Applicant Name: Abdullah Umar (Arana Digital)
Applicants dYdX Address (for compensation):
dydx1arx2g4x8t79vwval5g2lwuaduckna7ks3v5740
Link to something you’re proud of:
Last quarter our blockchain investment fund, Arana Ventures, achieved “#1 Top Performing Crypto Fund” across all strategies according to Crypto Fund Research. Our fund was able to return over 1200% in 2023.
(can’t post links)
Pitch Summary (One-liner):
Arana Digital’s experience with facilitating governance for numerous DeFi protocols, its members’ background in critically analyzing projects on the investment side, and Abdullah’s experience as a consultant for dydx, makes us ideal candidates to help facilitate this grant program.
Detailed Pitch:
Arana is a firm with two divisions: Arana Ventures (AV) and Arana Digital (AD).
- AV is a blockchain fund that invests in small cap protocols across a multitude of chains and sectors. The fund optimizes for achieving outsized returns while not sacrificing liquidity by solely investing in the public market.
- AD is a governance group composed of ex-Michigan Blockchain members. Our team is currently made up of five individuals, all of which are deeply steeped in the crypto space and have multiple years of participation in protocol governance. With delegation history for DEXs, money markets, L2s, liquid staking protocols, and stablecoins, we’re acclimated with a breadth of sectors. We bring a diversity of experience to DAOs–our members have consulted for companies like Immutable and dYdX, worked at crypto investment and trading firms, set up various validator nodes, and run educational events for university students.
AV and AD are legally separated entities but have a degree of overlap in membership. Hence, Arana is able to amalgamate its experiences from both the investment side and the governance side to help with this grant program.
Our governance team has been highly active in DAOs like Uniswap, Aave, Compound, Arbitrum, Stader Labs, Origin, etc. In 2023 alone, via Michigan Blockchain, we spearheaded Uniswap v3 growth by helping deploy the DEX on Base, Avalanche C-chain, Scroll, Moonbeam, Rootstock (BTC L2), and Filecoin VM. Abdullah is also on the Uniswap Accountability Committee, responsible for administering incentive programs for various deployments as well as helping new chains adopt Uniswap. We actively help various parties, like bridge providers, foundations/labs, delegates, developers, and BD teams, coordinate on governance proposals. Abdullah has also been involved in the first Uniswap meta governance initiative, where he works with a team to manage an Arbitrum delegation on behalf of the Uniswap DAO.
Arana Digital has also worked heavily on the money market side with Aave and Compound. Our team served as prominent Aave delegates for the past 1.5 years. We’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with various service providers, like Gauntlet, Chaos Labs, Llama, Karpatkey, Flipside, etc during our tenure. We’ve also been able to converse with numerous teams who’ve approached Aave for a diversity of reasons. Prominent examples include–
- Working closely with Centrifuge to ensure the DAO most effectively made an entrance into the RWA space
- Back-and-forth with the risk assessors around events like the Curve fiasco in Q3 2023 and the bad debt debacle with Avi Eisen in December 2022
- Aiding Celo through the Aave deployment process (underway) by co-authoring the proposal and responding to feedback from BGD labs and the risk assessment teams
- Collaborating with Pyth to potentially introduce a backstop oracle–which we ended up stepping back from after a handful of conversations with Chainlink
- Co-proposing Aave private voting as well as delegate gas rebates
Abdullah will be representing Arana if elected into this program–and will closely consult the rest of the Arana Digital team for guidance.