I am setting up an X Spaces at Friday, July 26, 2024 5:00 PM→Friday, July 26, 2024 6:00 PM. to talk a few things Grant Ships and to kick off the next Grant round we are holding.
Even though “Ape Ships” has not been put up for a vote yet, “Grant Ships” continues 
We are currently holding a “community vote” to determine the funding allocations for our two remaining Ships for the second round of our beta. We did not get the voter turnout we had hoped for from Arbitrum delegates, as the couple whales that did vote, created major swings. So we didn’t get the signal we were hoping for from the delegate vote. Our third place operator chose to bow out graciously, in order to ensure 1 and 2 have the funds to award meaningful grants in the next round. It was a little disappointing to lose him, as he was an excellent operator and well connected in the Arbitrum gaming community. Lucky for us, he will stay on and help us in other ways.
In order to get a better representation of what ships performed best, we instituted a secondary token that was air dropped to some participants and people from Hats Protocol, Gitcoin and Allo who have helped us along the way. This vote will account for 50% of the weighting to determine the allocations. The other 50% is from the original delegate vote.
I’d love to see some people from the Ape community come by and learn a little more about Grant Ships. Our second round of grants begins July 29th and will run through the month of August. We have about 40K ARB we are awarding this round. Once again we are supporting gaming projects on Arbitrum. By extension, this also includes Arbitrum L3s, such as Ape Chain 
So even without “Ape Ships” happening (yet 
) there is still an opportunity for Grant Ships to get a little grant money out to gaming projects that want to deploy on Ape Chain.
If you want to get up on stage during the event, I’d appreciate if you could RSVP so I can plan accordingly. I’d love to have some Ape Coin DAO members up there.
if you just want to listen in, here’s the link to the Space:
https://x.com/i/spaces/1mrGmMqbYOvGy
Edit: By the way some of the UI/UX improvements we are making on the app after the beta round are pretty sick. None of them effect the proposal at all but the quality of the UX will greatly increase over our original design. ie, currently our activity feed on the main page is infinetly scrollable but not searchable. We are fixing that and adding the ability to filter. (keeping in mind this is all onchain activity)
We are also adding the ability for projects to provide much more robust and multimedia enhanced milestone updates and we are adding an ability for grantees and ship operators to openly communicate and negotiate in the app, playing a role in creating an extra layer of transparency.