We fully support the Arbitrum Foundation’s establishment of the first BoLD validator and the DAO treasury’s provision of funds to bootstrap the bond for this endeavor and have voted for this first proposal on Snapshot. We do, however, have some concerns regarding the DAO funding of the Service Fee and have decided to Abstain from that Snapshot vote.
BoLD introduces permissionless validation, ushering in a new era for Ethereum rollups and the decentralization of the Arbitrum protocol. The foundation’s request of 4234 ETH enables the Arbitrum Foundation to run the first BoLD validator by supplying the 3600 for the assertion bond and funds for a challenge bond in case it is needed. This will enable the validator to instantly serve as a proposer for Arbitrum One. One aspect of this framework we would like to explore going forward is the utilization of ARB in the assertion bond as well as ETH. The ARB token is yet to grow beyond the utilization for governance and the integration with a proposer bond would enable it to contribute to the decentralization of the protocol, something which the Arbitrum DAO should be more than willing to support. The DAO is also more capable of supporting efforts outside of the Foundation, given the DAO treasury is made up nearly entirely of ARB rather than ETH.
The second proposal is regarding the additional 900 ETH allocated to the proposer Service Fee and the refund of L1 gas costs. This amount is to be allocated over 3 years. We abstained on this proposal due to sharing similar concerns as @swmartin and further highlighted by the @Entropy team in this Gas Fee & Revenue Breakdown. While an allocation to cover L1 fees and counter the opportunity cost of staking is reasonable, putting off this issue for three years may not be the best approach for the DAO or the Arbitrum protocol. This is an aspect of sustainability with the BoLD implementation and the DAO revenue model that should be further explored. Are there ways to make the incentives offered to proposers more attractive than the yield offered by staking? Staking is a good benchmark to start, but committing to three years of providing staking yield felt like something to reconsider, and we are open to investigating alternative solutions.
We look forward to working with the Arbitrum Foundation and our fellow members of the Arbitrum DAO to create a sustainable process for persmissionless validation of the Arbitrum Protocol.