Elixir Capital Submits Governance Proposal to Establish $50 Million Arbitrum Startup Collective – Unchained

Over a three-year timeframe, the Arbitrum Startup Collective would act as an investment vehicle to funnel capital in up to 150 Arbitrum-focused startups between Seed and Series A stages.

Arbitrum governance members are currently weighing a new $50 million proposal to build a successful venture ecosystem.

Scott Collen, the founding partner of investment accelerator firm Elixir Capital, submitted a governance proposal on Thursday to the ArbitrumDAO, aiming to establish a program to bring capital to high-quality early-stage startups building on the layer 2 blockchain network.

Named “Arbitrum Startup Collective,” the program is designed “to invest in up to 150 startups building on Arbitrum through a $50m dedicated investment vehicle” over a three-year timeframe, stated the proposal in Arbitrum’s governance forum.

The goal is to increase Arbitrum adoption among developers and decentralized applications as well as increase the treasury of ArbitrumDAO through investment returns, according to Collen. Additionally, “Elixir Capital will be appointed as an external service provider to manage and oversee the day-to-day operations of the Arbitrum Startup Collective.”

A large inspiration for this governance proposal stems from how other ecosystems, namely Solana and Polygon, have venture-style ecosystem development programs such as the Polygon Accelerator and the Solana Ecosystem Fund. While Arbitrum currently has programs addressing both ends of the start-up growth spectrum, “there is a clear gap at the Seed to Series A level,” Collen added. 

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The proposal is in the earliest stage of Arbitrum’s governance process where people deliberate on the various elements of the program, though it has not yet garnered comments.

The next step after a healthy discussion about the program’s nuances would be for Elixir Capital to conduct a formal temperature check with a Snapshot poll, a common offchain mechanism used to gauge the sentiment of the governance proposal. 

The proposal comes as Arbitrum governance members are currently voting onchain for a separate proposal to catalyze gaming ecosystem growth. Unlike the proposal for the Arbitrum Startup Collective, the gaming proposal is in the final stages of the governance cycle as ARB token holders have been hashing over details since March and have already conducted a temperature check. 

If passed, the onchain vote, which ends next Friday, would “earmark 200m ARB [worth about $226 million] over a three year period to expand the gaming ecosystem on Arbitrum.”

Read More: Arbitrum Community Signals Near-Unanimous Approval for Gaming Catalyst Program

The price of ARB, the native token for Arbitrum, has jumped 16% in the last 14 days, but has slid nearly 2% in the past 24 hours to trade at $1.13 at the time of writing, data from CoinGecko shows.