I’ve been mulling over this vision ever since it was posted almost 1 month ago. I have refrained from sharing my views about it until now, because first, I wanted to let the dust settle on it for a little bit and see what everybody else thinks about it, but most importantly, because my initial reaction to it was quite visceral. I didn’t want to say something with a hot head, that I would later regret.
As I shared above, I did a podcast interview about it where I tried to remain factual and neutral about this vision and the consequences it can have for Arbitrum DAO, which you can watch here.
For context, I’ve been dedicating my time and energy to Arbitrum DAO, almost exclusively and full-time, since I quit my job at Thrive Protocol and went to Brussels to participate in (and eventually win) the Arbitrum GovHack in ETHcc in July 2024. Since then, I’ve been a very active delegate (as you can see from my track record here in this forum and on the Karma DIP dashboards) and I’ve been building proposals.app with @andreiv to serve Arbitrum DAO and its contributors. That’s mostly because to me, Arbitrum DAO is the biggest DAO in the world, and it is my deep belief that we need decentralized governance to work if we want to survive as a species, since governance is the endgame for humanity. That’s why I’ve been into DAOs since The DAO, and that’s why I’ve been actively building DAOs and other DAO tools exclusively for the last 4 years of my life. Also, a big percentage of my personal net worth is in $ARB, and the organization I’m building right now, proposals.app is serving Arbitrum exclusively, so on top of it all, I’m also an Arbitrum Aligned Builder.
So long story short, my opinion about this vision from the @arbitrum Foundation is that posting this vision in the forum, in this way, has effectively already killed the DAO in Arbitrum.
Here’s why:
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This vision is the direct result of the conversations in the secretly held Arbitrum Delegate Day meeting in ETH Denver in 26th of February 2025, as it was confirmed by @stonecoldpat here. Which means that this method of deliberation and definition of “A Vision for the Future of Arbitrum”, was done effectively behind closed doors, where the attendance of that meeting was gated by some arbitrary criteria (and no, it wasn’t just by the stated 2.5m ARB voting power threshold since, for example, @lobbyfi founders were in Denver but they were not invited to that meeting). I have an issue with this method of deliberation and communication of a unified vision, since it’s unclear which big delegates are onboard and pushing this vision for Arbitrum, besides the @arbitrum Foundation. It’s also unclear if @offchainlabs agrees with this vision (I think they do, at least from what I heard in the last call where Steven and AJ reinforced the same talking points in this vision) but more importantly, it’s not clear how much of a role Offchain Labs had in the definition of this vision. It would be great to have more clarity on the entities that contributed to the authorship and feel ownership of this vision for the Arbitrum DAO. Maybe a quick and easy way to bring this clarity would be to release the list of attendees of the secret delegate meeting in Denver, and then the larger community could assume that whoever was there agrees, supports, and backs this vision for our DAO.
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I called out on April 11th, in the first call about this vision, that this vision post should not have been posted in the Announcements category of this forum. The fact that it was posted in this forum category makes it look like an official and already DAO-ratified vision for Arbitrum DAO, which it isn’t, at least not yet. I understand why the @Arbitrum Foundation chose to submit this post under this category, for visibility purposes, but I would add that that utility has already been accomplished by this date, and that this post should be moved to either the Proposals category (where the intent would be to put it up for a constitutional onchain vote and update the constitution with this new governance process) or the SOS category (where the intent would be to have it included in the SOS feedback period of that strategic objective setting framework). And also, the overall intent and next steps for this vision should be shared by the @Arbitrum Foundation soon, instead of acting as if it is already the de facto way the DAO is going to govern itself going forward. Meta governance changes like this are exactly the ones that need the broadest consensus possible in a DAO, and the audacity of proposing them in this way and acting as if they are already in place is either delusional or tyrannical.
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Since this vision was posted, and for the past month, Arbitrum DAO has had way fewer offchain and onchain votes, way fewer proposals posted on the forum, way fewer Telegram chats, and way fewer forum comments than before. It feels like engagement is at an all-time low, just like the $ARB token price for these past months, which is the perfect storm to kill the organic engagement in this DAO. We used to pride ourselves that Arbitrum DAO was probably the most active and vibrant DAO in the world, and that’s not the case anymore. Those of us who were at the Arbitrum booth at ETH Bucharest 2025 felt that the DAO was alive and kicking. Then, a few days later, this vision was posted by the Arbitrum Foundation, and the vibe shifted hard to be the complete opposite of that. On a personal note, it feels very weird to me that in almost every call in this DAO for the past few weeks, I’m one of the very, very few that are paying attention to the call and almost always the only one that asks any sort of question. For the past month, ever since this vision was posted, it feels like either nobody cares anymore, or they are just afraid to speak any kind of truth to power.
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In my opinion, this statement above is misleading and borderline disingenuous since effectively, the proposed changes to the governance process detailed in this vision, effectively gatekeep any other entity that is not a sanctioned Arbitrum Aligned Entity (AAE) from proposing, getting funding and executing on a proposal they find important for the Arbitrum DAO. It feels like, even entities like @SeedGov and @404DAO, who have been contributing to Arbitrum DAO in a super valuable way for years, don’t know how to continue their engagements going forward. And I would imagine it’s the same thing for the @ADPC Service Providers (ever since the Foundation took over the Audit Subsidy Program), Hack Humanity with their GovHacks (since they haven’t submit any proposal to fund another similar event under the 2025 Event Budget that was targetting those kind of events), so on and so forth.
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I think last week was the first time Steven Goldfeder, the CEO of Offchain Labs, participated in a DAO call. And as I pointed out in that call, historically, Offchain Labs has been very hands-off in the DAO, just participating and commenting here on the forum whenever some technical issues call for their attention. For example, here’s a situation where they commented on a DAO issue, and here’s another situation of when they were explicitly asked to comment, but didn’t yet. As previously pointed out by @KlausBrave, the nature of the relationship between @offchainlabs and the Arbitrum Foundation is very unclear.
For example, it’s weird that nobody knows how much of the spending of the Arbitrum Foundation in 2024 was paid to Offchain Labs for their contracted services, if any. According to the Arbitrum Foundation 2024 Transparency Report, the total that the Arbitrum Foundation spent in 2024 was roughly $117M USD ($74,491,895 USD + 39,656,742 ARB, and if we assume an average ARB price of $1.08 USD per ARB in 2024, it adds up to roughly $117M USD) and it begs the question: how much of those $117M USD were paid to Offchain Labs for their contracted services in 2024, by the Arbitrum Foundation? Given that Offchain Labs is considered an AAE and apparently the DAO is paying for their services via the Arbitrum Foundation, it’s only fair that, at the very least, the DAO knows how much it’s paying to this AAE, like it does for all the other AAEs. -
In this proposed new vision, there is no openness, set of criteria, or even just a simple proposed procedure for any other entity to become an Arbitrum Aligned Entity (AAE) and join the club of the selected few that will have the authority to gatekeep new initiatives in Arbitrum DAO. This is probably the thing that pisses me off the most about this vision, because in my mind, a well intentioned vision that would aim at truly increasing the effectiveness of the DAO would have to include a very clear procedure to onboard new and diverse AAEs going forward. The fact that this vision was posted without that shows that the powers that be are not preoccupied with either increasing the scope surface area of the AAEs or, more importantly, with maintaining a semblance of decentralization and credible neutrality. It clearly shows that there is no interest in sharing power outside the selected 5 AAEs. And it also shows that there isn’t even an interest in just reconciling the standards by which an AAE should be bound when it serves the Arbitrum DAO. For the record, I believe that the standards for a truly Arbitrum Aligned Entity should be: a non-profit entity, with open and transparent finances, and whose output is always open-source. And currently, none of the selected 5 AAEs are even remotely close to that level of transparency. In DAOs, we should always enforce the cypherpunk ethic of “Privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful”. And it’s kinda poetic how we can see this principle at play in this very forum thread, where the most liked comment is an anonymous comment of someone speaking truth to power, and the latest Arbitrum Foundation response is dismissive, evasive and doesn’t offer any more transparency than previously, despite multiple direct questions asking for that increased transparency.
I could go on and on with more arguments, examples, and reasons as to why this vision has already killed the Arbitrum DAO, but I want to end with a little bit of a zoomed-out perspective. Over the last 9 months, ever since I’m been following Arbitrum DAO more closely and became a delegate, a bunch of changes gradually took place that I would like to highlight, and offer as context as to why I think the Arbitrum DAO is effectively dead today (since the posting of this vision is the final nail in the coffin, so to say) and how we’re all betraying the values enshrined in the The Amended Constitution of the Arbitrum DAO.
As a reminder, our constitution mentions 6 Community Values:
- Ethereum-Aligned
- Sustainable
- Secure
- Socially inclusive,
- Technically inclusive
- User-focused
- Neutral and open
In the past, we previously undermined the “Ethereum-aligned” value ever since we voted to approve this change to the Arbitrum Expansion Program, as I pointed out before. And now with this vision, we are undermining the “Socially inclusive” and “Neutral and open” values in the constitution, as others have pointed out above:
At the same time, with the recent dissolution of the ADPC by moving the Audit Subsidy Program under the Arbitrum Foundation, with the DIP being curbed down by including a Voting Power parameter that effectively excludes small delegates from getting delegate incentives, with the Arbitrum Foundation recommending delegates to vote against the only onboarding effort in the DAO, with the recently expressed wish by the Arbitrum Foundation to be included in the writing of the final submission of the SOS to be voted and ratified by the DAO, with the Events Budget being mostly used by the Arbitrum Foundation, and all at once, and being deprecated soon because nobody dares to apply for it, with the MSS being restructured soon to move under the Arbitrum Foundation as well, with the Arbitrum Foundation spending $117M USD per year and starting 2025 hiring for 32 open positions, so on and so forth… I feel that at this rate, there will be no community-driven initiative in Arbitrum DAO, driven by any entity other than one of the 5 current AAEs.
Arbitrum DAO used to be the main example of a decentralized organization with several service providers serving it simultaneously, a vibrant community of contributors and delegates, weekly discussions and experiments going on, and continuous learning for all that participated. But now, that’s not the case anymore. All in the name of a supposed effectiveness, that comes from an insidious idea that DAOs should be run like centralized companies. They shouldn’t.
As I said in my podcast interview above, Arbitrum will never be able to compete with Base at being centralized. Base will always kick our ass on being centralized. Arbitrum was created to be, as it says in the footer on arbitrum.io “The Most Decentralized L2 Technology”. Therefore, we should act as the most decentralized L2 technology, which obviously includes having the most decentralized DAO in the space.
This vision from the Arbitrum Foundation steers Arbitrum in the complete opposite direction. It kills the DAO in Arbitrum.
Arbitrum should be an Ethereum-aligned, sustainable, secure, socially and technically inclusive, user-focused, and most importantly, a neutral and open DAO, just like it says in our constitution.
And we should fight for it to be kept that way, even if that requires the DAO to enact the nuclear option of replacing the Arbitrum Foundation directors and therefore categorically rejecting this proposed vision.
Because this DAO is the only way we can ensure to all stakeholders in our ecosystem that the rules of engagement will not change under their feet willy-nilly by a centralized actor, and therefore the best builders in the space can safely choose to build their businesses, apps, and products on Arbitrum, because Arbitrum is a DAO and should continue to be so. That’s our biggest competitive edge.