I’ve been thinking about this for the past 2 days… agonizing over it really… and taking the risk of sounding really stupid, paranoid and even for sure indulging in some virtue signaling (which honestly, these are all “qualities” I know I have), here goes my current thinking on it:
it seems to me, that this proposal is some kind of trojan horse
why? well…
passing this proposal, like this, gives the still to be defined Arbitrum Developer Guild 20% of the 10% of the sequencer fees in these other blockchains, and I guess that this Arbitrum Developer Guild will then distribute that money in some still to be determined way that involves “the funds being appropriately distributed amongst its members” and by members they mean, core developers to Arbitrum that will have to go through some kind of membership application that is defined and controlled by someone? Offchain Labs? the Arbitrum Foundation? idfk…
The main problem is that this basically sounds like breaking the original promise of Arbitrum, where all of the fees will go to the Arbitrum DAO. It’s obviously not that simple, but that’s roughly the original intent of Arbitrum as an Ethereum L2 governed by a DAO, right? That’s what makes us different from… you know… the other Ethereum L2s, right?
See here for more details on the current fee distribution. There is no other precedent of sharing fees to any other entity other than the Arbitrum DAO, except for 20% of the L2 Base Fee in Arbitrum Nova, that goes “to parties running Nova Validators / the DAC”.
so… passing this proposal, this specific snapshot proposal that ends today, this offchain, non-constitutional quorum threshold bound, Arbitrum Foundation authored proposal… opens the door, and gives legitimacy, to change where the fees go… in ALL other blockchains that are not Ethereum… right?
keep in mind that, as far as I’m aware, the original Arbitrum Expansion Program was not voted on by the Arbitrum DAO. So as of today, it has no legitimacy whatsoever.
So, now… to come up with this proposal, calling it a “change” to a non legitimized program that the Arbitrum Foundation announced in January in a forum post that had literally zero feedback from delegates on it… is kinda weird, no?
Even more, to make it an offchain only vote, and bound to the lowest non-constitutional quorum threshold… even weirder…
Am I the crazy one here? I’m fully aware that I’m sounding like this guy… so please… tell me what I’m missing in here… I really hope I’m missing something here… please… I beg you…
and also… of course… this proposal passing gives legitimacy to the possibility that Arbitrum could stop being the Ethereum L2 that it is, and becoming something else… something we still don’t know what it is, how much effort it’s gonna take, how much of a priority it’s gonna be for OCL and the Foundation, etc, etc…
as I said before, in my opinion, this proposal violates the first community value in our constitution, of being “Ethereum-aligned”. and the more I look into this proposal… the weirder it gets.
this proposal should not pass. if it passes, it will change the direction of Arbitrum substantially.