STEP Committee Shortlist

DAO Programs & Initiatives STEP Applications
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We have some exciting news to start off June with: the STEP committee has gone through each application and come out with a first shortlist of 17 products that merit further analysis over the next few weeks.

Without further ado, the shortlist comprises of:

  1. Backed (bIB01, bERNA, bZPR1)
  2. Centrifuge Anemoy LTF
  3. DigiFT DRUST
  4. Franklin FOBXX
  5. Fortunafi
  6. Gyroscope SGYD
  7. Hashnote
  8. LibreCapital (LUMA)
  9. Matrixdock STBT
  10. Midas
  11. Mountain USDM
  12. Ondo USDY
  13. OpenEden Tbill
  14. OpenTrade
  15. PV01 Capital Markets (TBL)
  16. Securitize (BUIDL)
  17. Superstate (USTB)

Congratulations to the providers making the shortlist. We invite them to share any additional information before the committee begins the next round of reviews.

With the STEP program, the committee defined 3 objectives in the following order of priority

  1. Don’t lose the money (risk minimization)

  2. Earn a healthy yield uncorrelated to crypto markets (revenue generation)

  3. Grow the RWA ecosystem (growth)

In their first pass on the providers, these objectives fed into the following rubric used to narrow down the list of eligible applicants.

Product

  • Proportion of RWA is less & de-fi or crypto angle too high
  • Involves equities with high volatility
  • Not dollar denominated with foreign currency risk
  • A derivative product built on top of a product launched by another applicant
  • Not launched yet

Legal

  • Judged as not being bankruptcy remote, opening risk of creditors taking our funds in case of disputes
  • Service providers in a jurisdiction that is uncomfortable for the committee
  • Insufficient separation between fund manager and investment manager

Overhead

  • Requires bridging to other chains
  • Needs continual active decision making

Transparency

  • Black box setup
  • Multisig in control of executive team
  • Product is complicated and risk is difficult to quantify

This non-exhaustive list can be a guide to unsuccessful applicants on why their product wasn’t the right fit for us at this point of time. We invite them to apply to other ArbitrumDAO programs!

We are also sharing the abstain votes below

Conflicts of Interest Declaration

  • Karpatkey: Centrifuge Anemoy LTF and Centrifuge Anemoy DYF
  • Steakhouse: Ondo; Fortunafi: Mountain USDM ; Angle
  • North Lake Legal : Ondo
  • Nethermind : LibreCapital (LUMA)
  • GFX: Frax Finance
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As a reviewer, we want to make clear that there were some high-quality projects that didn’t make it to the shortlist. Often, this was more a reflection of the narrowly defined needs and capabilities of Arbitrum governance.

In general, applicants were high quality and should be proud of unambiguously demonstrating how far this corner of crypto has advanced over the last few years.

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Just wanted to verify did protocols receive more votes for not being dollar denominated (or I guess correlated) or did they lose points for not being dollar correlated?

Wanted to understand the committee’s thinking on this metric, as it might presume risk in two very different ways.

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Thanks for asking! We eliminated products denominated in or giving yield or having an underlying

Thanks for checking in! For the 1st iteration, the committee decided to try their best in avoiding products with principal, yield or underlying asset denominated in currencies other than USD. We basically don’t want a situation where we might invest in Japanese bonds but then the foreign currency exposure puts our money at a net loss in dollar terms, which is what DAO contributors usually benchmark against. Hope that answers it!

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This is great to see the culmination of all your work! What started as a small firestarter grant has blossomed into this outcome.

We are now funding a 300k ARB program to further the research and implementation of the next level of ensuring that Arbitrum is THE LEADING L2 IN RWAS.

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