GMX to receive $9.6 million under Arbitrum grant program

Following an Arbitrum community vote, 29 projects will receive grants totaling 49.6 million ARB (~$40 million) to develop and promote the use of applications in the L2 network.

1/ @arbitrum round 1 grant application has officially come to an end

Congratulations to the 29 projects which will collectively receive 49.6m ARB

Delegates came through in the last couple of hours, with all proposals achieving quorum pic.twitter.com/mu3MSYFiYM

— 0xRamen (@0xRamenUmai) October 13, 2023

The largest recipient in the first round of the initiative Short-Term Incentives Program (STIP) was the GMX derivatives platform — 12 million ARB (~$9.6 million).

DEX Camelot — with holders of 250 million ARB participating. More than 98% voted in favour of allocating 3 million tokens to the project.

The largest share of grants, 44% of the total, will go to protocols trading perpetual swaps such as GMX, MUX Protocol, Vertex Protocol and Perennial. Among the category participants, 21.75 million tokens will be allocated.

2/ Perps will by far receive the largest proportion of grants (44%), led by @GMX_IO, @muxprotocol, @vertex_protocol and @perenniallabs

DEXs are the second largest recipient sector (15% of grants), led by @CamelotDEX, @KyberNetwork, @TraderJoe_xyz, @Balancer pic.twitter.com/jTTVAnz3im

— 0xRamen (@0xRamenUmai) October 13, 2023

DEX segment led by Camelot, Kyber Network, Trader Joe and Balancer was the second-largest recipient segment, accounting for about 15% or 14.5 million ARB.

In addition to the winners, another 218 applications surpassed the 50% quorum and support threshold.

However, these projects, including PancakeSwap, Wormhole, Gains Network and Synapse Protocol, did not reach the round’s 50 million ARB cap in ‘yes’ votes. Their requests totaled 24.5 million tokens.

Other proposals failed to gain sufficient community support. Among the losers were the liquid staking protocol Lido Finance and the DeFi platform Curve Finance.

Under STIP rules, teams cannot convert the allocated tokens into other assets or participate in governance of the L2 network with the tokens.

Earlier in July, the Arbitrum DAO blocked 700 million ARB ($560 million at the time of writing) to fund the project’s fund.