Rationale: We decided to allocate our votes equally among these six candidates. Our decision is based on both prior experience working with some of them and the proven track records of others. For instance, ZachXBT’s reputation and demonstrated competence leave us with full confidence in his ability to handle this role. Similarly, @gauntlet and @Griff have been active contributors in the Arbitrum ecosystem for a long time, giving them valuable context and understanding of the DAO’s needs. As for @blockful and @WakeUpLabs , we’ve collaborated with them in other DAOs and trust their sense of responsibility and capability to support Arbitrum effectively.
Rationale: Since we’re involved in the Triple drip proposal related to our PRS mechanism, we’ve decided to vote Abstain to avoid any conflict of interest.
Rationale: We appreciate the AGV Council’s effort in building the foundation for Arbitrum’s gaming ecosystem. Establishing structure, strategy, and compliance from the ground up takes serious commitment, and that work deserves recognition.
At the same time, we are cautious about approving retroactive rewards without clearer mechanisms for long-term alignment. We would have preferred to see longer vesting periods or KPI-based milestones that tie rewards to tangible ecosystem growth and sustained performance.
By voting Abstain, we aim to acknowledge the Council’s valuable contributions while expressing the need for future compensation models that balance recognition with accountability and measurable impact.
Rationale: We are voting Abstain on this reconfirmation. John has contributed meaningfully to AGV across investment thesis development, hiring evaluations, and operational mentorship. However, his initial entry to the council was through ratification rather than a competitive election. Since this is an elected position, we believe all continuity candidates should participate in the open election to maintain fairness and consistent governance standards within the DAO.
This abstain vote is based on process considerations, not on John’s qualifications. We remain open to supporting him in the upcoming general election.
Rationale: We are voting Abstain on this reconfirmation. Tim’s venture background and involvement in building AGV’s strategic direction are well recognized. Similar to John, Tim joined through an initial ratification rather than a competitive election. For a role intended to be elected, we believe it is healthier for governance if all candidates, including continuity candidates, stand for the open election.
This abstain vote reflects a procedural viewpoint, not a judgment on Tim’s capability. We remain open to supporting him in the general election.
First of all, thank you to everyone who applied for this election. The background and experience across all candidates is honestly superb and it made this a very hard decision. After reviewing the profiles, calls, and disclosures, we carefully decided to allocate our voting power equally, 33 percent each, to JoJo, Greg Canessa, and David Bolger.
We chose this slate because:
JoJo (Governance & Policy Leader)
Brings deep Arbitrum native governance experience as a long time delegate, evaluator in multiple grant programs, and Program Manager of the D.A.O. Grant Program. JoJo also has prior context with AGV from the interim council and ongoing calls, and we see them as a strong bridge between AGV, other AAEs, and the broader DAO.
Greg Canessa (Strategy / Operations Leader)
Has a unique Strategy and Operations profile with 30+ years in gaming across Xbox, Blizzard, Activision, PopCap, GSN, Google and now Sequence. As a founding AGV council member and operator inside a key Arbitrum gaming infra provider, Greg combines ecosystem scale experience with direct context on how AGV has been built and where it needs to go.
David Bolger (Business Development / Growth Leader)
Leads gaming and consumer partnerships at Offchain Labs and is already one of the main entry points for games and consumer projects coming into Arbitrum. As a founding AGV council member who regularly routes builders between OCL and AGV, David brings a strong growth and BD perspective and helps ensure a smoother funnel from initial interest to actual deals and support.
Together with the reconfirmed seats for Tim Chang and John Kennedy, we believe this mix gives AGV a well balanced council across venture, governance, strategy, operations, BD and game go to market, while keeping continuity for a program that is now entering a more mature phase.
Rationale:We’re votingFOR because this upgrade is a straightforward win for the network. ArbOS 51 keeps Arbitrum aligned with upcoming Ethereum changes, improves how we track and price gas, and helps make fees more stable as usage grows. The code has already been audited and tested on Sepolia, and both parts of the proposal have passed temp checks. Since these upgrades ship together anyway, activating ArbOS 51 on One and Nova is the clean, low-risk path that benefits users and builders.
The program sets up a straightforward incentive for delegates to vote and share their rationales publicly. That alone helps improve transparency and gives the community a clearer picture of how different stakeholders view each proposal. It also makes it easier for proposers to understand feedback and refine future work.
We do have one concern around the current minimum voting power requirement. It feels a bit high for where the DAO is right now, and it leaves out many active delegates. That said, this is something that can be revisited as the program runs and as more data comes in. We do not see it as a blocker to getting started.
Since Curia previously received an Arbitrum grant to build governance analytics (Arbitrum Dashboard), we are also happy to support the @OpCo by providing data on voting activity, rationale participation, and other governance signals. If our work can help the OpCo review proposals or monitor the health of the system more easily, we are glad to contribute.
Overall, this proposal moves governance in a constructive direction, and we support giving it a chance to run while continuing to refine the details as the DAO learns more.
We support the shift to a DVP-based quorum model and believe aligning quorum with delegated voting power is a necessary improvement over the current supply-based system. This change better reflects real participation and helps address the growing liveness risk faced by the DAO.
Based on our prior analysis using historical participation data, percentage-based quorum thresholds in the proposed ranges strike a reasonable balance between governance liveness and meaningful participation. In particular, we found that ranges around 42–50% of DVP for non-constitutional proposals and 48–56% of DVP for constitutional proposals are broadly effective, and the Foundation’s proposed parameters are directionally aligned with these findings.
While we view the parameters as an initial configuration that should be revisited as delegation patterns evolve, we believe this proposal represents a constructive and necessary step forward for ArbitrumDAO’s governance.
At a high level, it just makes sense. If surplus stablecoins from concluded programs are sitting idle, they should be put to work generating yield through the ATMC rather than remaining unused. We also think it’s reasonable to avoid running a full governance vote every single time funds need to be swept, especially when the DAO has bigger decisions that deserve delegate attention.
The timing concern raised by @JoJo and @SEEDGov was valid, but we think @Entropy ’s clarification addressed it well. Only S2 surplus funds would be moved right away, while the currently active D.A.O. Grant Program funds would remain untouched until that program actually concludes. Just as importantly, the DAO still retains clawback rights at any time, so governance control is fully preserved.
Overall, this feels like a practical operational improvement that makes treasury management more efficient without weakening oversight, and we’re happy to support it.
We’re voting FOR this upgrade. Multidimensional gas pricing has been a long-standing request from the community, so it’s encouraging to see it being implemented. It aligns with builder needs and does not introduce breaking changes.Allowing Offchain Labs to adjust the base fee within defined limits is also a reasonable approach, particularly in light of the DAO’s reduced fee revenue following ArbOS 51.Overall, the proposal comes at no cost to the DAO and includes auditing, making it a well-structured and low-risk improvement.
Rationale: We support this proposal as moving the Code of Conduct and DAO Procedures to a living document just makes sense at this point. It’s already been updated multiple times, and keeping it in the Constitution would only slow things down for something that’s operational in nature.
Rationale: We see no blockers in this proposal given the impressive recent performance of the Treasury Management Portfolio. It is essential that we do not leave assets sitting idle when they could be generating yield for the ecosystem. Moving these unutilized funds into a portfolio that has already shown a doubling in yield YTD is a clear win for the DAO
Rationale: We support this move. Loosen the rules could helps us attract more of a top-tier teams that require flexibility, but for the AI part, it is a smart way to reducing the budget on unready code. However, we need to make sure the AI tools used are actually effective for these specific audits or which part of the audit that Ai take part . We’d love to see a clear report later on the actual ROI and how many projects stay on Arbitrum.
We would like to thank every candidate for stepping forward. Given the strong backgrounds across the board, this was not an easy decision. After careful consideration, we cast our votes for DZack23, netto.eth, and yoav.eth.
Senior blockchain engineer at Offchain Labs from 2020 to 2024, present from prototype through mainnet. He has first-hand knowledge of Arbitrum’s protocol internals that no other candidate on this ballot can match. Even after departing, he continues contributing technical research on sequencer decentralization and calldata pricing. For a council that must respond to protocol-level threats, having someone who built the system is essential.
yoav.eth (Yoav Weiss) - 35%
Security researcher at the Ethereum Foundation with 25+ years of experience. Co-author of ERC-4337, has discovered vulnerabilities across multiple L2s, and audited Arbitrum contracts pre-mainnet. Also serves on the Optimism Security Council, making him the only candidate with a cross-L2 threat perspective. Lower allocation is strategic, not a reflection of credentials. We expect broad community support and directed our weight where it has more impact.
netto.eth / Blockful - 25%
Netto brings a perspective the council needs: governance security. Blockful specializes in governance capture prevention, voting attack vector analysis, and DAO mechanism design. As Arbitrum’s treasury and governance footprint grow, the risk surface extends well beyond code exploits. Regarding the LobbyFi incident from October 2025, we view it as evidence that governance security gaps exist, which is precisely why this expertise belongs on the council.
Rationale: We’re voting in favor. Our main reason is very simple because the priority right now is getting the recovered ETH back to affected users as quickly as possible (we still want it to be faster than 49 days if possible we do think the process is too long), and every day the funds sit frozen is another day of unresolved impairment for rsETH holders and Aave users on Arbitrum. The funds aren’t DAO treasury, the action is scoped as a one time measure with a fallback to governance if things don’t go as planned. Since the frozen ETH originated on Arbitrum, we’d also like to see Arbitrum users prioritized in the recovery distribution where possible, and a brief reconciliation update from the authors after distribution so the community can see how the recovery actually played out.
We believe the Foundation is the backbone of Arbitrum, and the work done over the past few years reflects that.
That said, at this stage of the DAO’s maturity, we think it’s time for funding to be more explicitly tied back to ARB token holders. The current flywheel works in principle, but the missing piece is a clear mechanism for how that success accrues value back to the people actually holding ARB.We’d like to see future proposals come with clearer alignment between Foundation performance and token holder outcomes, whether that’s through defined KPIs, ARB utility development, or revenue-linked mechanisms.
We’re voting FOR because we trust the Foundation’s track record and recognize the operational necessity. But we’d encourage the team to treat this cycle as the last one where alignment with token holders remains an open question.
Rationale: Nova has clearly run its course. $20M TVL and 0.03 TPS just doesn’t justify $1.52M/year in operational costs anymore. The ecosystem has moved on, and teams that need low-cost DA can just spin up their own Orbit chain now. Appreciate that this is a minimize rather than a hard shutdown. The 90-day migration window is reasonable, and the phased approach gives existing users and projects enough time to move over. Migration to Arbitrum One should be straightforward given both chains are EVM-equivalent.
One thing we’d echo from Griff’s comment, the team should be more proactive about reaching out to users still on Nova rather than just waiting for them to figure it out themselves. Not everyone is following governance closely. Overall this is a sensible financial and strategic decision for the DAO.