Oversight and Transparency Committee (OAT) - June 2026 Elections Application Thread

Applications for DAO programs
10

Application Form

Applicant / Nominee Information

  • Full Name: Alex Netto

  • Contact Information: X

  • Current Occupation: CEO & Founder at blockful

  • Country of Residence / Time Zone: Brazil / GMT-3

Applicant / Nominee Qualifications and Experience

  • Identify one of the domains described within the Desired Qualifications section in the OpCo - Oversight and Transparency Committee (OAT) Application Process Overview forum post in which you have the most experience and describe that experience:

Domain: Business Development, Venture Building, and Strategy & Operations

I founded blockful in 2022 as a web3 software house and have since led its evolution into a specialized governance, security, and infrastructure company. Growing from the ground up, I scaled the team to 18 people before strategically consolidating to a senior team of 10 to focus on security products. I have directly sold over $5M in services and software solutions, spanning smart contract development, governance tooling, and security advisory.

A central product of this journey is Anticapture, a governance security platform we built to monitor economic behavior, delegation patterns, and delegate activity across DAOs, translating governance dynamics into measurable risk indicators and classifying each DAO into security maturity stages. The platform functions as an independent risk assessment layer for the ecosystem: making governance security visible, public, and actionable before vulnerabilities are exploited. Anticapture’s active modules include a real-time governance dashboard, a governance alerts system for proposals and power shifts, a call data review service, a governance front-end package, stage-progression consulting, full governance security audits, governor test rehearsals, and a dedicated researcher line for continuous advisory. The platform has been adopted by ENS DAO to monitor its Security Council and track governance risks, and has driven governance improvements at Uniswap DAO after a formal risk analysis.

A significant share of my BD experience sits at the intersection of blockchain and traditional finance. I co-designed a BRL-backed stablecoin architecture in collaboration with Chainlink, Stark Bank, and Genial Investimentos - a project that demanded coordination across financial institutions, technology providers, and regulatory stakeholders. I organized and hosted an event at B3 (the Brazilian Stock Exchange) with the leadership of Brazil’s CBDC program, bringing together the public and private sectors around digital asset infrastructure.

Before founding blockful, I served as CTO at Ayla, a real estate technology startup, where I owned the full technical strategy, product architecture, and delivery roadmap - driving a 70% increase in company revenue. Before that, I built backend systems at TecBan, the operator of Brazil’s Banco24Horas ATM network, one of the country’s largest financial infrastructure providers, serving over 150 million transactions per year. This career arc, from fintech infrastructure to startup technical leadership to founding and scaling a governance security company, has given me a hands-on, multi-disciplinary perspective on building organizations, identifying strategic opportunities, and executing across complex cross-functional environments.

  • Describe your network and reputation within the blockchain/technology industry. Have you previously represented a crypto brand and/or navigated DAO governance:

I have been an active participant in the Ethereum and broader blockchain ecosystem since 2022, consistently operating at the intersection of governance, security, and infrastructure. My reputation has been built through direct, high-stakes contributions, founding and running blockful, representing it in front of institutions and DAOs globally, and producing open-source work that has materially advanced governance security practices across the ecosystem.

As an ENS Delegate (netto.eth) since 2022 and elected Lead Steward for the Term 6 of ENS DAO Meta Governance Working Group. Facilitating and improving governance processes, doing oversight on the endowment’s treasury management, managing budgets, grants and coordinating with a diverse set of stakeholders.

I am also a member of the ENS Security Council, the multisig body established to protect ENS DAO’s ~$2B treasury against governance capture, a council that my team was directly responsible for designing and deploying after blockful discovered a critical governance vulnerability in 2024. This dual role across both elected governance (steward) and security infrastructure (Security Council) reflects the breadth of my engagement with ENS as an institution.

blockful’s governance security work extends well beyond ENS. In early 2025, applying the Anticapture framework across the Ethereum ecosystem, we identified a critical governance vulnerability in Shutter DAO (0x36): the combination of a low market cap, minimal active voting power, zero timelock, and no proposal guardrails meant an attacker could acquire sufficient voting power for approximately $100K and drain a treasury of over $3M in stablecoins - a risk-reward ratio exceeding 30x. After more than a year of private engagement with Shutter stakeholders and a controlled simulation that validated the full attack sequence, we coordinated an emergency mitigation with a coalition of aligned delegates. My team designed, developed, and deployed the SecurityCouncilAzorius guard contract (independently audited by Cyfrin), which was submitted as a governance proposal alongside a 2-day timelock. Critically, the guard was structured to retroactively protect the DAO even during the voting window itself - meaning once the proposal was submitted, any attack proposals submitted during that period could still be vetoed. Full technical disclosure was made only after the mitigation was live and active.

blockful has also been a grantee of the Uniswap Foundation, extending our governance security research and tooling to them.

Beyond these engagements, I have been an invited speaker at Stanford University (2025, 2026), a bootcamp instructor at ETH Denver 2023 and SmartCon 2023, and a speaker at blockchain conferences across Brazil, the United States (Denver, San Francisco, New York City), Switzerland, Turkey, and Spain I have also organized ETHFloripa contributing to community growth at the local and international level.

  • Detail your experience in advisory, governance, and/or oversight roles:

Meta-Governance Steward: Term 6 (netto.eth)

Elected Meta-Governance Steward for ENS DAO. I oversee Working Groups, approve budgets, and evaluate service providers: the accountability layer between token holders and executors, directly analogous to OAT’s role for OpCo.

I coordinate operational decisions across WGs, resolve priority conflicts between contributors, and make resource allocation calls in real time, including incomplete information and competing stakeholder pressure.

Security Council Member

I sit on the multisig that can veto or delay on-chain proposals threatening the protocol or treasury. I proposed, designed, and deployed the Security Council: its mechanism, smart contract, and operational rules.

Through Blockful’s engagement with ENS DAO governance, I identified a critical flaw in March 2024 that would have enabled ~$150M treasury seizure and full protocol capture. I drove responsible disclosure, defined the remediation scope with core contributors, and led end-to-end delivery of the Security Council.

Delegate: Calldata Review & Governance Security (since 2022)

ENS Delegate since 2022. I vote, deliberate, and build governance tooling. I created and maintain dao-proposals (open source), the framework used to decode, verify, and security-review on-chain proposal calldata. It is a trusted independent verification layer in ENS governance.

  • Have you previously contributed to the Arbitrum DAO? Describe any relevant experiences through which you’ve gained an understanding of the DAO’s current structure, contributors, and programs:

Our most consistent contribution to Arbitrum has been active participation in its governance, deliberating on and voting across proposals submitted to the DAO. Given blockful’s background in governance security, our focus has been particularly on proposals that could affect the structural integrity or security posture of the DAO. We approach each proposal with the same analytical lens we apply in our security work: assessing intent against on-chain execution, identifying potential attack vectors or unintended consequences, and evaluating whether the incentive structures embedded in a proposal are sound. This ongoing engagement has given us a grounded understanding of the DAO’s contributors, programs, and decision-making dynamics.

  • Given the scope of OpCo is relatively broad in its current form, describe how you view OpCo’s role within the DAO and what it should accomplish to deem the entity a success over the next 3-5 years:

OpCo’s primary function is to serve as the operational executor of the Arbitrum DAO, the entity that transforms governance decisions into concrete action. All meaningful operational work of the DAO should be enabled and coordinated through OpCo. But I believe OpCo’s mandate should extend well beyond execution.

Over the next 3 to 5 years, a successful OpCo will have taken a more active role in reactivating Arbitrum’s governance itself, fostering new initiatives, increasing demand for its products, and growing the broader ecosystem. Governance vitality is not a given; it requires deliberate investment.

On the governance side, this means designing and implementing meaningful incentives for participation, not necessarily grant programs funding abstract ideas, but mechanisms that attract people who are genuinely interested in building on Arbitrum and contributing to its long-term success. The goal is to bring in contributors who are invested in the ecosystem’s growth, not just recipients of funding.

This activation effort must also happen off-chain. OpCo is uniquely positioned to engage the financial sector, academic institutions, and other traditional stakeholders, identifying pathways to bring new contributors into the Arbitrum DAO from outside the crypto-native world. Institutional relationships built through this kind of outreach compound over time and can meaningfully expand the contributor base.

Beyond business development, one of the most critical areas for improvement is communication and transparency across Arbitrum’s stakeholder landscape, from active delegates to the Foundation. Today, the perception is that these entities operate in silos, with limited information flow reaching the delegates who are most engaged in governance. OpCo should own the responsibility of closing this gap: establishing clear, consistent, and proactive communication channels so that all stakeholders have the context they need to contribute effectively.

In short, OpCo succeeds over the next 3 to 5 years if it manages to make Arbitrum’s governance more active, transparent, and accessible to new contributors, while simultaneously bringing new builders and institutional actors into the ecosystem through deliberate, sustained outreach both on-chain and off.

Additional Information (Only complete if relevant)

  • Please share any other relevant information that supports the applicant/nominee:

Beyond the roles and engagements described above, I have built and maintained a suite of open-source governance tools that reflect my long-term commitment to improving how DAOs operate and defend themselves.

dao-proposals: A governance proposal review framework developed for ENS DAO, providing calldata decoding, on-chain verification, and security analysis for every proposal submitted to the DAO. This tooling protects a ~$2B treasury by ensuring that what delegates vote on is actually what gets executed.

deadman-switch-safe: A Gnosis Safe module implementing a dead man’s switch for automatic asset recovery in the event an owner becomes inactive. This project was recognized at multiple hackathons and addresses a real operational risk in multisig-governed treasuries.

ERC-7884: Operation Router: I co-authored this Ethereum Improvement Proposal, which defines a standard enabling smart contracts to redirect write operations to L2 chains, L1, or off-chain databases. The ERC is a foundational piece of infrastructure for cross-layer DAO operations.

DAOIP-6: I co-authored this DAO interoperability standard for grant program reporting, developed through Metagov and DAOstar. DAOIP-6 creates a common reporting interface across DAO grant programs, increasing accountability and comparability across the ecosystem.

Safe{Wallet} contribution: I contributed ENS name resolution to the account list UI in Safe{Wallet}, which was merged into the main codebase and is now used by millions of Safe smart account users.

References (Only complete if relevant)

  • Please provide the name, position, and contact information of individuals who can attest to the applicant’s/nominee’s qualifications and character:

  • James Waugh: Delegate on ENS

  • Vegayp: Delegate and former steward in ENS DAO

  • Alex Van de Sande: ENS co-founder

Disclosures

  • Please disclose all of the applicant’s/nominee’s actual and potential conflicts of interest, including but not limited to financial, personal, DAO governance, and professional:

There is no conflict of interest as of the date of this application. Should Blockful, the company I founded and in which I am directly involved, become a service provider, I will abstain from decisions related to it.

  • Please disclose all active contributor roles and payment streams related to the Arbitrum DAO that the applicant/nominee, and entities that they have a professional or financial relationship with, have and are receiving:

Declarations

  • The applicant/nominee understands that any offer to join and hold a position in the OAT is contingent on:

    • Successfully completing as well as maintaining updated all relevant non-disclosure agreements, KYC requirements, and other necessary documents

    • Not being a direct representative or full-time employee at network competitors (e.g., Solana, Polygon, Optimism, etc)

    • An individual will be entitled to run as a candidate for the election. No single organisation should be overly represented in the OAT. There should be at most 1 candidate associated with a single entity.

    • If a candidate is elected on behalf of an organization, then the OAT membership is tied to them and cannot be rotated to someone else in the organization. It will be up to the current OAT to enforce the above policy, and if a candidate is excluded from the election, then the rationale must be publicly disclosed to the ArbitrumDAO

    • Being aligned with the community values listed in The Amended Constitution of the Arbitrum DAO, following the Code of Conduct for delegates, being committed to prioritizing the Arbitrum DAO’s needs, and acting in absolute good faith and utmost honesty to fulfill their duties to the best of their abilities.

  • If nominating someone else, the nominator confirms that the nominee is aware of their nomination and the essential details related to it

  • The applicant/nominator confirms that they have read and understood all the content within this form and that the information submitted is accurate and complete: Yes