Entropy is providing this update on behalf of the reviewing committee. Going forward, monthly updates will be published based on month-end data rather than mid-month.
Reports
In April, the Watchdog program received 8 new reports. This brings the total number of submitted reports (unique + duplicates) to 86 and the number of unique cases up from 59 to a total of 67. There was a notable jump in new submissions following the publication of the retrospective, but all of the new reports were still in relation to the historic incentive programs. They mostly concerned simple late distributions of rewards by teams, which the committee considers minor administrative errors consistent with the patterns described in the retrospective.
Over the last month, the reviewing committee completed its investigation of 14 reports, 10 of which were found to be valid cases of misuse and the other 4 not valid. As of April 30th, the committee has closed nearly all of its outstanding investigations, with only 2 reports still under review. In total the committee has completed 65 investigations, 42 of which were found to involve some form of misuse, while the other 23 were considered not valid.
As announced on April 20th, the time-frame limit on eligible reports goes into effect at the end of Sunday, May 10th at 11:59 pm UTC. Reporters with findings related to programs or incidents prior to 2025 should submit before that deadline.
Finances
The following is a breakdown of the Watchdog Program’s finances over the last several months. All numbers are denominated in ARB and assumes a price of $0.12 for earmarked payments
In April, the Watchdog Program recovered 35,049 ARB, bringing the total recovery to 457,365 ARB. The Arbitrum Foundation processed a substantial portion of previously earmarked bounty payments during April, with 193,985 ARB paid out to reporters over the month. As a result, earmarked payments to reporters now stand at ~10,568 ARB, reflecting the few cases where we are still waiting for the reporter to reach out to complete the KYC process. We’re continuing to message these reports and have notified them of the new 3-month KYC deadline, which was put into effect as of the April 20th update. Outstanding opex sits at ~30,498 ARB. All together, this brings the working budget of the program to ~476,481 ARB.
Operational Updates
SeedGov announced an internal restructuring that led the organization to step down from their role in the Watchdog. However, Ministro will continue to fill the same responsibilities, just in an individual capacity. As program manager, Entropy felt that no other actions or replacements were necessary. Additionally, we’re beginning to transition responsibilities of the Watchdog to the OpCo as their team has now been onboarded to the Globaleaks platform, meaning they are capable of taking on any cases that do not involve the historic incentive programs or other pre-2025 grants. As a whole though, the current reviewing committee will continue to work alongside OpCo so that the transition can happen smoothly. The Arbitrum Foundation will remain involved for legal and technical support, meaning that they will still be the entity that technically hosts & manages the Watchdog Portal, in addition to relationship/stakeholder support as necessary, while Ministro will still be leveraged in the event a report requires extensive onchain analysis.