Stylus Sprint Program Updates

DAO Programs & Initiatives Stylus Sprint Program
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July 2025 Update

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

6-month Program Overview & Finances

The building period of the Stylus Sprint is now half-way through. Since teams began completing their scoped work, a total of 1,737,668 ARB of the 9M ARB budget has been sent out for completed milestones and 515,700 ARB in payments are actively being processed by the Arbitrum Foundation. 22 of 26 original teams remain in the Sprint and have collectively completed 42 milestones out of the total 113. Detailed further below, CoBuilders (GUI for the Cache Manager) is the first Stylus Sprint team to complete all of their milestones. A breakdown of milestones completed and paid out by month can be found in the following chart:

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Submitted Milestones

Since the last Stylus Sprint update and in the month of July, 11 milestones have been submitted by participating teams.

Debid - Fairblock

  • Milestone 2: Beta testing (deliverables, payment processing)

RedStone

  • Milestone 2: Gathering feed requirements and needs assessments from ecosystem partners (deliverables, tx link)
  • Milestone 3: Investigating needs requirements and judging for unique specifications for deploying assets and integrating with the chain (deliverables, in review)
  • Milestone 4: Integration (deliverables, in review)

Enclave

  • Milestone 1: Implement a stylus-based universal ZKVM verifier (deliverables, payment processing)

GUI for the Stylus Cache Manager by CoBuilders

Walnut: Enhanced Debugging Workflows and Tooling

  • Milestone 4: Enhance Cargo Stylus Replay to support debugging a transaction with multiple Stylus contract calls (deliverables, in review)

Angel

  • Milestone 2: Documentation chatbot (deliverables, in review)

Moving Stylus

  • Milestone 3 (Added as an intermediary step): Demonstrate the current working state of the Move-to-WASM compiler by showcasing a demonstrative Move contract highlighting compiler capabilities and its execution on the Stylus runtime. (deliverables, in review)

StylusFuzz: Advanced Property Testing for WASM Contracts

  • Milestone 4: Implement WASM-EVM Interoperability (deliverables, payment processing)

CodeTracer

  • Milestone 2: Basic Stylus Debugging Support (deliverables, in review)

Completed Project

As briefly mentioned above, we’re excited to share that the first Stylus Sprint project has been completed. The Stylus Cache Manager (GUI for the Cache Manager) built by CoBuilders is now live and available for anyone to use!

Official link: Stylus Cache Manager
Documentation: Stylus Cache Manager
Source Code: GitHub - CoBuilders-xyz/stylus-cm-deploy

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For those unfamiliar with Stylus, the initialization process when entering a contract can be very costly & time-consuming. A caching strategy was created to avoid repeated initializations, which is managed by the CacheManager smart contract. The cache operates through an auction system, so other Stylus contracts can bid for dedicated space in the cache, However, periodic bids are required to maintain and manage the slot. Without proper management, a Stylus contract risks eviction, leading to slower execution and higher gas costs.

The Stylus Cache Manager sits on top of CacheManager contract and simplifies the developer experience by providing a user-friendly interface for interacting with the underlying cache bidding system and additional features like automated bidding and monitoring alerts.

:warning: Disclaimer: the automated bidding feature is still in the process of being audited.

Terminated Project

About 2 weeks ago, the Stylus Sprint Committee was informed that the Warlock Labs team had been acquired and due to departures/changes in the engineering team’s composition, they would no longer be able to complete the Sylow project. Unfortunately, a payment of 175,000 ARB was sent for Milestone 1 back in April. 525,000 ARB from the remaining 3 milestones is still in the possession of the Stylus Sprint committee and the grant agreement has been terminated by the Arbitrum Foundation. The Sylow repo remains open source in the event that another team is interested and/or engaged to pick up the work.

Other Highlights

Challenges & Reallocation of Funds

While market conditions improved in July, the difference in the price of ARB from when the grants were scoped out compared to the current price continues to pose a challenge for the program. Following the withdrawal of Sylow, the total ARB reclaimed by the committee reached 1.15M. With several teams approaching the committee with formal requests for additional funds, we have begun discussions on allocating some of the reclaimed funds.

We’d like to preface that conversations are still in early stages as the committee weighs several factors, including prioritization of grants that involve certain high-priority tooling/infrastructure, total shortfall across all of the teams, amount of completed progress, and everchanging market conditions. Two allocations that have been finalized are Trail of Bits: Add Stylus as A Solang Compiler Target and Moving Stylus, each receiving an additional 200,000 ARB. The ARB for Trail of Bits is being allocated equally across the 3 remaining milestones. For Moving Stylus, Milestone 3, which was the largest and most costly milestone, has been broken into 2 parts to provide an intermediary checkpoint. This “Milestone 2.5” (referred to as Milestone 3 going forward) was allocated 200k ARB.

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Entropy Advisors Monthly Update: July 2025