Hi there, Arbitrum community 
I am Kat, and I am the Thank ARB Grants Manager. I’m working with the Thank ARB team to deliver Thank ARB Milestone 1b. Welcome to our May monthly status update!
This ongoing report series serves as both a monthly summary of our work and an ongoing record of our progress. Additionally, this report is intended to be a transparent clearinghouse of information related to the operations of the Thank ARB (formerly known as Plurality Labs) grants program. This update provides updates on programs, deliverables tracking, financial details, and our asks of the community.
As always, if you have any questions, feedback, or ideas, feel free to leave a comment. 
1. Program updates:
This section provides a series of brief updates as to the progression of our currently active suite of Arbitrum Plurality Grant Programs.
1a Historical programs
Belo, you can see the close-out status of the Milestone 1 programs as of May 31st, 2024. As you can see, seven programs are completed and paid, three are incomplete and in the process of being paid, and two are still running.
| Project name | Status | Project Manager | Expected payment completion |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arbitrum Citizen’s Retro Funding | PAID | Zer8 | |
| Arbitrum Co.Lab by RnDAO | PAID | RNDao | |
| Firestarters by PL | PAID | Disruption Joe | |
| Questbook Support Rounds | PAID | Zer8 | |
| Sense and Respond: Thank ARB | PAID | Martin | |
| GovBoost by PL | PAID | Disruption Joe | |
| Gitcoin Hack on Allo | PAID | Buidlbox | |
| Open Data Intelligence | PAID | Evan Powell | |
| Biggest mini-grants Joke Race | Complete - partially paid, partially KYC Pending | Diana Chen | June |
| Gitcoin Match | Complete - KYC pending | Zer8 | June |
| MEV Research | In Progress | Lexicon Governance | June |
| Grant Ships | In Progress | DAO Masons | July |
1b Milestone 1b programs
Request for Program Proposals
We received a whopping 120 program ideas for our RFP process for innovative program ideas, of which 64 (53%) passed our initial screening for spam, scams, and AI generation. We selected 22 applicants to receive a 1,000 ARB planning grant to refine their proposal before making a final selection. We compensated applicants for putting time and resources into designing a good program and hosted two workshops geared towards helping applicants refine their allocation mechanism, metrics, and overall execution plan.
As a result, we saw applications that were much improved, geared toward top-level objectives for the Arbitrum Ecosystem as a whole, and oriented toward those ecosystem goals that delegates deem most important for grant programs. We also received overwhelmingly positive feedback that applicants found this process both helpful, educational, and fun! 
Each application was reviewed by a minimum of 5 of 18 external reviewers sourced from the Arbitrum community. We then selected the eight applicants scoring the highest across four rubrics for funding. The selected programs will run from June to September.
We are so excited to be funding the following grant programs 
- Amplifying Impact – Bonus Funding for Outstanding GG20 Arbitrum Round Projects
- Cartographer Syndicate
- Farcaster Builder Program
- GIV-Arb Ecosystem Accelerator Program
- Oasis Onchain Quick Grants
- Oxcart Delegation Engine
- ReFi in Arbitrum
- RWA Innovation Grants (RWAIG)
Gitcoin Grants 20 (GG20)
The first program funded by Milestone 1B of our pluralist grants program was Gitcoin Grants Round 20 (GG20), which operated exclusively on Arbitrum for the first time. Additionally, GG20 was supercharged with strategic rewards and impact assessment via Thrive Protocol, offering builders, promoters, curators, and program managers reward opportunities for contributions that boosted community engagement in the round, attracted top talent to the Arbitrum ecosystem, and generally promoted wider adoption of Arbitrum.
The donation phase closed on May 7th. GG20 achieved its immediate goals by allocating and distributing 100k across both Open Source Software and community rounds and budgeting an additional 100k for impact-based incentives. It facilitated over 35,000 addresses transacting on Arbitrum, resulting in more than $2 million in total transactions, including matching funds from Gitcoin. Additionally, the number of open-source projects doubled, and Arbitrum was highlighted as the default network for all grant rounds, with Gitcoin committing to continue this partnership through 2024. 
Firestarters
The second program funded by our pluralist grants program is the Firestarters program. Firestarters aims to address urgent needs and high-impact areas for the Arbitrum DAO by linking problem identification with community-driven resource allocation. 
Grant sizes range from $5,000 to $50,000, with projects assessed by a decentralized group of high-context Arbitrum community members. We also published a call to Arbitrum community members to become part of our team of reviewers as we progressively decentralize our pluralistic grants program.
The first project selected for funding through the Firestarters program is SheFi, which is led by Maggie Love and empowers professional women and non-binary folks to reinvent their careers in Web3. It’s 8 weeks of immersive instruction, hands-on demos, onchain quests, and peer support aimed at mastering Web3. Together with the Arbitrum Foundation, Thank ARB is sponsoring Season 11 of SheFi, which aims to increase knowledge and adoption of Arbitrum’s Layer 2 solutions, enhance community diversity, and contribute to Arbitrum governance.
2. Oversight Board & Milestone Delivery Tracking
Board meetings
In May, we held four Oversight Board meetings. We continued publishing weekly updates on the forum to keep the community in the loop on what was discussed at these board meetings. For transparency, we always include the agenda, a recording, and a transcript.
Milestones Delivery Tracking
Our milestones delivery tracker reflects our weekly progress towards each deliverable of the Thank ARB pluralistic grants program Milestone 1b. Here’s the status of our milestones as of May 31, 2024. Feel free to use the link to the live version to follow along during the month.
One highlight from the month included the sensemaking survey that asked delegates questions regarding top-level ecosystem objectives and goals for grant programs. We have already used these results to help our planning grant recipients refine their applications and are applying them in our rubric for the Firestarters application reviews. Here are some highlights from the survey results:
3. Finances & grant spending
M1 spending
In May, we paid out a total of 256,138 ARB to get one step closer to closing out all Milestone 1 programs. We made the following payments:
- 11,750 ARB to r3gen Finance Token Flow Reporting, which was funded under the M1 Firestarters Program
- 100,00 ARB to the Pluralistic MEV Research Tooling program
- 25,350 to Gitcoin Citizen Match
- 90,462.91 ARB to the Open Data Community “Permissionless Suggestion Box” program
- 11,700 ARB to Grant Ships
- 16,875 ARB to the JokeRace “Our Biggest Mini Grants Yet” program
You can see which programs still remain open in the program update section above.
M1b spending
None yet, but feel free to view our working budget. 
I hope you found this monthly update insightful and helpful. If you have any questions, please leave a comment! Additionally, if you have suggestions on how we can better inform and involve the community, feel free to share your ideas.