Security Council Elections - L2BEAT voting rationale thread

Note: I just realized I haven’t shared our rationale for Security Council elections during nominations phase, here I share just for sake of completeness. I will follow with rationale for the candidate elections in the next post.

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. For the security council elections we did consult our research team to make sure that our choices reflect the understanding and

As with the last elections for the Security Council, 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 who 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 reputations.
  • 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 the 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 time zones 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’ve decided to cast our vote for the following nominees,:

Bartek.eth

Bartek is one of the co-founders of L2BEAT and a prominent figure in the L2 ecosystem, having worked with virtually all L2s, including Arbitrum, since before their main net launch. He was also part of the past Security Council cohorts.

Alizk.eth

Ali comes from a strong technical and security-oriented background. He was also among our picks for the previous cohort of the Security Council.

jdetychey

Jerome has a big track record building in Ethereum ecosystem, including running one of the biggest crypto conferences, and brings in a lot of experience from his tenure in similar roles.

Justin Leroux

Justin brings strong technical knowledge and security experience.

The following nominees were already qualified by the time we cast our vote so we couldn’t vote for them, but we wanted to signal our support here instead.

Emiliano Bonassi

Emiliano comes from a researcher background with strong technical knowledge and experience in web3 security since 2020 and he was one of our picks for the last cohort as well.

Open Zeppelin

Open Zeppelin is an industry-leading blockchain security firm with extensive experience and expertise in the space.

Yoav.eth

Yoav has been a Security Council member since its formation and comes from a security and research background.

Certora

Certora is a formal verification tool and smart contract audit firm. They have strong technical experience and make for a good candidate.

Fred

Fred is a long-time contributor to Arbitrum, being the former tech lead at Offchain Labs and the current tech lead for the Arbitrum Foundation. He’s very familiar with Arbitrum’s codebase and has a lot of experience with cyber security. Although associated with the Foundation, Fred is going independent in April.

Zellic

Zellic is another top-tier security firm that has extensive technical knowledge and experience. They’re also a founding member of the Security Alliance (SEAL) with a 24/7 emergency hotline for help with incident response, vulnerability disclosure, and other security concerns which makes them a perfect fit.

Raf Solari

Raf brings over 15 years of software engineer experience and he’s the CTO of Tally, which is the backbone of Arbitrum’s on-chain governance. Raf is very familiar with Arbitrum, its DAO, the smart contracts, and the security model.

Disclaimer

Keep in mind that these are our picks for the first phase of the Security Council elections, and we might change or consolidate our voting power during the second phase where the member election takes place.