Stylus Sprint Results: Announcing the Accepted Applications

The grading process for the Stylus Sprint has officially concluded and the committee is very excited to share the list of accepted applicants! Overall, the program saw extraordinary demand, with high quality submissions far exceeding the availability of the 5M budget, totaling ~32M ARB at the time of applications closing and before negotiations.

While it is common for grant programs to normally exceed their budgets, the committee was pleasantly surprised to see how many great teams submitted high impact proposals. A beneficial problem to have, but the committee faced several hard decisions when evaluating the proposals and considering how to maximize the 5M budget approved by the DAO to meet all the Stylus Sprint’s original objectives.

During the grading of the proposals it became clear that several teams would have deserved to be part of the program but with the given constraints it was not possible to include them. For this reason, as shared at the bottom of this announcement in more detail, the committee believes there are several high quality projects worth funding through an extension of the program’s budget. With Stylus being arguably the most important competitive advantage Arbitrum holds in the Ethereum L2 landscape, the committee hopes to provide sufficient rationale and justification for additional funds so that these ideas may be built.

Program Highlights and Data

  • Total Submissions: 147 after removing duplicates
  • Total ARB Requested at the Close of Applications: 31.92 million ARB.
  • Tracks:
    • Open Application Track: 89 submissions and ~21M ARB in requests.
    • RFP Track: 58 submissions across 9 categories and ~10.95M ARB in requests.

The participation in both tracks exceeded expectations, highlighting the enthusiasm across the industry to build and innovate with Stylus.

Below is a breakdown of the Open Application submissions by their request size:

At the time of applications closing, the Open Application Track saw a strong preference for grants under 500k ARB with the majority of projects aligning within this range (~95%).

As the chart above shows, medium sized requests of 100-250k ARB requests made up the largest percentage (~30.8%) of submissions. This was followed closely by submissions of lower requests. After the grading process was completed, the committee recommended some of these applicants to monitor the results of the upcoming Arbitrum D.A.O. Grant Program onchain vote. While it was made clear that applicants would be reevaluated and funding was not guaranteed, the committee determined that many of these applications could be a better fit for that program.

For the RFP Track, the committee saw at least 1 submission for every category. Total submission broken down by category can be seen below:

With the AI-agent narrative taking off in the middle of the application period, the committee was not surprised to see it as the most submitted category. Several of the RFP categories saw sometimes as many as 5 or 6 very competent teams apply for what ultimately had to be narrowed down to just one selection.

Overall, the program saw almost 3 times as many infrastructure/tooling related submissions compared to applications. As part of its evaluation process, the committee prioritized making sure at least a few application specific submissions were funded. However, given the nascent state of the Stylus ecosystem and its current developer experience being geared more towards a power user, our hope is that this current iteration of the Stylus Sprint will help provide the necessary foundation for applications to be more easily built in the future.

Accepted Applications

After a comprehensive review and grading process, we are excited to announce the 17 approved projects that stood out for their novel idea or use of Stylus, feasibility, and alignment with the priorities of the Sprint.

Open Application Track

The following projects were approved from the Open Application Track:

  • Thirdweb Stylus integration: thirdweb will be integrating Stylus into their full stack, open-source development platform in addition to highlighting Stylus’ capabilities by building out 3 unique use cases with their partners.
  • DeBid - Fairblock: Fairblock will build onchain sealed-bid auction infrastructure using Stylus, serving DeFi, RWA, and tokenization apps enabling net new privacy preserving use cases on-chain.
  • RedStone Oracles: RedStone will be building out Rust versions of their pull and push oracles, enabling projects in Arbitrum’s DeFi ecosystem to integrate with cheaper and more secure oracles.
  • Enclave: Enclave will integrate Stylus as a Compute Provider for secure computation in Encrypted Execution Environments (E3s) allowing users to perform operations over private datasets while preserving privacy.
  • Surety Protocol: Bridging fiat and crypto by market-making a single secured on-chain fund backed by reserves in multiple fiat currencies, enabling cost-effective on/off-ramps and enhancing access to liquidity especially for non-US/EUR markets.
  • Passport XYZ - Multi-Wallet Identity Proofs for Sybil Resistance: Extend Passport XYZ’s ID verification system to enable users to claim ID proofs across wallets into a single score.
  • Open Source Observer: Open Source Observer (OSO) is an open analytics platform that will assist in tracking the growing Stylus developer community and provide open-sourced pdashboards
  • Remix IDE for Stylus: The most popular web-based IDE supporting the development, compilation, deployment, and interaction of Arbitrum Stylus contracts.

RFP Track

The approved projects addressing specific RFP categories are as follows:

  1. Tooling for New Languages
  1. GUI for the Stylus Cache Manager
  • GUI for the Stylus Cache Manager: Funds CoBuilders to create an open-source GUI for Arbitrum’s Stylus Cache Manager with automated bidding, real-time alerts, and usage insights.
  1. Enhanced Debugging Workflows and Tooling
  • Stateful fuzzing of Stylus programs using Medusa: Add Stylus support to Medusa, an advanced well-known fuzzer built by Trail of Bits, which will allow security researchers to fuzz mixed EVM/Stylus contracts in the same environment on top of the Stylus stack.
  • Walnut: Enhanced Debugging Workflows and Tooling: Large improvements to existing debugging tools and workflows, addressing critical developer experience gaps to support multi-contract development across Stylus and Solidity…
  • Arbos-foundry: Funding to add ArbOS and Stylus support in revm and foundry, which will enhance developer workflow and allow for more ease of use for Solidity developers, with support for end-to-end integration testing and foundry tools like Anvil.
  1. Enhancing Migration Tooling
  • StylusPort: Stylus migration framework for Solana: StylusPort is creating comprehensive documentation, a framework and toolkit to streamline the migration from Solana to Stylus with a focus on providing a 10x reduction in migration effort required by demonstrating the process with real world open source projects
  1. AI-Powered Onchain Innovations
  • Angel: A combined proposal with several teams, Angel will focus on building AI-agents on top of ARC, a growing Rust based rig framework on Solana built by Playground, one of the teams in this application. The application helps support builders capable of both attracting Rust devs and helping Arbitrum obtain a strategic positioning within the AI-agent space.
  • 9 Lives: A prediction market that eventually becomes one for agents, run by agents, with a self reinforcing system that will determine successful agents based on outcomes. The team has a good track record (Fluidity) and the revenue strategy seems strong.
  1. Education Materials and DevRel Resources
  • Stylus Saturdays odyssey: Stylus Saturdays is a blog series that focuses on the Stylus ecosystem, with an advocate for the technology that is already widely recognized and that would help in introducing newcomers to the Stylus world. Alex has also committed to building out 3 unique Stylus applications with the process documented through his blog.

Additionally, we want to thank all teams who made a submission. We very much appreciate everyone who took the time to complete an application, answer the committee’s questions, and participate in the process. We understand that this is time spent away from building your company or project, and we also understand the potential frustration of not being chosen. In some cases this was due to the enormous demand we had, which is a testimony to how interested the participants seemed to be to take part in this program.

We also want to thank Offchain Labs and the Arbitrum Foundation for their participation: their knowledge of Stylus and their understanding of the development landscape has been key to making the hard decisions on which grantee would potentially be able to provide the most value. We also want to thank the other members of the committee, Michael and Gustavo from OpenZeppelin, SeedGov, and JoJo. The OpenZeppelin team has helped enormously with their technical expertise, especially since we had more than 150 proposals, and SeedGov and JoJo with their experience in grant programs have been good stewards in navigating several pitfalls as well in reviewing the less technical proposals.

Next Steps

The committee will now work closely with these teams to ensure their successful execution, starting with the Arbitrum Foundation’s compliance process. After completing a KYC/KYB, funding will be available to the accepted teams according to their milestones. The committee will transition to providing support and oversight as needed to ensure deliverables are met.

Our goal is to not only see the adherence of the projects implemented to their respective proposal, but also understand, in the next 10 months, where the crypto industry is heading and how Stylus and the approved projects can adapt where possible to changing demands. At the same time, the committee will push for the adoption of the tooling, infrastructure, and applications created as part of the Stylus ecosystem.

As mentioned in the beginning of this announcement, the Stylus Sprint program saw extraordinary demand and there are numerous applications that the committee was unable to fund despite being confident of their value to the Stylus ecosystem. After initial conversations and internal discussion amongst committee members, Entropy feels there is significant value in the DAO extending additional funds to the Stylus Sprint in order to make sure certain tooling and applications can start being built in the short-term. The DAO can expect a proposal tomorrow that outlines a more detailed rationale along with a request for 4M ARB. With this amount, the committee believes it can not only fund well deserving, competent teams, but also increase the effectiveness of the Stylus Sprint as a whole.

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