Appreciate your reply TempeTechie and I agree on the majority of your points (both here and in your SOS).
Let me try to break down your questions.
On Builders and DeFi.
Fully agree on your remarks. The Entropy team has also reached out and we are working on a joint Matrix that takes the best of the initial proposals. Happy to incorporate your feedback.
Premium to ARB
- Staking: I agree we can wait until we have a better overview of what type of revenues the DAO is generating, and that we have completed our biggest growth phase so the ROI in investing into new things is < that rewarding stakers.
Your institutional point is spot on. Holding ARB will be a way for them to get governance rights, but also extended exposure to the ecosystem they’re building on. For that to happen we should: 1) Effectively onboard those institutions 
and 2) Create dynamics to have them buy ARB on the market (majority of chain deals today are about giving them free tokens).
On other ways to give premium to ARB - it won’t be easy because ARB doesn’t have the moneyness properties that assets like ETH or OHM possess. We should focus on making it a bet on the overall Ethereum and Arbitrum ecosystem. By buying ARB you get access to its tech stack potential, the apps the DAO invested in and is supporting, and the future revenues of the DAO.
Don’t have a magic key yet, but it’s something we should experiment with.
Innovation
I’m not sure I agree that 80% of focus should go to DeFi. Yes, DeFi is critical for the onchain world, but we’ve reached a point of stagnation in terms of new primitives - and having a slightly faster perpetual protocol won’t move the needle for Arbitrum.
What I think we should do:
- Attract liquidity for the best assets: ETH + Stablecoins (adding: all major world currencies), LRTs, BTC + Any form of RWA (houses, farms, loans)
- This creates the fundamentals to then bring protocols that create new forms of sustainable yield (more Ethena and fewer Yearn competitors)
More importantly, we should start using DeFi as a base layer for applications rather than the ultimate goal. Why are we building all of this for?
The AVI team probably expressed it better:
I think it’s time to start building crypto cities: a constellation of onchain economies connected to the physical world. A few ideas:
- Physical (itinerant) Arcade Rooms where people aggregate to try web3 games
- Networks of AI shoppers - tell them what you want, they find the cheapest price and buy it
- Insurance with attestations + zero-knowledge data (Ex: verify I’m under 60)
- Loans for farmers backed by IoT sensors with data brought onchain in a privacy-preserving way
- Fund science projects
- Pay delegates with perks that are bought with ARB
Importantly, all of these use cases use DeFi as an underlying layer - but if we don’t try to expand the pie we’ll always be fighting for the same users. and their capital.
I think we should equally support Orbit chains and Arbitrum One- bbut for different use cases. A1 should be the center of liquidity that every chain can access, while successful Orbit chains will specialize in specific use cases that become part of the broader Orbit economy.
Governance
After reading the AF vision, I think their structure mostly makes sense with some improvements. The current delegate structure and DIP have attracted some great minds (and some parasites, obviously).
I think it’s good to reposition the delegate as a strategic decision maker + controller, which will bring DAOs and big investors back to the governance table.
However, we should find ways to leverage the collective we’ve gathered so far. I’d like to see delegates proactively work on specific streams (commissions) with dedicated focus areas (like ARDC, TMC, etc). Come with an initiative for an experiment, convince OpCo you’re the best to execute it, and a workstream is started for your team.
Transparently, I’ll follow the AAE approach but hope to see some flexibility in it, otherwise we risk ossifying the teams working on Arbitrum and the innovation they can bring.