The below response reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @krst and @Sinkas, and it’s based on the combined research, fact-checking and ideation of the two.
As L2BEAT, we have decided to spread our voting power to 5 nominees, ensuring 3 of them qualify for the next stage, and signalling our strong support for 2 of them in the process. On a high-level, the 4 aspects that helped us drive our decision were:
- Strong technical knowledge
- It’s imperative for each member of the security council to be able to independently verify what they’re signing, but to also understand the underlying technology and code. We are willing to support also members that bring other skills like deep knowledge of legal implications that add significant value to the security council.
- Reputation at stake
- While we respect the wish for some members of the community to remain anonymous, we believe that members of the security council should have their identities known, so that if they misbehave or fail to act on time, they risk slashing their public reputation. We are willing to make an exception only for well known anons with exceptional reputation.
- No connection to OffChain Labs or Arbitrum Foundation
- We wanted to limit the support for individuals or entities that are related to the original founding team (OffChain Labs and Arbitrum Foundation) as we believe that Security Council should serve as a third party guardian that protects the users of the protocol.
- Location
- Security council members should be spread around the world to cover most timezones and various jurisdictions as that would help with reaction speed in case of emergency, and would mitigate the risk of legal implications.
With that in mind, we voted for the following nominees:
Philipp Jovanovic - Associate Professor in Information Technology at University College London (UK)
- Philipp has a very strong technical background and with 12+ years of experience in cybersecurity. He’s involved in various projects in his capacity as a cybersecurity consultant and he’s experienced in cryptography, distributed systems security, privacy-enhancing technologies, cryptocurrencies among other fields.
Haroon.eth - PhD on Crypto Analytics & Security (UK)
- Haroon also has a very strong technical background and he has professional experience in blockchain security and analytics. He has published numerous academic articles and research on blockchain and security and he’s also on the technical committee of the IC3.
Emiliano Bonassi - Tech at Conduit (Italy)
- Emiliano comes from a researcher background with strong technical knowledge and experience in web3 security since 2020. He has been supporting and leading various war rooms, discovering security issues on Yearn and Synthetix.
And while we don’t have enough voting power to also help qualify the following 2, we’ve voted for them as well to indicate our strong support.
Caleb Lau - Software Developer at Etherscan (Malaysia)
- Like with the other nominees, Caleb has a very strong technical background, and he also has the experience of being on the security council as a member of the previous cohort.
Paul Imseih - Founder and Principal of Daimon Legal (Australia)
- In our opinion, Paul would make for a great addition to the council despite not having as strong technical knowledge as other nominees. Paul has provided legal advice and had leadership roles during cybersecurity incidents in the past which would make him a good fit for covering the legal aspect of any actions of the security council.