgrounds, onboarding developers of all levels

  2. Run multiple cohorts in year 1, building out key developer funnels

  3. Target 150+ graduates across all developer tracks

  4. Support 10+ global hackathons and development events with 3,000+ participants total, with 60 high-quality submissions

Objective 3: Position Arbitrum as the leading ecosystem for institutions

What the DAO enables:

  • Funding the development of infrastructure and applications that serve the needs of institutional clients
  • Funding academic research into dark pools and other privacy solutions for institutional clients.
  • Funding hackathons to encourage developers to build privacy solutions
  • Funding public relations, marketing, and educational content such as blog posts and YouTube videos targeted specifically at institutional clients and their users.

Key Results/Success Metrics:

  1. Expand tokenized RWA assets on Arbitrum, bringing 5-10 new product baskets onchain (real estate, commodities, equities, etc)
  2. Fund a $10M RWA + privacy grants track specifically targeting applications with institutional use cases
  3. Arbitrum Institutional hub is built out to showcase Institutional adoption including RWA TVL, institutional products and applications, and Arbitrum native partnerships
  4. 500M+ RWA TVL on Arbitrum One(currently at 200M)

2-Year Strategic Objectives & Key Results

Objective 1: Establish Arbitrum as the standard for blockchain developer experience

What the DAO enables:

  • Fund long-term developer support and experience improvements
  • Support initiatives promoting Arbitrum’s developer advantages

Key Results/Success Metrics:

  1. Debut a full developer tooling suite, complete with a variety of tutorials and SDKs, AI tools, and implementation guides
  2. Highlight over 25+ developer success stories and case studies demonstrating Arbitrum’s advantages, creating a desirable builder culture

Objective 2: Catalyze a developer ecosystem enabling mainstream and institutional adoption

What the DAO enables:

  • Continue to fund new tooling infrastructure, bridging technical gaps
  • Build upon existing developer academy programs targeting key growth segments around AI, traditional finance, and emerging technologies
  • Double down on developer onboarding areas that showed the most promise through additional funding, hackathons and developmental events

Key Results/Success Metrics:

  1. Support educational programs onboarding 1,000+ developers from non-crypto backgrounds
  2. Graduate 500+ developers through advanced Arbitrum Academy programs

Objective 3: Make Arbitrum the home of all onchain tradfi infrastructure

What the DAO enables:

  • Support new chains launched by Institutional players
  • Coordinate development of privacy standards and frameworks
  • Support the development of a comprehensive privacy toolkit for Arbitrum developers
  • Fund institutional focused applications

Key Results/Success Metrics:

  1. 3 Orbit chains launched by traditional finance institutions
  2. 20+ institutional-focused applications running with minimum TVL requirements
  3. 5 privacy-focused applications in use by institutional players
  4. 1B+ RWA TVL on Arbitrum One

Further Details

Resource Requirements

  1. Technical Resources: Infrastructure for developer environments, testing, and deployment
  2. Educational Resources: Curriculum developers, technical writers, and executors
  3. Community Resources: Event organizers, community managers, and developer mentors
  4. Research Resources: Privacy researchers, institutional experts, and user experience specialists
  5. Analytics Resources: Dune wizards, Reporting managers

Risk Management

  1. Competitive Response: Other chains will attempt to copy successful initiatives

    Mitigation: Focus on creating network effects and community that are difficult to replicate

  2. Developer Retention: Initial interest doesn’t always translate to long-term building

    Mitigation: Build out a comprehensive developer support system with support at each stage of the developer lifecycle

  3. Institutional Hesitancy: Traditional institutions may move slowly despite innovations

    Mitigation: Create case studies and fund PR demonstrating Arbitrum’s security and technical design benefits

  4. Resource Diffusion: Attempting too many initiatives simultaneously may dilute impact

    Mitigation: Implement strong intelligence systems to prioritize highest-impact initiatives

  5. Technical Limitations: Some developer experience challenges stem from core protocol design

    Mitigation: Maintain close coordination with Offchain Labs to align technical roadmap with developer needs

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Thank you for the proposal. I couldn’t attend your SOS objective pitch (organized by L2beat). Unfortunately, the recording was lost, so I hope I’m not asking questions that were already covered there.

I really like that your objectives focus on developers. I also appreciate that you’ve split them into 1-year and 2-year strategic goals. I come from a web2 developer background and have a few ideas that could improve your proposal.

This idea stands out to me. Will it be aimed at students and non-crypto developers? I think it should be. The program only makes sense for people who already have some development skills but lack the specific knowledge to build onchain. Basically, it would turn web2 devs into web3 devs. Is that the goal?

Another great way to reach web2 devs would be by attending and sponsoring major IT conferences. For example, something like WeAreDevelopers (WeAreDevelopers World Congress • July 2025 • Berlin, Germany). I’ve attended this one before, and I believe it attracts the right kind of talent for this program.

On Objective 1: Establish Arbitrum as the standard for blockchain developer experience:

From our calls and feedback from the AAEs, there’s been a strong push to prioritize Arbitrum-native projects—those that build exclusively on Arbitrum. I agree this rule might shape this objective quite a bit.

It’s a big ask for experienced devs or startups to commit to building only on one chain. But it’s the best way to ensure resources are used effectively. By focusing on top builders and helping them go exclusive, we can also free up resources at the AAEs to work on bringing more users to Arbitrum.

This way, we grow the ecosystem while supporting builders and helping them get users. What do you think about this “Arbitrum native” clause?

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I like how builder centric this is. The pipeline focus is straight forward and could have a huge impact.

@krst take note, 404’s direction here addresses all the things you were looking for in the other post.

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Objectives 1 and 2

Strong support for objectives 1 and 2 – developer ecosystem must be a top priority.

We fully agree with the emphasis on these Objectives. In a market with rapidly growing competition among L2s and app chains, Stylus represents a major technical differentiator for Arbitrum. It has the potential to significantly broaden the developer base by lowering entry barriers and enabling new use cases—and that’s a strategic advantage we should absolutely pursue.

Arbitrum DAO should prioritise creating a vibrant, engaged developer ecosystem. This means attracting new developers and supporting them with the right mix of education, tooling, incentives, and community infrastructure.

The proposed approach of funding key components of this developer ecosystem makes a lot of sense. Elements like the Arbitrum Developer Academy, mentorship programs, and curated onboarding resources have already succeeded in other ecosystems – the Atrium Academy in Uniswap is a great parallel. Building something similar tailored to Arbitrum, especially with Stylus in mind, could be extremely impactful.

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Cross-posting a portion of our reply in this thread as it is directly relevant.

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