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Arbitrum AMA on D.A.O. Grants with Jojo
Recorded: April 23, 2025 Duration: 0:57:24Space Recording
Short Summary
The recent discussion highlighted the launch of the Domain Allocated Offering grant program by Arbitrum, aimed at fostering innovation and growth within the ecosystem. With funding opportunities of up to $50K, the program is structured around five tracks, including a new focus on application development through the Orbit domain. The conversation also emphasized the importance of strong proposals and effective communication between applicants and grant managers.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. I'm just giving a couple more minutes for Sonja can others to join damn
well Thank you. Anyway, Jim, let's start this.
Thank you so much, Jojo, for joining us.
Thank you for inviting me.
Pleasure to be here, as always.
And actually looking forward to giving both projects and anyone the chance to learn more about this program.
For those who don't know, Giorgio is the program manager of the DAO grants. And maybe Giorgio, you want to start by giving a quick introduction about yourself for those
who are not familiar?
Sure.
So, I'm Giorgio.
I work for Jones, which is an Arbitrum protocol.
Some of you might know it.
It's a protocol that is oriented to making
yield simple for users.
Our focus is on concentrate liquidity
through automatic bolts.
I mostly do the models behind this.
But I also contribute a lot to Arbitrum, specifically to grants.
Besides being a delegate, I've been basically participating up to certain capacity in all the grants that we have had in Arbitrum so far.
And this time, I'm helping through the management of this program, the AO, which is a shitty name. I'm sorry, I'm not good at picking names.
But it's the domain allocated offering grant program
for Arbitrum, which is a broad grant program
with five different tracks that's going to last one year.
And that is the introductory grant
into the Arbitrum ecosystem.
But I'm pretty sure we're going to have some time
to talk about this.
For sure.
Yeah, so basically the idea of this grant
is to be targeted to, I guess we can argue,
smaller projects also due to the size of the grant,
which is up to 50K.
And it sort of like fits within that initial funnel of early growth
and sort of like stimulate new projects.
Yeah, I mean, I think maybe like it would be nice to touch upon,
like since you've been program manager for the third season,
we've also been very interested in grants, in the way they're run and organized.
So maybe we could touch upon some changes that's been done in season three compared to season two, for example, and sort of like maybe take it from there.
Yeah, sure.
So the first thing that is worth mentioning is the track.
In this third season, we have five tracks, which basically means the verticals
that we want to focus on.
We have one journal bucket called the New Protocols
Aliens is managed literally by you guys, by Castle,
specifically by Andy that we have in this school in Chile.
We have community education and events,
dev tooling, gaming, and orbit chains.
Now, this has been the first major change.
We voted in the DAO to add this fifth track, Orbit,
which is managed by Max Lumuncio.
He is a really cool delegate of Arbitrum.
He used to work for Everclear.
He has collaborated with Oficial Labs
to create their interoperability map.
So someone really expert. And this is the first major change compared to Season 2 and Season 1, which only had the other four aforementioned domains.
The second biggest change is that it's kind of an invisible change,
meaning that we are trying to embed this program better
inside the DAO ecosystem, okay?
So Arbizum DAO has several programs,
several important stakeholders.
First, obviously, the foundation,
but we obviously have the Gaming Catalyst program.
We obviously have off-chain labs.
We have several important people, right?
Entities, colleagues, whatever.
And everybody has an agenda which, at a high level,
is about making garbage from the best ecosystem out there.
But obviously, they work in two different verticals.
Offchain Labs, for example, is extremely focused at this period,
also in styles, right?
Gaming is about bringing, let's say, gaming experience, but also other stuff into Arbitrum and so on.
And so our goal is to fit our offering in terms of grant into what is the need of these stakeholders. And if possible, not only give grant to really good team
that have good ideas, but also nurture them
up to funneling into this new initiative.
Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that, to put it superficially,
if you get a grant from us into gaming,
then you're going to get a grant from the Gaming Catalyst proposal. Not at all. But we're going to try to see what synergies we can
find, try to pitch internally the best proposals and so on, so that, you know, teams have a path,
okay, inside the ecosystem. So this is, to to me the biggest change compared to previous season
it's a change that is really difficult to see from the outside if you don't know the
intricacy of our dow of arbitrum but it's probably the most important thing to work upon
yeah um yeah i think that's really interesting and uh maybe like um let's start with some like
applicants focus questions to get a bit into the uh needy and greedy of it like uh um for example
like you know we we always talk about um the about the fact that we're looking for successful projects.
And, you know, it always comes like what really is a successful project, right?
So, like, can you share maybe some of, like, what you guys would really like to see out of this program?
And maybe, like, what you would like protocols to see out of this program and maybe like what you would
like protocols to focus on as well. So as we said initially this is kind of a
entry-level program and it's mostly because of the amount right we can grant
up to 25k if you want to be reviewed by a single domain allocator or up to 50k okay usd usdc
to be uh precise uh by by getting reviewed by two domain allocator it means that our program
is not necessarily capable to push for a big protocol like like an angel round will do, but it's for sure good enough
for either to bootstrap new team, okay,
or for mid and big project
to focus and accelerate some development
in an arbitrage that is maybe secondary right now
and that could need a boosting capital
to be prioritized in the list, right?
So why this? because it helps understand what
the scope of the grant program can be and what we can't realistically achieve okay they said
one of the things we've seen last year and expect to see these these years as well is that team
apply in terms of what the narrative around crypto are okay so we've seen in in q3 and q4 of last year
artificial intelligence ai okay getting uh uh yeah a lot of mind share right into into crypto
and this is rippling into the new year so we are seeing a lot of AI type of application,
both in the new protocols and ideas, okay,
and into the dev tooling.
At the same time, we are also seeing something
that is more specific to Arbitrum.
These are the examples in dev tooling.
We have launched a stylus in Arbitrum,
which for the people that don't know,
it's basically a way to write code in different language, right?
C++, Rust, and so on.
There are several, right?
So not only we had a program specifically in Arbitrum,
the Stylus print,
but we are seeing more applications
that are definitely oriented towards Stylus.
So it's a mix of narrative in crypto
and specificity of our
room both are fine in my opinion because we can then we can't impose to the market okay we can't
impose certain verticals to the market we need to uh give the users what the users want and builders obviously see and notice okay
they will try to give the users what the users want what the market wants so
inevitably in this year I'm expecting the the truck to be more or less oriented
based on the narrative that we would see we will try nonetheless to to be a bit
more specific over time when we can better
involve the dow in saying okay dear dow dear arbitrum is there something that you think you
really really need right and if there is an appetite to give us an answer we will try our best to
to implement this
end is that's great i think um in the end it all comes to having a balance there as you said because
um like these grants also are somewhat of a good opportunity for uh arbitrum to still manage to
get new projects into verticals where maybe uh you know, there's less establishments, right?
Because of course, it's going to take more time due to, like, you know, the needs of
doing so properly.
Maybe something more on touching on the synergy of projects like like within the ecosystem how do you see for
example the new domain of orbits to like integrate within like the existing
like vision and also maybe to sort of like like contribute if we want to solve some of the fragmentation there, for example.
For sure.
Okay, so Orbit is a very interesting domain for a reason.
It's not necessarily about bootstrapping a new Orbit chain.
Why am I saying this?
Because if you want to create a specific orbit chain the foundation
can already help has already programmed for this has been doing this for a lot of time for sure
they're better than us in doing this so um what does this mean we don't necessarily support a
proposal that is just about creating a new chain right uh it doesn't mean that you can't do a proposal
that inside is also spinning a new RB chain.
This can be done.
But the most interesting thing is probably
trying to find the niche in which we can contribute the most.
Okay, so creating a new RB chain,
the foundation is the best entity to talk with.
They can help.
They can give guidance, et cetera, et cetera.
Fragmentation and interoperability.
Offshell Labs is the most important player, okay?
They're working with all the people involved to create an interoperability solution
that should solve UX-wise fragmentation.
Can we help in there?
Maybe, maybe,
but I don't see us making,
with a 50K grant,
any meaningful impact,
I'll be honest,
especially until we have this new solution out.
So what is the Orbit domain about?
The Orbit domain about is about the app.
It's about either creating new the app into
orbit chain or migrating your v up from arbitral one into the chain because in the end we can have
the best chain in the world the best parameters in the world we we need to have freaking up to
use on top of that and maybe you as a protocol on our vision one have a good app and
you want to go to orbit you want to go to winner chain you want to go to a chain but you don't have
the time to prioritize that right and you can come to us and ask a grant and we can help you migrate
for example your application into into this orbit chain now this is just an example but I
think it's a good example to better understand what is doable what is useful
and what is the most valuable for the scope of our program
Yeah, for sure. I think getting this right is really important. And I think we've seen
how framing grants within a broader objective for the project like be the main focus there. But maybe, I don't know, without taking further time,
we can always come back to more domain-specific questions
and actually maybe dive a bit deeper.
Maybe I just want to like see if some of the guys here
in the space are actually like applicants
and if they have some questions, maybe you guys can raise your hand
and we can give you more time to ask questions.
If not, yeah.
Yeah, that would be wonderful.
If there is any question, either here in written form
you want to come on stage, please just shoot.
We will do the work best to help. There we go. in question either here in written form you want to come on stage please just shoot we
will do the work best to help there we go
perfect welcome olexia i'm saying your name right
you should not be able to speak feel free to to ask your question
able to speak feel free to to ask your question yeah think you are muted
perfect hello hi we can hear you welcome hi yeah yeah hi josh how are you? So I added just a few questions here from my side.
I'm founder of Dex Studios.
We are holder of Motodex.
It's hyper-casual racing simulator.
We are in the peak top three worldwide game
with half a million wallets per day.
And I tried to apply it two times with Arbitrum grants in the past
and all was unsuccessful for a known reason.
Just outside view how it was like a recent application but the manager for application in most cases disappeared.
And even if we need some corrections, we can't do it.
And finally, application was in the status unreviewed.
And I guess Arbitrum missed a very good game with strong stats. Zera. So would you like to find a
way to connect like in Telegram,
create a group with Foundation to speed
up a process and don't miss Motodex
this time here?
And so and a second question about
process for applying.
So it's it will be same as the past
or you can provide some more detailed instructions.
OK, maybe I can take this this question.
So I did review your application.
OK, six months ago.
Well, it wasn't specifically six months ago,
but it was in
last season okay that lasted the second half of the year because before being a program manager
was a domain allocator um and if it wasn't me i gave a hand to to my colleague i don't i don't
remember which one of the two was but uh the application were reviewed and there was a review directly into the
the question application I suggest you maybe we can go back and look at the comments that is in
there they were reviewed but one thing needs to be put out because that's the known unknown about grant program.
The amount of applications compared to the amount of money that is in there that we can
distribute is definitely higher.
So what I mean is that we generally have an amount of application that is 10 times the amount of grant that we can effectively distribute.
Which means just numbers at hand, any grantee that applies has like 10%
chances of getting the grant. This is quite unfortunate, right?
There is always more than we would like to do,
but the economic constraints are always the biggest constraints, okay,
that we have.
And this doesn't always, does not apply only to this,
but to any grant program, okay?
It means that even if there are very good proposals,
sometimes we just don't tap the funds, okay?
Because there is something else that we approved
or the specific domain allocator is governing
for a certain type of diversification, okay?
In the proposal, there can be a lot of reasons,
but the biggest constraint is always economical.
So even if you weren't not supported, okay,
it doesn't necessarily mean that the application was not good.
It might just mean that it was about the constraint at the time.
So I hope you don't take this in a personal way, right?
When you said, I'm not you want to support Motodex.
There are plenty of reasons, okay,
why an application is not approved.
So I wanted to explain this
because a lot of times
this is not easy to be seen
from a proposal point of view.
Yeah, the big problem there
is that without direct contact, like in Telegram, we cannot see and even comments not appears.
But I remember one comment was appear and then we correct our application.
But after that review not happens.
Even reject status was not appear there.
So this is like where I guess if it's possible to create some maybe group for builders or in Telegram or just contact directly, like a much more clear way for me, for my team to understand
and correct immediately and maybe for push back, follow up
later to review.
So yeah.
Understood.
OK, so let's do like this.
You can contact me on Telegram, OK?
And I can send you the Notion site,
the web, this can help you understand a little bit better the template, the rubrics and so on,
and we can start from there. One difference that we have this season compared to the previous is
that we have a lot more communication through the comments. Okay.
One of the things that probably happened is that while there was a comment
about changing this and that, this happened toward the end of the season.
And so it happened in a moment in which we effectively,
we didn't have any money left.
There was a bunch of applications coming in the last month and you know the moment
in which we finish the grant that we can disperse and we have 20 new applications, we didn't
review this new application, we didn't have the money to do so. I understand that the
communication might have been a little bit disappointing at the time. This is one of
the teams that we're going to correct
in this season.
It's about communication.
But besides this, let's put this aside.
You can call to me on Telegram.
I'm Giorgio Decao, okay?
So like, Giorgio, like my username, Decao,
or I can try to find back your contact as well.
And I can give you some stuff to to work
upon okay but then a lot of more communication will happen directly into the comment of the
application because it's just easier for everybody to see in there especially because one wants to
shut through telegram once one wants to have a google meet the ones wants to go to to discord etc
wants to go to Discord, et cetera.
Yeah.
Can you repeat your telegram, Jojo?
Jojo the cow.
T-H-E-C-O-W.
I'm literally a cow.
Maybe it makes sense to play a place in comment.
Yeah.
Yes. And also we can drop in the chat,
the website that we use because this is also the,
there are all the contexts in there as well.
So even if you can get it now,
it's in the Notion site that we use.
Francesco, I'm not sure if you can get it now it's in the Notion site that we use. Francesco, I'm not sure if you can also link the Notion website and I'm gonna send it to you really quickly in Telegram as well.
Perfect. Thank you very much for your comments, I appreciate your help.
help. No problem.
No problem. Yeah, thank you guys.
Yeah, yeah. Thank you, guys.
Okay.
I think we have
also
Buco Buccio that wanted
to ask a question, I believe.
Hey, yeah.
Thanks for having me.
Can you hear me all right?
Yeah.
Appreciate what you are doing, you know, going over the grants
and taking time to answer questions.
I'm actually applying for Chaincraft,
and we applied last round as well in the gaming section.
And this year I see that – I feel like this year the gaming kind of changed it up.
This year I see that, I feel like this year the gaming kind of changed it up.
So we actually thought we fit pretty well with the new protocols and ideas.
I guess my quick question was, how is the Discord play much of a role in this?
I know there's different spaces to reach out to y'all, Telegram, Discord, and even the comments section.
Where does Discord play a role, I guess, big or small?
I don't know.
Okay, okay, okay.
So our general policy is to have a lot of conversation into the Questbook app, okay?
Why?
Because it's sticky, okay?
It's in there.
Everybody can see it and so on. Now, we always need some sort of's sticky, okay? It's in there, everybody can see it and so on.
Now, we always need some sort of Azure communication, okay?
If the team wants you to be in a call, right?
They're gonna probably try to bring you to Discord, okay?
And then from there, set up a call.
But also, you know, we have five different tracks, okay?
Managed by five different tracks, okay, managed by five different
people or teams, okay, and everybody has a slightly different way of working because,
for example, seed.gov for the event domain, there are a lot of people, okay, Adam for the gaming
domain is instead a single person, and so there are some differences, right?
The point, what is the point?
The point is that when your application will be reviewed,
you will get contacted.
Usually the first contact happens in Questbook.
Through Questbook, they tend to give you the first feedback, okay?
And if not, you will be directly contacted,
but at some point the conversation will move
either in Telegram or in Discord to set up a call, for example.
Adam, as far as I know, is managing his domain
in a way that is a little bit different,
and I'm going to explain why maybe this is relevant
for the conversation.
In gaming, we have evolved the domain
from Season 1 into season three
to something that is more oriented
toward the user acquisition, streamers, and so on.
Does it mean that there is no space for indie games?
No, there is still space for indie games,
but the evolution has gone toward,
let's say, a more classical approach
of what is the ecosystem of video gaming okay outside
of web 3 and this is in accordance with the foundation especially of shell labs which is
helping us a lot in in this sense saying okay this is what we effectively need now um it also means
right that you might have something really good,
but that something really good might just not fit the need of the moment
into the gaming domain,
because maybe the budget was already pretty allocated for the months
because there was something similar.
Even if you think about it, right?
If the goal is to have a certain amount of stream of games,
it doesn't make too much sense to have everything overlap
and we try to, let's say, spread it,
have a certain coverage and so on.
So there is a lot of hidden things, okay,
beside the decision process.
I'm throwing all of these details to you
to let you a little bit understand how this thing goes but all in all
you should you will be you will be contacted okay by if look adam i call it adam but it's
look which manages the gaming domain and he will get in touch with you when he needs more information
from you or if he needs to hop in a call with you, etc.
It can happen through Discord or in Telegram.
This depends. I can give you a firm answer on this.
Yeah, I appreciate that.
Yeah, we applied for gaming before,
and we did get feedback from fluke and this time
we did chain craft did apply for new protocols and ideas okay okay yeah so just throwing that
out there because because kind of what we're doing does fit there um even though it's like a gaming
platform ai gaming platform there's still like a lot of this like new protocol idea so well we felt like it fit there for the
current program requirements but I appreciate that feedback and again thank you all for what you're
doing because I know y'all have a lot of grants to go through no problem and to clarify there is no
lying stone about the domains there is a lot of times there are proposals that just
fit in more than one domain.
We often have internal discussions, right, about, okay,
does this proposal go into your domain or my domain?
Do we redirect?
Do we split?
Do we relate together?
Because it's not single boxes, right?
You can build a game that underneath has some infra.
In your case you
have ai so yeah definitely there can be this this part as far as i know castle which manages the new
proposed ideas works instead a lot lot lot through questbook and through the comments and so a lot of
the first interaction a lot of most of interaction will probably
happen in there, for example.
Cool.
Sounds good.
I appreciate it.
Awesome.
Thank you, Jojo, as always.
Anyone else maybe in the crowd that wants to ask some questions?
You guys can feel free to raise your hands.
Otherwise, we can dive a bit deeper into more domain-specific questions.
Or honestly, Giorgio, anything you feel like you want to maybe share with everyone?
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
So we are in the process of drafting the first uh report
um this report should delight what we accomplished in the in the first months of operation and so on
and should be in the home really really soon a few days of delay due to eastern okay and that's
that's mostly on me because the team is working a lot and i'm the
one that is lacking on this sorry my bad and so the doubt will be able to see um what is happening
okay and most of the stuff that we will publish are basically initial number i think that until
last week okay up to the 17th of April, we had around 200 applications.
So 200 applications in 30 days spread among five domains.
So this can also give you the numerosity of applicants that we have, which is extremely good.
good, right? It means that there is an interest, there is an interest to build an arbitrage.
It means that there is an interest to building an arbitrum.
At the same time, it kind of falls into what I was saying before, the amount of resources
that we have is limited capital-wise. So a lot of times we're going to really need to
sometimes reject applications that should deserve a grant, but for which we don't, we
don't much really have enough capital, right? But the program so far has been on a very good track, number-wise,
and we're really looking forward to show to everybody what we're doing.
I think that's great.
And also, I mean, we touched upon before some of the, maybe the issues that, like, you know,
were mentioned, for example, in terms of communication.
We've also done some research on grants.
So we saw that, you know, while these are absolutely justifiable from a project's point of view,
absolutely justifiable from a project's point of view, but, you know, very often the amount of work
managing hundreds of applications for each domain, you know, and it sort of like
takes a lot there. So I think we can definitely see some improvements. And, you know, hopefully this is on the right
direction to establish these grants as an important part of the funnel of Arbitrum.
Maybe, like, you could share maybe some, like, tips or, like, things to avoid, like some of the main reasons why a project is rejected
or maybe things they should try to avoid?
So I think that the idea is simple to grasp,
but it's extremely difficult to properly handle.
So when you do grant effectively you want
to have a mindset that is quite similar to investing okay effectively we are investing
money on behalf of the DAO and even if the DAO doesn't have a participation directly into this
nor has as the domain allocator and the program manager, we will have secondary and third level effect
from allocating money in an efficient way, OK?
Because it will grow the ecosystem.
It means that all the DAs will look at how good the team is,
how good the DA is, and how feasible the idea is to realize, OK? The first thing is how good the team is, how good the idea is, and how feasible the idea is to realize. Okay. The first thing is
how good the team is. You want to show what you're capable of. Obviously, showing your track record
helps a lot, right? If you were successful in the past, we want to know it. We want to know what
you achieved. We want to know your best project and so on. This helps us in having more trust
in the fact that you're effectively able to do what you were supposed to do, right?
The second thing is describe the idea. Describe what problem you're solving. Describe why do you
see a problem there? What solution do you bring? solution does have the market uh for this problem up until
now how is your uh solution different what do you effectively bring on the table okay and third we
we want to have people that are hungry and ambitious right this is a prerequisite in every work. You also have to be realistic on what you can achieve
because it's really easy to see.
Okay, this is the idea.
This is going to work.
We're going to freaking have 200 million of TDL
in the span of two weeks.
Okay, easy cowboy.
Can it happen?
Yeah. Is it extremely likely to happen maybe not okay so it doesn't mean that you need to undersell right but the moment in which you try to pitch
yourself too hard in terms of goals and targets you set unrealistic expectations. And the domain allocators are usually able to read through this, right?
When you set unrealistic expectations, it's usually two cases.
You either want to bullshit the people that are on the other side of the screen,
or you're not capable of properly framing
the market in which you're operating, the context and so on.
It's usually not a very good idea. That's what I mean.
Again, it's not about underselling
yourself. It's about being realistic in what you can
achieve. Okay, so okay, the the the answer is quite complex.
I'm sorry about this. But let me go back to this. The team, how
good you are, your track experience, your idea, what
you're bringing to the table, the value that you're bringing, and finally, what you can realistically keep inside the
grant. We also want to know your vision above the grant, right? We want to know that the
money invested into you is not going to end up in just in six months, right? We want to know what you want to do with your project when it's bigger.
But set realistic expectation.
Yeah, and in the end, this is a 25 to 50K grant, right?
Yes, yes. Yes. Like it should be used for, you know, like the best possible way that this money could go for like not only your project, but flourish, like being able ideally maybe like to integrate
with other parts of the ecosystem
and sort of like be able to walk on their own legs
without sort of like needing more and more grants.
So I think that's definitely something to keep in mind, right?
to keep in mind, right?
Yes, definitely.
So maybe like something like about like after the grant sort of like gets approved and projects
get the funds and they will sort of like, you know, there's some ways to measure their success.
you know, there's some ways to measure their success.
Maybe you could share some thoughts, Jojo, on this,
like maybe on like the way we do this, like tracking,
but also like maybe like ideally what, you know,
what would be a nice and good impact there?
Yeah, sure.
So first, what happens when you get the grant?
You do KYC or KYB because obviously we include kyc and kyb uh we sign on the paper works and we all get work
you as a guarantee they got a grant you start to work toward the milestone that you uh published
accordingly to to also what the your domain locator said. Okay. And you publish these results and you contact your domain locator and say,
look, this is what we keep, and he check or she checks,
if effectively it's what was previously discussed.
And in the end, you publish something as a comment in Questbook.
So everybody, any DAO delegate can, for example, go there
and independently check this milestone up to a certain degree, of course,
because sometimes it's not that easy to do.
When you complete your project,
we want to have a...
On one side, we want to track, okay, the project, the grant.
On the other, we want you to be able to
showcase yourself and so how do we accomplish this first you you will have to create a report
in the forum of arbitrum right so this is a report in which you showcase your application
you talk about the grant that you got the path that you made over time.
And this is a way for delegates and people in the forum to know that there was a builder that got a grant from the DAO
and built something cool, okay?
We also want you to speak with us three months after this.
Three months after this, we're going to conduct a written survey with you,
asking you some questions about how is it going if at the end of the grant
you kept building your application, maybe you pivoted,
because maybe when you're in prod you understand,
okay, maybe my users want their car blue and not pink.
And so you're going to make it blue despite having a grant to build it pink.
And that can happen, right?
Because one of the things about crypto is that oftentimes you need to be agile.
Okay?
You need to be able to find your niche.
Okay?
And you don't know your niche until you're there, okay, in the trenches.
Or maybe effectively went exactly like you said,
and you're really killing it, okay?
And we want to know all of this stuff.
We want to know all this stuff,
and so we will interview you 90 days after your final report.
And that's also why usually we allocate a relatively small portion,
10-50% of the grant at this point,
because we want you to come back to us, share your information,
and we will release a relatively small portion of the grant
for you to do this, right?
So you're also compelled to talk with us.
So this is what we're trying to do,
to have a better vision on what happens to projects that
complete the path into our grant program.
That's great.
And I mean, maybe still with regard to something similar, do you want to share maybe some success stories from the past or like either from like an application point of view or projects that went on and sort of like became like very used within the ecosystem. Yeah.
It's difficult to choose the best success story because, first, it can be subjective,
and second, we have several domains
that are very different from each other.
One thing that I liked a lot from last season
thing that i liked a lot from last season was the grant that we gave to viper okay so viper is um
was the grant that we gave to Viper.
compiler uh an ambient uh program language that is really used is used a lot in in quark for example
and so on it secures a lot of money both on ethereum in arbitrage room and in a lot of l2s okay
in Arbitrum and in a lot of L2s.
They had a rough year last year because due to a bug there was a pretty spectacular hack in Curve.
Long story short, this is a team that is securing a lot of money into DeFi.
They came to us to ask for a grant because they have operational needs. They also talked with the foundation and there was also a lot of fad and discussion about
them not being able to secure their operational expenses through the Ethereum foundation.
And this was sorted out, if I recall, last month or something like that. Maybe a couple
of months ago, I don't remember. But, you know, besides this, what was cool is that we gave a grant to this team
because we felt like it was the best usage of money of the dev tooling for that period.
It was about securing a lot of capital in DeFi and DeFi is paramount to Arbitrum.
This is one example.
Another thing that I liked a lot and i'm
going to mention this because we always talk in this grant about small protocols right but we
have grants for bigger protocols so last year peer protocol some of you might know this it's
it's an extremely cool protocol about fair trading okay Per trading is very common in traditional finance. You
go long Apple and you go short of Exxon Mobile because you think that Apple does a cool thing
and that oil is not going to be worth too much. Maybe it's the wrong example, but you
get the idea. So per trading in crypto not that much
common difficult sometimes to key with platform they're very different per protocol allows you to
go long one asset for example arb and short another asset for example op just to name two
random assets right and they will manage the splitting of the capital, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
This is a relatively big problem. They were able to raise a decent amount of money and so on,
but through our grant, they were able to prioritize the development of the API module,
okay? That is, in the end, what is the most needed on their side to allow market maker to operate a lot into derivatives, right?
So the goal was to increase the activity of market makers.
And one of the ways we tried to give this was to speed run the API module
that was secondary at the time for peer,
and there was a speed up through this grant.
There are plenty of stories like this, okay,
in different domains, and I don't know them all.
As I said, it's also quite subjective,
but there are several stories in which the impact
is either for the chain or for the team
that we're able to kind of start to grow
and keep the ball rolling.
Yeah, those are great examples, I think.
And actually, we do also have, for those who are interested to dive deeper, we just published
a report on this in the forum.
I'm going to link it here.
I think maybe some projects that are looking to apply can find this useful as well.
Awesome.
Perfect. can talk like and can find this useful as well um awesome perfect so um maybe like
like we haven't really like um like touched upon them i guess but um like how should project
measure their success like um you know like um given there's like different objectives, like what is the best way they should present this?
Do you have any like advice on your side?
Or like you've also, I mean, obviously being, you know,
like checking applications yourself in the past.
So obviously you can bring sort of like,
what makes your job easier
and sort of like what would we
like to see as impact basically
with KPIs
so the first
advice that I give anybody who wants
to apply is go to the
website that we created
in Notion I'm not sure if
you were able to publish this into
the discussion of the space maybe it's worth it is arbitrum.grants.notion.site.
We literally have everything in there.
Great.
We got everything in there.
We got not only the template, which, you know, it's automatic in Questbook or whatever. But we have the rubrics.
We have a description of all domains.
We have a lot, a lot of stuff for which the domain allocator have worked a lot to spy and lay down and communicate their vision.
Okay.
For what they want to see as very successful project.
Starting from there, to me, it's paramount because I'm pretty sure that everybody that applies things has a great idea, right?
Kikas protocol.
And maybe it's true, right?
But the main problem is being able to communicate this idea to people outside and to the domain allocator. In this case, you need to be able to speak the same language of the person that is on the other side,
specifically the DA, that we want to know, okay, what are your milestones? Okay, what are the main points that will bring you from start to finish?
What are the numbers, the KPI in between that will allow us to measure how you went from point A to B because you can
go from start to finish but maybe not in a successful way or in extreme successful way
instead you have to be able to describe what KPI are good for you we suggest you some but
it's your idea it's your event your protocol your protocol, your stream, your chain, whatever.
You need to be able to pitch yourself in what metrics you think are best, right?
And that is extremely important.
And it's also an extremely good exercise for anybody that is starting a protocol, a team,
because being able to communicate in a way that you're not used to, okay,
is necessary when you go out there to pitch in future to venture capitalists
if you want to go there, or to people that want to invest with you,
or to team, to people that you want in in your own team right so this is the start
okay obviously looking at the history of approved proposals helps a lot reading the comments of the
DA what they ask a lot of times some some details are just uh you know skipped over by some applicants
for example we ask for a somehow detailed breakdown of economics you're asking me 50k okay
you need to tell me how you're going to utilize them and it's not about i'm going to utilize to
build the protocol no i want to know how much goes through your engineer how much it goes to marketing
how much it costs the licenses of the software that you need to buy to build that.
Okay. How many hours do you kind of need to build that?
And, you know, I can know for sure how many hours
I will, you will need to build this.
But also we kind of have the experience to understand
if a request is inflated or not, et cetera, et cetera.
So, getting all the details that are mentioned in this template, So we kind of have the experience to understand if a request is inflated or not, et cetera, et cetera.
So getting all the details that are mentioned in this template, reading the rubric, reading the previous proposal,
helps a lot in, let's say, speedrunning your proposal.
Why speedrunning? Because if you don't say this stuff we're gonna ask you to okay
we're gonna ask you modify this application and put this and this and this you're just gonna save
yourself and us a lot of time if you do this and you're gonna present yourself in a very professional
That's great.
So this should be the starting point for everyone.
It's really, really well done,
and it actually answers a lot of questions,
and obviously there's only so much time to apply,
so it kind of saves a lot of back and forth there, right?
So definitely, definitely, like,
try to look at, like, all of the resources there.
Have a look at what we shared as well in the link
in terms of some of the findings we have
and more examples of successful projects.
Well, Giorgio, I don't know if you have any final remarks, maybe.
And if no one else wants to ask questions, I think we can wrap it up at the one hour
mark.
Maybe just the final remark is about that.
I really see this program evolving over time.
It's going to be a one-year program.
It's the first time that we have a grand program lasting one year, approved by the DAO.
I definitely see this one changing over time.
What does it mean?
I'm not sure.
In the sense that we will try to adapt the program
to new narratives, to what the DAO needs.
For example, the SOS rules are currently in discussion
through the DAO and so on.
So I expect this to change and be more nuanced over time.
And it's going to be interesting to see what we're going to,
as a collective, realize in this program.
That's great.
And I mean, like, as you said, things change really fast. So I think it's really important to see, for example, how the efforts you've put in, for example, in this new know that navigating grants is not easy,
but honestly, just wanted to give props
to anyone involved with DO grants,
both Domain Allogators and Jojo,
really trying to do their best
to make this as clear as possible and yeah hopefully we see
a lot of great projects coming out from this and more and more of them that can be used as
a great example of success for future grants that's great that's great thank you a lot
everybody for being here thank you a lot first times for having
me here it was a pleasure uh let's let's do this again in a few months to see where we are
awesome awesome with pleasure with pleasure thank you so much giorgio always nice talking to you and have a nice rest of your day bye guys bye
