2026 AGV Council Elections: 2-Seat Council Nominations for Reconfirmation

DAO Programs & Initiatives Arbitrum Gaming Ventures (AGV)
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Summary

This proposal seeks DAO approval for each of the two candidates nominated by the existing council to sit in the 2026 term.

The existing AGV Council’s nominations are:

  • Tim Chang
    • Core Competency: Venture Capital and Investments
  • John Kennedy
    • Game Development / Go-To-Market Leader

Rationale

Building on the governance tradition established with AGV and subsequently OpCo, which combined appointed and elected positions, this election proposes a hybrid approach for filling council seats.

Ensuring continuity of institutional knowledge across our oversight, advisory, and investment programs is critical for effective governance. Having experienced DAO representatives who understand our historical context and strategic direction, independent of the operational team hired to lead these initiatives, helps maintain stability during transitions and preserves organizational memory that might otherwise be lost.

To address this need, the existing AGV council has voted to nominate two candidates for continuity seats, subject to DAO reconfirmation prior to the election, with three additional seats open for a DAO-wide election.

Council Nominees for Reconfirmation

Below are the extended details of each nominee for reconfirmation:

Tim Chang

Role / Expertise

Venture Capital Leader

Bio

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Tim previously led consumer technology investments at Mayfield Fund, focusing on next-gen Commerce & Marketplaces, Communities, Health & Wellness, Gaming and Digital Media, and has been named twice to the Forbes Midas List of top 100 VCs in the world for his early-stage investments at the beginning of the social and mobile smartphone gaming eras.

Tim has also been named to the AlwaysOn Power Players of top investors, as well as receiving the Special Achievement award from the Gamification Summit for his work in leveraging game design thinking to domains beyond gaming.

Tim has led early-stage investments in Grove Collaborative, Tonal Fitness, Fitmob/Classpass, Iridigm Display, Playdom, ngmoco, Basis, AdChina, Moat, and Pillow, creating more than $2.6B in total exit value. His current board seats include Alignable and TRIPP VR.

He holds an MBA with honors from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a MSEE/BSEE from the University of Michigan, where he received a departmental scholar fellowship. Tim has also been an active and avid investor in Web3/blockchain since 2014, helping to establish and invest in early crypto hedge funds, as well as advising and supporting multiple web3 gaming startups.

Outside of his passion for venture and startups, Tim is also a proponent of healing and flourishing of Mind, Body and Spirit, and serves on the non-profit boards of California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), and Ecoversity, and formerly served on the nonprofit boards of Little Kids Rock, NorthStar.guide, Gray Area Arts and Reimagine Death, as well as advising Transformative Tech Lab, Consciousness Hacking, Building Bridges, Near Future Summit, Edmund Hillary Fellowship, GoldHouse, Berklee School of Music, and other efforts to uplevel Capitalism with greater consciousness, regenerative models and inclusive stakeholding. His impact efforts include supporting MAPS and co-founding Northstar.guide to ethically commercialize psychedelic medicine, and he is dedicated to supporting Men’s Work, greater financial literacy for Women and Girls, ethical design principles for AI and tech products, and regenerative agriculture/Permaculture.

Tim is the cofounder of a cutting-edge social wellness members club called The Portal (https://theportal.house) in the San Francisco Bay Area, with additional locations opening soon.

Major AGV Accomplishments:

  • Guided initial thesis creation and subsequent thesis evolutions.
  • Worked with the team to create infrastructure, including approval processes, IC review rituals, memo templating, risk management parameters, best practices, due diligence checklist, as well as how to assess behind-the-scenes deal, team and investor syndicate dynamics.
  • Acted as a source of additional context, given his large VC/founder network for deals with known founders, co-investors, and other strategic partners.
  • Provided 23 years’ worth of early-stage venture investment expertise and wisdom as advisory and due diligence support for all deal leads that advanced through the IC pipeline in 2025.

Why are you interested in serving on the AGV Council again?

“I genuinely enjoy working with the people on the investment team and the wider AGV stakeholders. This is a unique experiment and opportunity for a leading L2 network to pioneer what DAOs can do, and the mandate to grow one of the largest verticals within entertainment and gaming is exciting. There are challenges, but I have always believed in forging new frontiers while accepting the risks that come with innovation. I have advised multiple Fortune 500 corporations in forming and implementing corporate strategic investment programs, and to do something similar for the AGV is a chance to build an investment and ecosystem program in a wholly new format for the web3 world. I’m proud to be part of this journey, and hold huge hopes for how Arbitrum and web3 overall can bolster the leading edge of gaming and gamified experiences, as well as the convergence of generative AI with blockchain.”

John Kennedy

Role / Expertise

Game Development / Go-To-Market Leader

Bio

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John, formerly Head of Product at AWS GameTech, left in 2023 to launch Actual AI—an engineering manager agent for software teams that provides guardrails for AI-powered software development. Actual AI has received venture funding from AlleyCorp, G2C ventures, OrangeDAO, Alchemist Accelerator, and Irregular Expressions.

At AWS, John successfully pitched the CEO on transforming Amazon’s Lumberyard into a cutting-edge open-source 3D game engine. He secured a team of over 100 top game engine developers to build Open 3D Engine (o3de.org), a modular, extensible, and high-performance 3D engine featuring a new renderer, visual scripting tool, and physics engine. Additionally, John launched and grew several high-revenue AWS services, enabling game developers to seamlessly serve hundreds of millions of players with capabilities for streaming, multiplayer servers, and cloud storage.

As a Core Partner at Underscore VC, John has advised numerous early-stage startups on product development and go-to-market strategies. His executive experience spans multiple high-growth startups, including Platform.sh and Acquia. John continues to mentor Series A-C startups, sharing his expertise in scaling businesses.

In 2024, John co-facilitated Arbitrum’s two GovHack events in collaboration with Hack Humanity at EthDenver and EthCC. Each event drew over 200 participants and resulted in the creation of 48 new governance proposals.

Major AGV Accomplishments

  • Worked with the team extensively on the formation of the investment thesis, bringing deep gaming industry experience and over 20 years of experience building and marketing digital products.
  • Guided the hiring process, including working on the evaluation rubrics, working with the team and recruiter on candidate triage, and interviewing most candidates.
  • Mentored the team on operations, strategy, and growth, including bi-weekly sessions with the leadership team.
  • Deep deal analysis on all deals that passed IC from the gaming and software development perspective.
  • Met with candidate portfolio companies to vet leadership and technical expertise.
  • Established relationships with partners and portfolio companies.

Why are you interested in serving on the AGV Council again?

“I’m excited about the 2nd gaming revolution that is coming to Arbitrum. We have now established the groundwork to execute on our thesis of building a vibrant gaming ecosystem of service providers, games, and gamers. I think we can build the Steam of web3 backed by Arbitrum.

It has been great to see AGV grow and put down roots. We now have the dream team that is going to blow up the industry. Gaming is in dire need of new channels for user acquisition and monetization. We are in the perfect position to take advantage of this need.

I can’t wait to dive in with the team, guiding portfolio companies on their way to success with GTM and operational expertise, building playbooks, and by connecting the AGV team with new partners who can extend our reach in gaming and AI.”

Process, Implementation & Next Steps

In order to seek tokenholder approval for the discrepancies between the original GCP Proposal and this proposal, the AGV team and Council now submit this proposal for a DAO vote.

Following the posting of this proposal, a one-week community feedback period will remain open on the forum to gather input from delegates and stakeholders.

Following the discussion window, an Introduction and Q&A Call will be held on Google Meet on November 13.

A Snapshot vote will then go live on Thursday, November 20, and remain open for seven days.

Each nominated candidate will then undergo a separate confirmation Snapshot vote (simple majority with a quorum of at least 3% of all votable tokens voting either “For” or “Abstain”) on Thursday, November 20, and remain open for seven days.

Timeline

Voting Options

Each proposal will include the following voting options:

  • For
  • Against
  • Abstain

Should FOR be the majority preference, and the combined FOR and ABSTAIN votes meet at least 3% of the total votable ARB supply, the respective candidate will be considered reconfirmed to the AGV council for the 2026 term.

If either of these nominations are vetoed by the DAO, that seat will then be added to the Election Process, and the nominee(s) will be automatically entered as an applicant(s) for the Election. If a nominee is vetoed and added to the Election, the number of open seats would increase from three (3) to either four (4) or five (5) seats.

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UPDATE:

Taking into account the participation of many delegates in Devconnect, the reconfirmation Vote on Snapshot of the 2 Council-Nominated Seats has been moved:

  • from November 13 - November 20
  • to November 20 - November 27
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UPDATE:

Re-confirmation voting for the two Council-Nominated Seats is now live via Snapshot, and will run until November 27.

Be sure to cast your votes via the links below:

You can find the transcript for the Q&A held for each reconfirmation seat here.

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The following reflects the views of GMX’s Governance Committee, and is based on the joint evaluation of the various members. Committee member Atomist was not involved in this discussion, as he is temporarily on leave.

The GMX Governance Committee just voted in favor of both candidates.

The fact that the existing AGV council proposes these two capable candidates for continuity seats signals that they deem their presence crucial to the proper functioning of the council. We agree that ensuring continuity in this manner is likely to make the new Council more effective, and we don’t see a significant reason to disagree with this rationale.

While there are valid arguments to be made for a fully open nomination and voting process, we expect that we would then end up voting for these same candidates down the line. We therefore defer to the existing AGV council and its proposed process. In our view, the practical benefits of continuity and the retention of experienced representatives carry significant weight.

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I have voted in favour of both candidates.

Having been closer than most delegates to the AGV team, I have had some insight through the last year about the work done so far. In particular Tim has had a strategic role, being the one with the most experience in VC and been the member of the council advising on investment per tally proposal.
That said, as @Jonezee mentioned, if the current council deem Tim and John worth to be in the new council for continuity, we have little to no reason to believe otherwise. The work of the council has not been just oversight, but hands-on based on needs and capabilities.

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Hi everyone, I had a conflict during the last governance call so wanted to drop my responses to some of the questions fielded by delegates to John and I here:

Question 1: What if any improvements would you recommend for the AGV next year?

  • 2025 was about establishing the basic foundation of the AGV, as well as beginning to source, screen, diligence and deploy capital into initial deals and begin constructing the portfolio. I feel the team has done a terrific job in getting an initial set of quality startups and building up the beginnings of an attractive portfolio, as well as forming the starting processes and workflows for the investment committee.

  • 2026 will be about refining the workflows and processes as a fully functioning venture investment team, and expanding focus and efforts across:

    • Active portfolio management and review

    • Assessing portfolio company traction vs. initial investment thesis and targets for deployment of follow-on funding from capital pool allocated for follow-on reserves

    • Helping portfolio companies execute as well as attract follow-on investment

    • Working more closely with ecosystem and grant efforts, beyond primary venture investing activities

    • Improving communication and reporting flows to stakeholders

    • Boosting credibility and visibility in the overall market.

    • Deepening relationships with ecosystem partners and co-investor targets.

    • Streamlining decision making and communication processes within the investment committee and with the AGV council.

    • Refining and updating investment thesis, portfolio allocation targets, and KPIs; regularly updating and reporting on thesis, portfolio metrics and KPIs to council and DAO.

    • Continuing to explore and expand investment scope beyond pure gaming, and into adjacent, related and complementary sectors.

Question 2: How can Arbitrum win with programs like the AGV? What does winning mean?

  • Winning can be defined across a few dimensions:

    • Investment returns: simply put, does money invested return more money than initially invested, within a reasonable timeframe. Early stage deals typically target a 20x return over an 8-10 year lifespan. Mid stage deals typically target a 5-10x return over 5-6 years, and late stage deals target 2-5x return over 3-5 years. We are in discussions with the AGV team on investment return targets based on a shifting web3 and entertainment / gaming ecosystem.

    • Portfolio momentum: are portfolio companies executing and making progress on business and metrics traction? Are they attracting follow-on rounds from reputable investors at upround valuations?

    • Successful deployments on Arbitrum chain and growth of Arbitrum ecosystem: are portfolio companies making meaningful milestones deploying on Arbitrum, and demonstrating compelling use cases for Arbitrum in gaming and other applications? Are end users adopting these use cases and applications? Are top developers attracted to Arbitrum and working on projects using Arbitrum?

    • Credibility of AGV: are leading investors sharing dealflow with AGV, and actively co-investing with AGV? Is AGV on the radar screen of top web3 gaming founders and companies? Is AGV starting to be seen as more than just a pure web3 gaming fund?

Question 3: What KPIs should the DAO track for a venture backed program like the AGV?

Given the long term nature of VC, KPIs typically track efficient deployment of capital and momentum. Within the 3-5 year mark, we can expect to see more indication of IRR and DPI expectations, which may be used to raise subsequent funds.

I believe there needs to be a strong delineation between what is shared publicly, and what is shared with council members that represent the DAO and have signed the appropriate disclosure agreements. Since Venture Capital is typically raised from private parties, we need to find the right balance to ensure

  • Typical venture fund KPIs:

    • Pace vs. model targets:

      • # of deals done per year vs. target

      • $ deployed per year vs. target

    • Momentum:

      • % of deals achieving upround valuations for follow-on rounds

      • Multiple of capital on top 5 deals

    • TVPI: total value to paid in capital

    • DPI: distributions to paid in capital

    • IRR: time-adjusted return

    • Loss ratio vs. Hit ratio

    • Ownership % at entry and exit vs. model targets

    • Portfolio allocation by stage and sector vs. model targets

  • Potential ecosystem KPIs specific to AGV:

    • % of portfolio companies leveraging and deploying on Arbitrum chain

    • # of portfolio companies with successful TGE

Note: for competitive confidentiality of individual portfolio company metrics and performance, aggregate KPIs are typically reported vs. per portfolio company!

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Voting for both reconfirmation proposals.

The community feedback has been consistently positive, the candidates have a strong track record, and I haven’t seen any compelling reason to disrupt the current momentum. Continuity makes sense at this stage.

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voting Against this offchain vote because this council is in dire need of properly legitimate elections, not reconfirmation votes.

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voting Against this offchain vote because this council is in dire need of properly legitimate elections, not reconfirmation votes.