There is an existing and well established precedent of the ArbitrumDAO paying teams to provide services to the ArbitrumDAO governed chains. Specifically, Arbitrum Nova validators and Arbitrum Nova DAC members are compensated with 12% and 8% of the L2 base fee collected from the sequencer, respectively. In general, the ArbitrumDAO is the owner of Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova - responsible for the chain’s upkeep, maintenance, security, and deployment of capital accrued via fees in support of the chains’ growth and adoption.
Since BoLD enables permissionless validation, there is no requirement for the Arbitrum Foundation to participate or for the ArbitrumDAO to fund any such party to participate in securing and advancing the chain. It follows then that anyone can volunteer to step up and fulfill the important role of an active proposer for Arbitrum One. Furthermore, anyone is welcome to propose, to the ArbitrumDAO, that these funds be spent on other initiatives or to support other entities. In this particular instance, the Arbitrum Foundation is proposing to step up and fulfill this role using the ArbitrumDAO’s funds. There is no expectation of reward either - this action is purely voluntary because some entity needs to fulfill this role for Arbitrum One. As mentioned in the forum post, taking no action means that the ArbitrumDAO holds the risk that no entity will fulfill the role of being the first honest party to advance & secure Arbitrum One.
Should you and your team continue to believe this to be an issue, we are confident that the community will be receptive to discuss alternative proposals for how to bootstrap the first BoLD validator for Arbitrum One.