Stylus Sprint Program Updates

DAO Programs & Initiatives Stylus Sprint Program
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February/March 2025 Update

With the passing of the additional funding for recommended applications last week and it now being about 6 weeks since the Stylus Sprint kicked off, Entropy is happy to report that the majority of the teams have now completed the KYC/KYB process and have begun work on their deliverables. Sylow, CoBuilders (GUI for the Cache Manager), ArbOS Foundry, and Fiet Protocol (formerly Surety) have already submitted their first milestone reports to the committee for review and we expect several more in the next few weeks.

Due to both market conditions and upcoming updates to Stylus, the committee has had to work with a few applicants to adjust their milestone structures. For the most part this has been adding/adjusting details to the required deliverables at each step in order to make sure expectations on each side are fully aligned. So far adjustments to milestones have been limited to StylusFuzz, Syndicate, Wakeup Labs, Passport.xyz, and Fiet Protocol. The committee will soon be posting the full details and changes as a comment underneath the respective applications on Questbook and will update the DAO if there are other applications that require adjustments.

Social highlights have already started being posted from official Arbitrum accounts and Entropy is coordinating with OCL’s marketing team to set up additional co-marketing opportunities for the participants. For delegate’s convenience, Entropy has created a X (Twitter) list of all the Stylus Sprint participants that can be followed to help amplify any posts.

Lastly, each Stylus Sprint participant is required to submit a monthly update document to the committee. This is to help us keep teams accountable and identify potential obstacles/issues teams might be facing. Several teams did not have materials updates in February as they were completing KYC/KYB. With this now completed and development across all teams ramping up, we anticipate that there will be a more substantial update by the end of April.

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April/May 2025 Update

Entropy is posting this update on behalf of the Stylus Sprint Committee.

Stylus 0.9

In May, Offchain Labs released Stylus 0.9. This update included key features to help developers write more complex contracts and have better EVM equivalent functionality. This came in the form of a new inheritance model and constructor support amongst a variety of smaller improvements and updates to improve the developer experience. The Stylus team is now working towards 0.10 which will introduce the last set of planned key features to make the Stylus SDK more robust and even easier to use from onboarding to deployment such as multi-contract workflows and better type support.

On May 29th, we hosted the 3rd Stylus Sprint with all of the participating teams where Srinjoy shared an overview of Stylus 0.9 in addition to several teams demoing their work thus far. Delegates can view the recording here.

Submitted Milestones

Since the start of Stylus Sprint, 23 milestones have been submitted by participating teams. Following review by the committee, 15 have been marked as completed with payment sent to the respective team.

Of the 7 that have not yet been paid out, Walnut and Moving Stylus’ Milestone 2 payments are being processed by the MSS. Thirdweb and Wakeup Labs’ are in the final stages of review, with teams incorporating any comments/feedback. Angel’s first milestone has been marked as complete, but the teams behind the application are still finishing KYB. The remaining 2 outstanding milestones from the CoBuilder’s team and CodeTracer application, are actively being reviewed.

In total, 759,668 ARB out of the 9M ARB budget has been sent to teams. Each deliverable can be accessed below along with the corresponding payment transaction.

ThirdWeb

  • Milestone 1: Application Approval (tx link)
  • Milestone 2: Initial Integration with base contracts (deliverables, In final review)
    • Blog post from Thirdweb announcing the integration.

Redstone Oracle

Fiet Protocol

Open Source Observer

  • Milestone 1: Integrate with Questbook and auto-index data for all Stylus grant recipients (deliverables, tx link)

Remix IDE

Stylus SDK: Building an Assembly Script to WebAssembly Solution by Wakeup Labs

  • Milestone 1: Set Up Fee (tx link)
  • Milestone 2: Research and Deep Feasibility Analysis (deliverables, In final review)
  • Milestone 3: Core Development - Setting the Foundation (deliverables, In review)
    • Wakeup Labs has also been posting updates on a dedicated forum thread.

GUI for the Stylus Cache Manager by CoBuilders

Walnut: Enhanced Debugging Workflows and Tooling

  • Milestone 1: Enhance Cargo Stylus Trace command to output user-defined Rust functions including hierarchy between calls (deliverables, tx link)
  • Milestone 2: Enhance Cargo Stylus Trace command output with decoded return values, parameters and entrypoint names (deliverables, tx link pending)

Arbos-Foundry

Angel

  • Milestone 1: Data Aggregation and Annotation (deliverables, tx pending KYB completion)

Stylus Saturdays Odyssey

Sylow

  • Milestone 1: no_std coverage, to allow compatibility with Reth and other compilation targets like WASM (deliverables, tx link)

Moving Stylus: Move to Stylus-Compatible WASM Compiler by Rather Labs

  • Milestone 1: Research: Conduct research on Move compilers, design architecture for Move-to-WASM backend, and validate feasibility. Research on Stylus compatibility requirements and design needed components (e.g. runtimes). (deliverables, tx link)
  • Milestone 2: Proof of Concept: Develop a proof of concept for translation of simple Move code to WASM operations. Map out potential risks of development. (deliverables, tx link pending)

StylusFuzz: Advanced Property Testing for WASM Contracts

CodeTracer

  • Milestone 1: CodeTracer is open-sourced (deliverables, In review)

Milestones in Progress

In addition to the completed milestones above, below is a short summary of work other teams have completed:

  • Pyth confirmed that implementation work began towards the end of May and that the team is still on track to hit their first milestone (September 16th) according to the original timeline.
  • The Stylus Sprint Committee has worked with the RedStone team to set up discovery calls with the teams behind the Fiet Protocol, Debid, and 9 Lives projects as part of their milestone 2 requirements.
  • The Fairblock team is wrapping up their Debid MVP.
  • Fiet Protocol is finishing up their full visual identity overhaul in preparation for the core launch of the protocol. Entropy has already been coordinating with the Usher Lab team and OCL market to make sure we help amplify this launch.
  • Open Source Observer has finished developing the initial developer metrics dashboard. The committee is working with their team to review and make improvements.
  • 9 Lives launched 2.0 of their marketplace which introduced a Constant Product Market Maker AMM
  • Trail of Bits began work on adding Stylus as a Solang compiler target in April. The first milestone is expected in July.
  • As part of Stylus Saturdays, Alex has built both Stylusup, a one liner creation & setup script for Arbitrum Stylus and a website for more info on the ecosystem, and OrderbookKit, a one click deployment of an orderbook to any Arbitrum chain, powered by Stylus.

Each month, Entropy meets with marketing members at OCL to help identify upcoming milestones/deliverables that can be amplified across Arbitrum’s social media channels.

Milestone/Scope Changes

Due to a variety of factors, including market conditions, changes in business priorities, or hard obstacles in Stylus, a few teams are actively working with the Stylus Sprint committee to rework parts of their scope.

  • StylusPort is bringing on Oak Security as a partner to help share the workload. A revised scope and timeline can be found here.
  • After thorough testing, the team behind Enclave concluded that the originally envisioned stylus-based compute provider is not viable. Ultimately, the data and computation sizes that they were dealing with for FHE computations proved to be far larger than what is practical within the Stylus VM, even with significant optimizations to our FHE code and modifications to Nitro. However, this body of work revealed that stylus would be perfectly suited for building a universal ZKVM verifier, which could then be used to leverage any of a variety of ZKVMs as a compute provider for Enclave, along with being generally useful for other builders and applications looking to verify the output of ZKVMs in their own stylus programs. This revised scope only impacted Milestone 1 & 4. The revised timelines and deliveries can be found here.
  • NuffleLabs rebranded to More Markets. While the underlying protocol and use of Stylus will be staying the same, the target use case has shifted from restacking to providing yield opportunities for underutilized assets in DeFi like XRP. The Stylus Sprint committee is working with their team to adjust certain milestones deliverable to reflect this change in strategy.

Challenges

As mentioned in our previous update, with the program’s grants being designated in ARB changes in market conditions forced the committee to work with several applications in making adjustments to timelines. For reference, most teams designed the scope of their project with the price of ARB fluctuating between ~$0.70-$0.80. Despite most teams including buffers, the price of ARB is currently much lower than most teams anticipated and in many cases, teams are operating in the red due to development costs.

Unfortunately with conditions not improving, the Passport and Ember projects have been forced to withdraw from the Stylus Sprint. Additionally, Trail of Bits has decided to withdraw their Medusa application to consolidate their development resources and focus on the Solang application, which so far has received greater interest from other developers. No milestones were paid out for these three projects, and the allocated ARB remains in the MSS-controlled multisig.

After reviewing the Fund the Stylus Sprint proposal, there is no specific language on what should be down with the ARB of withdrawn projects.

For the time being, the Stylus Sprint Committee feels it is best to reserve the newly reclaimed ARB in the event market conditions worsen even further.

Shortfalls due to the denomination of programs and/or grants in ARB has been a consistent issue for the DAO. We will not dive into the issue too deeply here, but the situation facing practically all of the Stylus Sprint teams is another example of the importance of building up a healthy base of stable assets in the DAO’s treasury.

Looking Forward

In order to provide additional support to the Stylus Sprints who are struggling with recent market conditions, the Arbitrum Foundation has confirmed that they will be eligible to apply for the upcoming Audit Subsidy program. It is the committee’s hope that ARB originally allocated for audits can be freed up to cover other development costs.

Lastly, with a majority of milestone deliverables requiring deep technical expertise of Stylus and/or input of OCL engineering and the availability of Stylus Sprint Committee members varying each week, we have decided its best to bring on Daniel, Stylus team lead at Open Zeppelin, as an additional reviewer. The other members of the committee have agreed to reduce their monthly payment to 4,000 ARB going forward and Daniel will be paid the same rate; therefore, overall opex costs will not increase.

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