- The Arbitrum community has agreed to expand its grant program, STIP, to help support more projects
- The decision is meant to prevent a common scenario where projects are approved but not funded
- STIP will now fund 56 projects up from 36
The Arbitrum community through its DAO has voted in favor of expanding the amount allocated to fund community-approved projects to help reduce the ratio of approved vs funded projects. Arbitrum’s grant program, Short-Term Incentive Program (STIP), had a cap of 50 million Arbitrum (ARB) tokens or roughly $56 million at the current exchange rate before the protocol’s DAO raised it by 21.2 million ARB tokens, bringing the total fund amount to over $75 million at the current exchange rate. The Arbitrum DAO disclosed that it targets to use the extra funds to widen the range of supported projects.
143 Million Votes in Favor
The proposal to increase STIP’s cap, which was open for voting for two weeks ending December 2, attracted a total of 216.77 million votes, with 143.15 million agreeing to the idea while 73.44 million rejected it.
Apart from increasing the grant amount, the proposal also sought to make the protocol inhabitable “for new projects [and] avoid potentially irreversible harm of crushing small, high potential builders.”
According to the proposal, the decision will help backfund approved projects and raise the number of funded projects by 26.
Although the proposal was supported by a majority of the community, some dissenting members said that an increase in funding would see STIP support projects “with mixed” qualities. Others also noted that it was better to open another round of funding instead of a backfund.
DAOs are Falling Apart
The Arbitrum community’s move comes at a time when other DAOs are having issues either within themselves or with the core protocol team.
NounsDAO, for example, recently experienced a fork from unhappy Nouns NFT supporters. AzukiDAO has also in the past proposed to repossess funds raised during an NFT sale claiming that the NFT project is “scamming” the community.
With a decision to increase the STIP fund, it’s to be seen whether Arbitrum will be able to guarantee the quality of supported projects.
