Double-Down on STIP Successes (STIP-Bridge)
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Abstract![]()
This proposal introduces the STIP Bridge, aiming to sustain and enhance Arbitrum’s market leadership by extending support to key protocols amidst intense competition from other Layer 2 solutions. It serves as a strategic interim solution, maintaining incentive alignment and ensuring continuous engagement of vital projects within the Arbitrum ecosystem until the Perpetual Incentives Program is initiated.
Motivation
The Arbitrum ecosystem is currently facing unprecedented competitive pressures, with significant incentive programs launched by rival Layer 2 networks threatening to attract our established protocols away. The STIP Bridge is crucial for retaining these integral projects, ensuring they remain committed to Arbitrum by providing timely, targeted incentives. This initiative is essential to preserve network growth, user engagement, and overall ecosystem stability in a highly dynamic market environment.
Rationale
Aligning with Arbitrum’s mission to support and nurture its development community, the STIP Bridge embodies our commitment to our builders and their contributions. It strategically addresses the imminent risk of losing key ecosystem participants to competitors by offering a seamless transition in incentive support. This approach not only retains critical projects and liquidity within Arbitrum but also sets a solid foundation for the impending comprehensive Perpetual Incentives Program, reinforcing our long-term vision of innovation and community empowerment.
Specifications
Eligibility
- Any protocol funded under STIP or the Backfund is eligible to apply for a bridge grant coinciding with the LTIPP distribution window.
- This will allow Arbitrum to ensure protocols that had success during the STIP campaign can retain their users and continue to focus on building on Arbitrum.
Maximum Funding Size:
Maximum funding requests under this bridge grant are capped based on a percentage of the prior funding received under STIP:
- Greater than 500k ARB: may make a funding request of up to 50% of their prior funding.
- Less than or equal to 500k ARB: may make funding requests up to 100% of their prior funding, capped at 250k ARB.
STIP Performance Audits
To give the community a better understanding of how protocols utilized their STIP grants, audits will be conducted.
OpenBlock Labs has been monitoring protocols included in STIP and reporting their data using dashboards.
OpenBlocks will be providing closing remarks on all protocols they have data for. These summaries will include:
- The percentage of STIP allocation that recipients used
- The amount of unused funds recipient protocols returned to the incentives multisig
- Should be any remaining amount of full allocation
- Success metrics compared to similar control protocols
- Insights into oddities that occurred during the incentive period
Additional analysis opportunities:
Additionally, this proposal team has already asked the ARDC that once they are prepared to provide additional analysis and insights to prepare for LTIP.
This is also a great opportunity for Arbitrum community members to use the data that OpenBlocks has been sharing in their open-source dashboards to create their own analysis. Community-driven analysis of the success of STIP will bring many interpretations of the data and help delegates make the most informed decisions. This analysis could be compensated via a portion of the research bounty budget from LTIPP.
Advisors Help
The advisors from the LTIPP (JoJo, SeedLatam, Castel Capital) proved to be a tremendous help to applicants as they ensured protocols received quality feedback, a better understanding of how much ARB they should request, and possible incentive mechanisms to use. Additionally, the Advisors stay on to support the protocols during the program allowing each team to better learn and iterate through testing.
The LTIPP advisors have agreed to assist similarly during the STIP bridge. Protocols applying to the bridge will have the opportunity to meet with an advisor. This will help them gain insights into their proposals. This not only helps guide applicants through the process but also ensures the DAO will have better proposals to review.
The advisors will hold office hours during the Addendum period to help answer questions protocols have, and to discuss with them through the Discord infrastructure already leveraged during LTIPP, in a way they could provide feedback on both previous results and/or new mechanisms to integrate.
Program Manager Role
The STIP Bridge will include a program manager to help ensure the program runs smoothly. As seen in other programs, a single manager is required to ensure efficient and effective operations and to deal with the unexpected situations that ultimately appear.
Project manager responsibilities:
- Ensure Addendums are properly posted
- Administer deadlines for various phases of the program
- Handle COI with advisors
- Help facilitate the posting of snapshots
- Help coordinate with the multisig to ensure funds are properly distributed
- Update grant recipients on program progress as streams start, run, and end
Matt Stein from StableLab will serve as the program manager.
How To Apply - Addendum on STIP Forum post:
Any STIP protocol wishing to apply will fill out the Addendum template
After filling out the Addendum, protocols will post it in the newly formed “STIP Bridge Addendum” section of the forum. These posts should be titled “[Protocol Name] STIP Addendum”
Applicants will be able to meet with an advisor during office hours to get feedback regarding their incentive plan and grant amount as protocols did with LTIPP.
Applicants will have around two weeks to submit their Addendums. Beginning when the Tally vote becomes active and ending when the tally vote ends.
Applicants can edit their Addendums as many times as they want until the deadline. Once the Tally vote ends Addendums are final and can no longer be modified.
Challenge and Review Period
During this time between the tally vote and the optimistic snapshots, delegates will have a week to review Addendums and prepare to post challenge snapshots for applicants they believe require a closer look.
Any delegate with at least 500K ARB delegated can put up a challenge snapshot using this challenge template.
Any desired challenges should be posted to the forum during the Challenge and review period (May 4th- May 11th). They then must be posted to Snapshot during the Challenge Snapshot period (May 11th- May 18th).
Voting and Approval Mechanism:
Optimistic Approach
An optimistic voting mechanism will be used to mitigate the potential for delegate fatigue from voting on 50+ proposals while still holding projects accountable for their overall performance within STIP and in general.
This optimistic model hopes to reduce the load on all delegates but ensure that the DAO’s full attention is placed on the more contentious proposals.
Initial Voting Mechanism
The Tally vote will earmark funds to allow the DAO to distribute up to the maximum permissible grants.
Should this Tally vote pass, all STIP protocols that properly submitted an addendum will be optimistically awarded a grant
Challenge Snapshot Process
If the DAO feels some applicants should not be optimistically funded and require a closer look, any delegate with at least 500K ARB delegated may post a challenge Snapshot for a specific applicant.
If a challenge snapshot is posted, that applicant must receive at least 66% of the votes in favor of funding (Excluding abstain votes) in order to receive their bridge funding.
Delegates may seek a full DAO vote at their own discretion if they believe that a project did:
- (a) not fulfill their STIP requirements,
- (b) failed to deliver tangible results during the STIP period or
- (c) the amount sought in the bridge application would not result in an effective utilization of the DAO’s funds.
This will allow the DAO delegates to focus their available attention to more closely examine contested applications.
Any desired challenges should be posted to the forum during the Challenge and review period (May 4th- May 11th). They then must be posted to Snapshot during the Challenge Snapshot period (May 11th- May 18th).
Possibility of Extension
In case the full long-term incentives program gets delayed, this proposal will have a built-in extension method to prevent another gap between incentive programs.
If 4 weeks before the end of STIP Bridge incentives distribution, another incentive program has not passed a snapshot, then we will post another extension directly to Tally that extends funds for protocols that received funds from LTIPP and/or STIP Bridge.
Steps to Implement
- Send funds to LTIP multisig
- Have applicants post Addendums
- Conduct Performance audits
- Have DAO members challenge contested proposals on the forum
- Conduct individual Snapshot votes for any challenged application
- Have successful applicants complete compliance
- Start streams along a similar timeline as LTIPP protocols
- Monitored incentives throughout the program as done in STIP
Timeline
This is a rough timeline. We aim to start the STIP Bridge around the same time as LTIPP.
Overall Cost: 37.6M ARB
Incentives Budget: 37,500,000 ARB
See estimated amounts here
Operational Cost: 100K ARB
A maximum of 100K ARB will be used for the operational budget. This could be used to cover the costs of the advisors, pm, multisig signers, additional audits, and or any other expenses that come up while operating the proposal. A separate snapshot will be published to allow the DAO to decide how these funds will be spent.
Additional Documents:
