“DAO-governed milestone grants, elected Domain Allocators reviewing proposals in public, sized to fund a scoped deliverable rather than a company.”
The Questbook Domain Allocator Program is Arbitrum DAO's way of pushing small-to-mid grant decisions out to elected community reviewers instead of a centralised Foundation team. Four domains split the money: Dev Tooling, New Protocol Ideas (DeFi and infrastructure), Gaming, and Education/Community. Each domain has its own elected Domain Allocator, its own multisig, and its own public review thread on the Arbitrum forum.
DDA 2.0 raised the per-project soft cap to $50,000 against a total domain budget of $4M, and the Foundation's own update thread reports 396 proposals submitted against 91 approved in the first months of that round, with observed approved grants clustering between $2,000 and $48,000. Questbook's dashboard currently also lists a "DDA 3.0" entry, but the live intake status for that round was not confirmed at the time of this review: check arbitrum.questbook.app directly for the current season before telling a founder it is open.
The two domains most relevant to a company-building founder are Dev Tooling and New Protocol Ideas; Gaming and Education/Community fund a narrower set of projects and are worth checking only if that is your actual product.
Key stats:
| Person or team | Role | Where to find them |
|---|---|---|
| Elected Domain Allocators (one per domain) | Review proposals publicly and approve milestone payouts from a domain multisig | arbitrum.questbook.app |
| Arbitrum Foundation | Runs the update thread and reports on the program's overall health | forum.arbitrum.foundation |
Individual allocator names rotate by domain and season; check the current domain page on Questbook for who is reviewing right now.