So, the folks running the Arbitrum DAO just made a pretty big move. They gave the green light to the next part of their plan to manage the treasury money. It’s called the Stable Treasury Endowment Program, or STEP if you like acronyms.
- The Arbitrum DAO is allocating $11.6 million in ARB tokens to tokenized US Treasurys through the STEP program. This is part of a broader effort to make the DAO’s treasury more efficient.
- The community voted overwhelmingly in favor of the STEP plan, demonstrating strong support for the initiative. This highlights the community’s active role in the DAO’s financial decisions.
- The STEP program aims to generate yield on the DAO’s treasury, making the funds work harder and potentially opening doors to further investments in the future. This will help the DAO grow.
What’s the big deal? Well, they’re taking a chunk of their ARB tokens – we’re talking 35 million of them, which is about $11.6 million right now – and putting them into something called tokenized US Treasurys. Think of these like digital versions of government debt, managed by some big names in traditional finance.
They didn’t just pick names out of a hat. The DAO had a whole process, asking companies to pitch how they’d handle this money. Over 50 groups put their hands up. A committee, picked by the community members themselves, looked at everything. They wanted a mix that felt right – looking at fees, how much money the companies already handle (TVL), how risky things seemed, and how involved the community could be.
In the end, they settled on three main players for this STEP 2 phase. Franklin Templeton got 35% of the ARB, putting it into their tokenized fund called BENJI. Spiko also got 35% for their USTBL product. WisdomTree snagged the remaining 30% for their WTGXX offering. It’s like picking different flavors of ice cream, but with digital government bonds.
The community got to vote on this whole setup. And vote they did. Almost 89% said “yes” to the plan. Just a tiny fraction, 0.01%, voted against it. About 11% decided to sit it out, which is fine too. The voting wrapped up on Thursday morning.
Anyone who didn’t get picked this time around? Don’t fret. The plan is to have more rounds of this, so they’ll get another shot. It’s a bit like trying out for a team; sometimes you don’t make it the first time.
Matthew Fiebach, who helps advise the Arbitrum DAO through a group called Entropy Advisors, sounded pretty excited. He said seeing big names like Franklin Templeton, Spiko, and WisdomTree – and he even mentioned Blackrock, though they were in the first phase – working directly with a DAO is a huge deal for crypto. He feels Arbitrum has always been right where crypto meets traditional finance, and STEP shows the DAO is serious about bringing more big institutions onto the blockchain.
Roger Bayston from Franklin Templeton was also happy about being chosen. He leads their digital assets work. He likes working with Arbitrum’s technology because it’s faster and cheaper to use. He sees this as helping them build the next kind of financial systems.
So, why are they doing this anyway? The STEP program kicked off last summer, in July 2024. It was the first time the Arbitrum DAO really tried putting its treasury money into these digital real-world assets (RWAs). The idea is to make the treasury money work for them, earning some yield (like getting interest in a bank account, but maybe more complicated) instead of just sitting there.
In the first go-around, STEP 1, they put over $30 million into things like BlackRock’s BUIDL, Ondo’s USDY, and Mountain Protocol’s USDM. That first step brought in nearly $700,000 in yield. Not bad for just letting the money do some work.
The big goal for STEP is to build a treasury for Arbitrum that earns money, can be used easily with other crypto stuff (that’s the “composable” part), and can keep going for a long time (“sustainable”). It’s about making the DAO’s money smart.
These tokenized US Treasurys are becoming a pretty big deal in the crypto world. The whole market for them is now worth around $6.8 billion. BlackRock’s BUIDL is the biggest player right now, managing over $2.8 billion. Franklin Templeton’s BENJI is next, with over $763 million. WisdomTree’s WTGXX and Spiko’s USTBL are smaller but still significant, handling over $108 million and $71 million respectively.
With this latest move, the Arbitrum DAO has now put more than $45 million into these types of digital assets across eight different companies. The Arbitrum Foundation pointed out that the total amount of real-world assets held digitally on platforms built on Arbitrum has exploded. It’s gone up 50 times over the last year! That’s a massive jump.
The foundation also mentioned that the STEP program isn’t just about making idle money work. It’s also setting things up for the Arbitrum DAO to maybe invest in other kinds of assets down the road. They’re thinking about things like early-stage companies, different ways to handle credit, and even commodities (like gold or oil, but digital?). It sounds like they’re just getting started.
And how did the ARB token itself react to all this news? It saw a nice bump. The price was up 7.7% in the 24 hours after the announcement, trading around $0.33. Sometimes, when a DAO makes smart moves with its money, the token price likes it.
It’s interesting to see these big, established financial companies getting involved directly with decentralized groups like the Arbitrum DAO. It feels like two different worlds bumping into each other, and maybe finding they have some things in common after all. Who knew government bonds could get so… digital?
