The following 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.
We are voting AGAINST this proposal and encourage delegates who voted in favor of it to reconsider their position.
First of all, we’d like to point out that we wouldn’t need to have this discussion if the Arbitrum license was simply free and permissionless. If the goal is to spread Arbitrum technology, then this would probably be the best course of action. If we were discussing opening the license, then we would be supportive, but that’s not what we’re discussing right now.
We believe that extending the Arbitrum Expansion Program to non-Ethereum chains is a huge mistake. Not only is it a distraction from building on and growing Ethereum, but it potentially supports Ethereum’s direct competitors, including centralized and permissioned ones.
Arbitrum invested immense amounts of time and resources to build permissionless fraud proofs with BoLD, and we are paying millions in ETH to settle transactions on the mainnet for a reason. Now, if this proposal passes, we’re sending a signal that all of this is unnecessary as, apparently, chains can settle, for example, to Binance Smart Chain, and they could even get Arbitrum Foundation’s support to do so. What should we do that for? For some doubtful future income from sequencer fees? We should be working on converting users from those other chains, not incentivizing them to go there.
Furthermore, this is just an unnecessary distraction. We have a lot to do in Ethereum alone, and we should not spread ourselves thin trying to build our presence in other ecosystems. Arbitrum has a very strong position as an Ethereum L2, and in our opinion, the DAO and the Foundation should focus on using this advantage instead of building from scratch elsewhere.
We assume that if we change the expansion program to allow deployments of Orbit chains on any blockchain, the Foundation will be involved in managing these Orbit chains (at least for validating and collecting revenue). Consequently, the Foundation would then, at one point, probably turn to the DAO for additional support, be it in terms of money or other resources. We do not want to allocate time and/or resources to such deployments as we feel it’s not prudent to do so.
Lastly, we don’t agree that we should try to hedge the risk of Ethereum losing its position to other chains. In our view, Ethereum is our best bet right now to ensure that the future of finance is built on a truly decentralized, permissionless, trustless, credibly neutral layer. If, instead, it ends up being built on Binance Smart Chain or something similar, then it doesn’t matter if Arbitrum secures its’ position there, as that would be a case of winning a battle but losing the war.