[Constitutional] AIP: Constitutional Quorum Threshold Reduction

Constitutional AIP

Abstract

This AIP proposes a reduction of the constitutional quorum threshold by 0.5%, lowering it from 5% to 4.5% of the total Arbitrum votable tokens. The goal is to ensure that well-supported proposals can successfully conclude by aligning quorum requirements with current levels of voter participation, reducing the risk of legitimate initiatives failing due to quorum thresholds not being met.

For non-constitutional proposals, the existing 3% quorum threshold will remain unchanged.

Motivation

Over the past year, the 5% quorum threshold for constitutional proposals within the ArbitrumDAO has been challenging, despite support from a broad range of delegates. As the circulating supply of $ARB continues to grow and voter turnout remains relatively flat, quorum requirements are becoming increasingly difficult to meet. The two images below from ARDC research on governance risks analysis suggest that quorum on constitutional proposals could reach 300M (in base case) in about a year, while participation rate as % of votable supply has gone down from 8% in early 2024 to 4-5% in early 2025. Reducing the constitutional quorum threshold by 0.5% provides a short-term adjustment that enables critical governance to move forward while longer-term reforms are considered and developed.


Rationale

ArbitrumDAO is governed by the principles of decentralization, participation, and credible neutrality. This proposal balances those principles by modestly reducing the constitutional quorum threshold to better reflect the current governance environment without undermining the legitimacy of approved proposals. This proposal also would not require any upgrades to existing smart contracts, helping maintain community trust and operational simplicity.

The 0.5% reduction was selected as a conservative adjustment that is expected to meaningfully improve the likelihood of well-supported proposals reaching quorum, while still maintaining a high enough threshold to deter governance attacks.

Key Terms

  • Constitutional Proposal: A type of proposal within the ArbitrumDAO that modifies governance structures outlined in the ArbitrumDAO Constitution. These require higher quorum thresholds than non-Constitutional proposals.

  • Quorum: The minimum number of tokens required to participate in voting for a proposal to be valid and eligible to pass. In this context, it is calculated as a percentage of the total $ARB votable tokens.

Specifications

This proposal updates the constitutional quorum threshold from 5% of the total votable tokens to 4.5%.

As of April 2025, with ~4.3B ARB in votable tokens (formula is total supply of ARB token, which is 10B, minus the amount delegated to the exclude address), the quorum reduction would decrease the requirement by approximately 25 million ARB tokens, bringing the effective quorum from ~215M to ~190M ARB.

No upgrades to core governance smart contracts are required. Instead, this proposal will include an action contract that uses existing functionality to modify the quorum constant used in the calculation of constitutional quorum thresholds. The action contract will need to be audited, and this is expected to take 1 day.

The 0.5% reduction represents a minimal-risk, fast-to-implement interim solution, while other long-term solutions can be considered, such as flexible quorum, or franchiser contract.

Steps to Implement

The proposal will follow these steps:

  1. Forum discussion: This AIP is posted to the ArbitrumDAO forum for discussion and feedback from the community.
  2. Temperature Check: An informal offchain vote is conducted on Snapshot to gauge community support.
  3. On-Chain Vote: A formal Constitutional AIP and call-to-vote is proposed to Tally for the on-chain vote. This proposal itself will be subject to the existing 5% quorum to pass.
  4. Update Governance Parameters: If passed, the new 4.5% quorum requirement would take effect immediately for all future constitutional proposals.

No smart contract changes or audits are required, which reduces implementation complexity and cost. The entire process is expected to take roughly 52 days.

Overall Cost

This AIP does not request any grant or budget allocation. It introduces no operational, technical, or recurring costs and does not require smart contract upgrades or audits. Governance configuration changes are handled via on-chain proposal execution and incur only the standard gas costs associated with DAO transactions.

I agree with this proposal, we should lower the threshold.

It’s clearly been a struggle to hit the 5% quorum, and getting there takes an too much time and energy from key contributors just to catherd delegates into voting. It’s a waste of time for important people that could be doing more impactful work. This isn’t how we win.

Let’s lower it.

It’s important and relevant that there’s also ongoing work to drive more organic engagement from larger stakeholders (which I fully support and hope to see succeed), this was a major topic of the SOS call today even… so this change is a no-brainer, while we push for engagement in other ways.

I just seen this proposal and went to Karma and saw almost all delegates are losing voting power. Seeing token holders lose confidence in the ecosystem should be ringing alarm bells for all of us. The dropping delegate voting power is a governance issue and a market signal that holders are selling and moving elsewhere.

I support lowering the quorum threshold as a practical response to our current reality. Let’s be clear though - this is treating a symptom, not the disease. The real problem is that token holders need actual reasons to stay in the Arbitrum ecosystem.

Lowering the threshold makes governance more agile, which is good, but without addressing token holder incentives, we’re just rearranging deck chairs. The market will always speak louder than forums.

@cupojoseph - Not long ago was campaigning pushing for increased voting difficulty. I believe your opinion here would be very valuable for the discussion.

2 Likes

The OP’s suggestion seems fine to me based on participation. Thank you for the good graphs and data.
If good proposals are struggling to get this level, bad ones would too. We want it to be easy to pass popular good proposals. My suggestions on quorum updates are just to consider making it harder for bad ones to pass.

Thanks for the tag!

Alternative

another idea or direction which may be more positive sum for the DAO but also more work to achieve the same outcome:

instead of lowering the threshold by ~22M votes, why dont we move 22M ARB from the treasury into 1/1 gnosis-safes controlled by the DAO. And use them to delegate to existing contributors.

100k to the top 200 current contributors? 200k to the top 100 contributors?

lower quorum while price is also lower means less resilience. more votes for engaged delegates means more resilience.

more on how this could work from another proposal made previously:

1 Like

The objective is to ensure that we do not “lock ourselves out of reasonable reach of quorum”, which is without a doubt very important for the continued smooth operation of the DAO.

We could do this by adjusting as in this proposal, then continuously monitoring and passing further proposals to adjust whenever needed, up and down. But that relies on our continued vigilance and essentially rubber-stamping routine adjustments regularly, which while doable, doesn’t seem ideal.

Is it viable to instead augment the smart contract stack to automatically calculate the quorum requirements to be whatever is the largest number of the following:
a) 80% of the average total votes cast for all the above-quorum votes the last 3 months
a) 65% of the average total votes cast for all the above-quorum votes the last 6 months
b) 50% of the average total votes cast for all the above-quorum votes the last 12 months
(with an option for the security council to override the quorum number at any time, in case of exceptional circumstances such as intentional manipulation of the quorum numbers through inflated voting, to create a lockout)

The percentages and periods are not important, but it’s the principle of automatic continuous quorum level-setting I want to bring to the table. This would automatically adjust the quorum level up or downwards according to voter interest over time, while maintain a reasonable margin to not make quorum a prohibitively high bar.

Would it be better to have that than to have to make regular manual adjustments?

Would it be viable to add to the current set of smart contracts?