Request to Increase the Stylus Sprint Committee's Budget

Non-Constitutional

Abstract

• The Stylus Sprint program saw overwhelming demand, with 147 applications requesting ~31.92 million ARB, significantly exceeding the initial budget.
• This proposal requests an additional 4 million ARB to extend the committee’s original budget. The funds will enable the evaluation committee to fund a set of exceptional applications that were excluded due to budget constraints.
• The committee has provided the list of applicants that it strongly recommends deserve to be funded as part of the Sprint, in addition to the 5M ARB already allocated. Rationale and a summary of the applicants is linked in the proposal.
• We will be moving this request to Snapshot next Thursday, February 6th. If approved, an onchain vote will move forward the following Thursday as to not further disrupt the proposed timelines of the applicants.

Motivation/Rationale

With 147 applications and ~31.92 million ARB in funding requests, demand for the Stylus Sprint program significantly exceeded expectations. The committee received a large number of exceptional applications, but unfortunately, due to the initial budget constraints, the committee was only able to fund 17 applications. They were chosen based on a combination of factors including cost, timeline, necessity for immediate start, RFP category importance, and the priority to fund both applications and infrastructure/tooling.

While the committee has accepted a subset of the applicants, there remains an important opportunity to support impactful ideas and high-quality teams. With Stylus as one of Arbitrum’s strongest competitive advantages, the committee strongly believes that enabling all impressive applications received as a part of the Stylus Sprint with funding is a worthwhile investment for the DAO.

This proposal seeks an additional allocation of 4 million ARB tokens to extend funding opportunities to promising projects that were not initially accepted into the Sprint. With this budget extension, the committee will be able to fund an additional group of applicants, outlined in detail below. While there are many more strong applications, the recommended list scored especially high during the review process and are ones that the committee is confident have the potential to provide value to the Arbitrum and Stylus ecosystems.

Specifications

As stated in the original Stylus Sprint proposal, large requests may be directed to the DAO directly to request funding. This process was communicated to applicants, some of which elected to go this route over reducing their request. The smaller applicants in this list are in the committee’s opinion worthwhile investments that have the potential to improve Stylus long-term.

The following list of applicants are the ones that come with a strong recommendation from the committee and to reiterate were unable to be accepted due to budget constraints.

Open Application

1. Pyth Oracle Implementation in Stylus - ARB Requested: 1,000,000
2. Sylow - ARB Requested: 700,000
3. Nuffle Labs - ARB Requested: 500,000
4. Syndicate MintVM - ARB Requested: 210,000
5. Ember: LP Optimization with Volatility-based Dynamic Fees - ARB Requested: 100,000

RFP Track

1. Moving Stylus: Move to Stylus-compatible WASM compiler - ARB Requested: 450,000
2. Trail of Bits: Add Stylus as a Solang compiler target - ARB Requested: 440,000
3. StylusFuzz: Advanced Property Testing for WASM Contracts - ARB Requested: 408,200
4. CodeTracer - ARB Requested: 250,000

Rationale and a summary of each applicant’s proposed scope can be found in this document.

It is important to note that the decision to include the above applicants is based on the finalized version of their submission that was reviewed during the grading period.

Due to the open nature of the DAO, applicants not included in this recommendation maintain the ability to move their request directly to the forums in case they feel like they have a compelling case despite the non-acceptance from the committee, effectively circumventing the Stylus Sprint and evaluation committee. The committee is aware of some applicants that may bring revised versions and/or lower budgets than when they were originally reviewed. While we appreciate that Arbitrum DAO’s open and decentralized essence provides the freedom to make such requests, we’d encourage delegates to be mindful of the possible precedent funding projects circumventing the program would set. When appropriate, the committee has already directed certain applications to be on the look out for alternative DAO programs, such as the Season 3 of Arbitrum D.A.O program if it's approved.

If this proposed extension is approved on Snapshot, we will move it immediately to an onchain vote the following Thursday, February 20th. The recommended applicants will be held to the current Stylus Sprint timeline, so the committee would like to not unnecessarily delay the ability to fund these projects. Projects funded as part of the Stylus Sprint’s budget increase will benefit from the infrastructure already in place as far as MSS/payments and milestone reviews by the evaluation committee.

The Snapshot vote will be a basic vote with For, Against, and Abstain as options.

Budget

The Stylus Sprint committee is requesting an additional 4,000,000 ARB to extend its Stylus Sprint budget. If approved, the funds will be sent to the existing MSS-controlled Stylus Sprint multisig.

Timeline

January 30th: Forum Post February 6-13th: Snapshot Vote February 20th - March 6th: Tally Vote March 9th: Funds delivered to Stylus Sprint multisig March 10th: Recommended teams join the Stylus Sprint

Conflicts of Interest

Entropy and the committee have no conflicts of interest associated with the recommended applicants or this proposal requesting an extension of funds.