What can we do that would provide the most impact on Arbitrum? What are the top level objectives and north star metrics our grant funding should drive? Most grant programs won’t directly affect these top level metrics, but how do we know that they are precisely targeting a goal which has leverage on the north star metrics? How do we define success of a grant program in a way that is aligned with the needs of the ecosystem overall?
On Tuesday the 23rd, Thank ARB hosted a session to align on these goals.
There are three phases to this project. This is a summary of the first phase.
- Using the results of the session while we further converge in understanding
- Conducting community surveys to involve more voices
- Finalizing priorities with a Snapshot vote
Overview of the Session
After a quick icebreaker sharing the worst clothing style choices of our lives, we started to work on the following agenda:
Oops… I mean the agenda:
We brainstormed North Star Metrics, objected to some, honed in on others. In the end, we came up with the following North Star Metrics (which we call Objectives) in no particular order.
- Increase Daily Active Users (DAU)
- Increase Total Volume Locked (TVL)
- Increase Net Bridge Inflows
- Increase Number of Verticals Arbtrum Leads in Market Share
- Increase Number of Protocols Actively Building on Arbitrum
- Increase Number of People Buying ARB to Use in Governance
We then brainstormed and heatmapped support for which levers have the best opportunity to affect these objectives. We called these goals.
The top suggestions include:
- Kickstart new verticals
- Incentivize dapps for retention
- Attract new protocols willing to mint natively with lockups on Arbitrum
- Design and implement staking & utility use cases for ARB
- Convince RWAs to launch natively
- Market to institutional investors
- Targeted marketing campaigns to educate about orbit & stylus
- Conduct token swaps with leading protocols
- Incentivize redelegation by tokenholders
- Highly targeted marketing
- Start a DAO DevRel team
- Provide DAO support services
- Gain unquestionable lead in defi, gaming, and RWAs
These goal suggestions were then broken down into strategies and measures. We relate this to a grant program in that most won’t be able to directly affect an objective like increasing the TVL. However, we can select them based on their alignment to ecosystem needs.
If you’re thinking “Holy snozberries!!! Those North Star Metrics must have been drafted by some type of nincompoop”, don’t worry. This is only the first phase.
Next Steps
We will be launching a survey to key delegates & contributors to suggest anything missing. During this time, we will use what we have to guide our grant program coaching efforts.
The results of the survey will be used to create a Snapshot vote allowing the full DAO to participate in ranking the Goals.
Then, each grant program will need to show which ecosystem goals they are directly aiming to impact. They will articulate the strategy being used and the measure of their success.
In the end, we will end up with grant programs having legitimate measures to understand their success or failure. It is important that an experimental program can fail at the pilot stage, but the incentive is normally to claim everything as a success. This ratified alignment and process requirement to improve communication at all levels of the program will be critical.
Here are some more pictures of our OGSMs which were started during the final breakout session. Feel free to join this Mural and spitball on some of the unfinished ones!
We’re already at 12 program manager applications and 10 grant program ideas. If you haven’t seen the program, check out Launching an RFP Process for Innovative Grant Programs and Managers 👀
Have a great weekend!