Recent concerns have been raised from an Arbitrum DAO member over the $220 million Gaming Catalyst Program (GCP), which was approved in a majority vote four months ago.
More particularly, a proposal suggests that 220 million ARB tokens should be moved from the Gaming Catalyst Program’s multisig wallet back to the Arbitrum DAO treasury.
“This will leave 3,650,000 ARB for the GCP to continue operations until needing to seek a transfer of more funds from governance,” the proposal states.
Indeed, Arbitrum DAO member and initiator of the proposal, Joseph Schiarizzi, argues that there’s “no demonstrable need for more than $120,000,000 of funding to be immediately available and controlled by a 3-of-5 multisig”. He goes on to call it “unconscionable” due to the GCP having failed to meet its agreed milestones.
As for what GCP has been up to, it’s not entirely clear, but in its first four months, the group has spent 1,699,998 ARB ($935,000). An official collaboration with Japanese gaming-centered blockchain Oasys was recently unveiled, which will see Oasys L2 chains leverage Arbitrum’s tech stack. Apart from that, it seems it’s not been a plain sailing journey for GCP to kickstart its plans.
One of the strong propagators of the $220 million gaming initiative was TreasureDAO’s Karel Vuong. At the time he called the passing of the program “a Herculean, community-led effort to draft, propose, educate, defend, and drive forward”. Three months later he announced that TreasureDAO was leaving Arbitrum to instead build its gaming-centered Treasure Chain on ZKSync. As Schiarizzi states, “GCP was passed with the understanding that Karel would be helping to lead it.”
Since then, GCP Working Group-nominated council member Andrew Green has also stepped down.
Adding to the list of non-met agreements, Schiarizzi points out that no quarterly transparency report on the GCP’s work has been published, there’s “no RFP live, no Open Grants for game devs, and no published onboarding process for funded projects”.
Arbitrum’s developer Offchain Labs has not officially responded to the proposal, but its director of partnerships and strategy A.J. Warner commented on his X channel, saying that the criticism of GCP’s performance “makes no sense”. He states that “Obviously there is no transparency report of data on GCP performance. They aren’t performing yet.”
In another response posted on X, Offchain Labs’ co-founder and CEO Steven Goldfeder has commented that “The Arbitrum DAO gave the green light to the GCP, and the funds are held in escrow at the foundation as it gets set up. It’s super complicated and won’t happen overnight – legal structure, oversight, hiring etc.”
