# ArbitrumDAO: A Year Review with Lessons Learnt, Interesting Research Questions & Fut... | Devcon SEA

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-09
- Duration: 27:08
- Topics: Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-DNHso6qvJ3M
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNHso6qvJ3M

## Description

The ArbitrumDAO was born in March 2023.  To date, the DAO has voted on 280+ temperature checks (snapshot), 40+ on-chain proposals (tally) & allocated 400m ARB. We take this time to reflect on a few questions:

- Why should an L2 care about governance with on-chain voting?
- How is the DAO's organisational structure evolving over time?
- What does a DAO like to vote on? 
- Can too much decentralization lead to oscillation? 

Finally, a list of interesting research questions for others to tackle.

Speaker(s): Patrick McCorry
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Coordination
Keywords: DAO, Governance, Decentralization, organisation

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## Transcript

[Music] um who's heard of a DA before raise your hand if you've heard of dows and then raise your hand if you've had a positive experience in a dow some people bless hands exactly you know Dows are you know you love them or you hate them and hopefully we'll explore that during the talk so just to get started what I want to talk about today is the following you know why is you rups care about Dows and then I want to get into the Dow itself you know what do we mean by autonomy decentralization and then organization as well so I started the Arbitron Foundation just about two years ago and I'm not a dow person you know I don't know anything about Dows certainly when I joined anyway so I joined the foundation and if anyone remembers you know the arbitrum Dow rejected our funding that was a great experience then after all that heated you know discussion I sat there and thought why have we got a DA like why should I care for this da why is this Dow important so I want to sort of answer this question how I thought about it about two years ago and it starts with how do you govern code and how do you govern the live deployment of code so let's start with code I'm sure most people here are familiar with GitHub you go on the website you look at a repo you look at the code you flick around you're like okay this is roughly how it works so you can get an idea how it works you know anyone can read anyone can figure out what's going on if you're a dev then the next part is how do you govern this code how do you decide you know how to merge code and upgrade the code so anyone can typically submit a pool request you look at the code you find a bug you Fork the code you fix it and then you do a pool request and then typically you have these code owners so these are the code owners for go ethereum you know they'll eventually say okay that's a good Chang the code I'll approve it and then it gets merged in so anyone can contribute to it and there's this governance process you know these code owners who can decide the merge in your code now what's also cool about open source software is that anyone can download the code run the code and you know do what they want with their deployment so these are the instructions for go ethereum you can download it and create your own local test net so maybe as a gug here who's ever done that who's downloaded go ethereum compiled the code and run it for your own local network one person two people there you go people have done it you know it's great you can do your own live deployment but then the question is what if there's you know how many meaningful deployments are there off that code and typically in crypto there's one meaningful deployment you know there's only one Bitcoin only one ethereum and of course there's only one arbitrum as well and then this raises a new question if there's only one deployment of the code how do we govern that how do we decide upgrades to the code and how do we change the code now this is a governance problem and the first way every project solves it is that it's centralized so if you think when Bitcoin was launched in 2009 it was satachi Nakamoto on an IRC Channel this is Source forged so this is the one from 2009 where you can see you know satachi Nakamoto updating the code he you know update the code he go on IRC and say guys if you're running a node here's a new version please upgrade so centrally orchestrated ethereum was the same and of course all the rollups are very similar as well from the get-go so you typically start off with centralized governance but then how do you you know get decentralized so in many crypto projects like Bitcoin and ethereum we have this process called rough consensus and rough consensus is a bit like a game of hot potato no one wants to take responsibility to decide who upgrades the software so what you typically do is you get the potato you pass it around and you just hope it doesn't land at you so in rough consensus today you typically get you know consensus amongst the cevs consensus amongst the token holders consensus amongst the community and consensus among you know the companies and the daps and the ecosystem and once everyone's sort of roughly agreed to say you know I sort of want this to happen you pick a flag day so you could say the 1 of December and at the Flag Day the upgrade should be activated so in advance everyone you know upgrades their nodes in anticipation of the Flag Day Flag Day happens the upgrade occurs it's rough consensus it's obscure on purpose to avoid governance attacks and also because no one wants to take the responsibility to decide this upgrade should happen another approach is Onan voting you know what if you could identify all the token holders the token holders cast a vote and they say oh I do want to upgrade the software I'm going to approve this that is basically Dows in a nutshell you have his on voting protocol you can cast your vote if the vote passes then you could you know process the upgrade on chain everyone has time to upgrade their offchain infrastructure but eventually the upgrade will occur and then obviously the system gets upgraded and so that's why you know from a software perspective why Dows are useful you know if a centralized approach th of consensus then eventually could have onchain voting and that's what Dows really care about or at least in arbitrum but wow Patrick you know onchain voting does that not impact the security of arbitrum because now I have all these token holders that can upgrade the software and of course it does but when you think about a rollup or any blockchain system to be honest there's two parts to the security the first one is the day-to-day operation what is the protocol protecting the funds is it proof of work proof of stick fraud proofs ZK proofs you know what is the protocol running most of the time that protects the protects the assets under the hoot and then there's always governance not .01% of the time human intervention social consensus where we all have to reach agreement to say oh it's time to upgrade the software add a feature fix a bug or you know fix a critical vulnerability as well and so governance is always part of a blockchain system you may to say there is no governance but then there's no way to upgrade the software as well so governance is always there you just need a process for it and of course Dows care about governance and they try to achieve this you know voting protocol diverse population that's how you protect govern or you know governance for the software system so that's you know how I understood why Dows are useful for rollups but what about the arbitrum Dow you know how's it grown over the past two years and what do they like to vote on so this is the a you know endow autonomy now in my mind and you sort of got this already the Dow has two objectives first the Dao is the ultimate defender of arbitrum it's up to the Dao to decide if an upgrade occurs on the system that's their main purpose they don't really enjoy that but they're stuck with it the second thing they enjoy is that they get the monies their treasury you know back two years ago they were you know they were given 35% of all ARB and you can imagine people on the internet they like to write proposals they like to spend money and they like to have fun so this is the really juicy part and the really fun part so over the past year and eight months on the Forum there's been about 200 threads that are you know specific proposals for the Dow to consider there have been over 329 snapshot proposals no temperature checks where people have had to vote there have been around 50 Tali proposals a Tali proposal you know C pass or feel that's where you spend the money you take the money from the treasury or you upgrade the software and to dat they've spent around 700 million ARB although a lot of that ARB is locked into initiatives so not really spent but allocated but that's crazy that activity is nuts on our is four proposals a week like I don't know how the delegates keep up to be honest because we struggle to keep up and it's our full-time job so our Dow is overly active and they could be less active at this point you know work out more meaningful proposals that go through the the Dow but they're alive they're well and they're doing stuff and what do they like to spend their money on you know they love incentive grants they funded crypto legal defense they have their own independent Grant programs they love real world assets blockchain gaming they like the fund us the arbiton foundation you know they rejected us initially but we're there now and they like us and of course security audits as well and a bunch of other stuff and probably the most important thing in our Dow and I I think it's sort of underappreciated or people aren't really aware when we started two years ago we made the explicit decision not to get involved in our Dow we were not going to get involved in governance we were going to you know not write proposals and let the Dow do their thing and um I feel like the first three months from like I's say March till September it's bit like a game of chicken we're waiting for the you know the contributors to do something the comput contributors were waiting for us to do something and we never moved and we didn't do anything and then around September and then over the summer there were some proposals some minute but by September last year you know one delegate put in a proposal for one of the incentive programs it eventually passed I think that was I forget now I think it like 60 million ARB or something it was like a huge proposal but then the then the contributors and delegates realized oh we can do this you know we can submit a proposal we can discuss the proposal we can vote on The Proposal we can take the money from the treasury and only after the proposal passed does the arbitr foundation step in and we do our best to help them and I believe that's what led to the success of our daa did because people realized oh they really have autonomy and they can really do cool stuff you know in our foundation we have about four people in the governance team there's no way we wrote 300 proposals so it's really exciting to see people step up and kick us and they are active so this is like a governance call they 47 people on it talking about funding stylists you know that's the AL alt VM for arbitrum another call where they're talking about Ops for governance this has about 40 people on the call uh they've ran their own hackathons they run their own delegate days our forum is extremely active we probably get 20 to 50 posts a day and actually for the hackathon the judges for The hackathon no one works at the Arbitron Foundation no one works even at offchain Labs their country uors and delegates in the Dow and they consider themselves arbitrum part of the community and they're judging arbitrum proposals I found this on the internet I thought it was funny Everyone likes to Pepe the Frog hi frogs and they're funding stuff that we have no involvement in so davriel uni got funded by the arbitrum Dow they funded their own booth the arbitrum Dow Booth they fund getcoin rounds and even like educational programs in Nigeria and there's a host of other stuff there's funding stuff and then I find out about a four weeks later I'm like oh what are these guys up to oh that's a great Booth you know it's really cool to see people actually do stuff and we're not even aware of it now after two years the way I like to think about the development of the Dow is that in the first two years or year and a half we've done a really good job or at least you know I make it look nice because we also have lots of mistakes but overall I think we've done a pretty good job of enabling the Dow to build their own identity they are a collective they recognize they're part of the Dow they can contribute and they can do stuff now over the past year the Dow keeps asking us the foundation to be more involved you know they're like oh Foundation we want your advice we want you on the Committees we actually want you to start getting involved and so now I believe we're at a point where we can be more involved you know the Dow now has an identity where they're not going to rubber stomp stuff we're going to give them our feedback our comments our opinions they want to take it g if they don't they can ignore us but now I think we're at the point where we can help them more and hopefully get them aligned on a certain direction where we can all kick ass together but that's taken about a year and eight months to get to that point and now to their to their desire we're actually going to try to help them more which for me is really exciting now what about decentralization what does that mean in a DA so when you think of decentralization you typically think oh let's get the world population and get it in the Dow you know that's what most people think when you think of decentralization for a dow but the question is what monor what monor are we bringing these people to the Dow and is that even a good idea and there's two ways to think about it you could decentralize the decision-making process or you could work for the da as well you know you could be employed by a DA and have your income there so for decision making what you really end up with there voting blocks you know like any political process you end up a voting blocks where contributors have a certain view other contributors have aligned views they sort of naturally become a collective and they sort of vote in certain directions and I think for decentralization of a DA what you really want to do is recognize these voting blocks and try to maximize the participation in these voting blocks to make sure you can always reach some type of decision either yes or no or they are forced to make some type of compromise and actually sometime last year someone me this joke to me when of the delegates he said the arbitrum Dow has four political parties and I don't know who those political parties are I have a rough idea but it's not well defined but you could find that out you know if you're a researcher you could look at the voting records the telegram messages the the discourse the form analyze it and start to identify who are these voting blocks and political parties in the Dow and actually the voting block idea comes from this paper I have no involvement in it the paper has two great insights decentralization for Dow should be defined by voting blocks and they have a certain way to meure entropy but also they highlight delegation in a dow so if I delegate my vote to someone else actually improves decentralization overall where normally when you look at that mechanism you think oh does that not centralize it because now one party has too many votes so I recommend reading that it's a great paper but most importantly when it comes to like diversity of views in the Dow you want to make sure that there's not too many cooks cuz if there's too many views and too many opinions you osculate the process becomes paralyzed and then you make no decision at all and everything comes to a halt but of course at the same time not everyone should have the same opinion because then there's no discussion and everything you know passes and obviously then you know they're not very good proposals so you want to make a bit of something in between and of course it's hard to create that but also decentralization is about execution I know ethereum's done a great job of this so the question is who is working towards the success of arbitrum and long and right now we have multiple ORS we have the foundation the Dow offchain La entropy advisers the gcp all these committees and long term you would like to think well if the Arbitron Foundation disappeared with the Dow survive and continue and I would like to think at some point we can get to that and that's also another form of decentralization there's enough orgs out there working on behalf of the ecosystem and there's not a single point of failure but now this brings me to the important question how do you get hired by a dow and what does the orc chart look like so I put this tweet up earlier this year in January because I recognized that in our Dow there's lots of these side gigs you know you perform a task you get 10K you perform another task you get 40K and sometimes you're like oh damn this Dow pays really well but where the applicants why is no one applying for these opportunities and obviously when you ask on Twitter you get everyone's opinion which is why I you know I get a good giggle out of it sometimes so here are some of the comments I got and the summary is that getting hard getting hire by a DA is hard now there's a lot to read there so I summarized it so in the top left comment he basically says PTY why would I spend three months trying to work for a DA to eventually get hired to then only get 1.5 times my salary like three months of free unpa work it's too much for a sight pay rise it's not worth it no thank you don't want to deal with the Dow on the top right hand side you know the poster basically said PTY the Dow is full of politics I have the good of the Dow I basically have the bag to people on the internet that get a salary no thanks I don't want to beg I just want to earn some money then at the bottom the P poster said well you know the D's scary there's a huge learning curve there's a scary form I don't even know where to start where can I find these pair opportunities so then after I got all those comments I st back and thought well what do most people want like in this room what do most people want in life most people either want a hobby do something fun or have a sidekick today most contributors in our Dow fit that category they want a side gig they want have some fun they're just genuinely interested in being in a dow the V majority of people want some formal employment you know they want a job hosting they want to apply for the job they want to be interviewed by a small panel they want to get hired you know have stable income health benefits just want to be a normal employee and the irony is for the past 10 years in crypto we finally got to the point where most people in this room can work for a crypto company and have a stable job I don't know if you were here in 2015 but getting a job was impossible today so many jobs and now in Dows we've basically said oh well let's forget about that you know we finally solved the problem of employing people but you know what we're just going to go back to Dows and not employ anyone but most people want to be employed and so most Dow contributors they're actually more like entrepreneurial Spirit you know a contributor is willing to go to the Dow submit a proposal pivot pivot pivot get rejected get rejected again then eventually get their proposal passed and then have the opportunity to run their initiative but most people can't do that you know unfortunately to the people in this room you know most people just what a normal job they do want to fight with random people on the internet to get to run an initiative and you have to recognize that which is why Dows don't get huge you know like not many people work for a dow for that very reason so you could solve this and say well PTY why now just have a centralized org that can hire people and obviously that's not the solution you know the whole point of a DA was not to have a centralized org was to be decentralized so what happens then in practice and so over the past two years in arbitrum I basically came to this observation where the Dow's job is to create an orc chart through popular vote so every time the Dow wants to do something they either spin up a new committee like multi- service the procurement process treasury management or they spin up a new orc so we funded no when I say we the arbit da funded entropy advisers the ging catless fund purly labs and even the quby gr program and that's how or charger created end Dows and then you would like to think in the future if you want to work for the da you wouldn't go to the Dow itself you would find these orgs find these committees and just apply get the job and then go kick us so I see most people working for Dows via orgs and committees and not actually interacting with the Dow itself and that's basically my last slide I have a bunch of like interested things I find interesting anyway about Dows for example um I think this one's probably one of my more interesting ones at the moment so in Dows sentiment changes really fast 6 months ago the Dow wants to do a 6 months later a is toxic we should do B and that Overton window is so interesting to see how opinions change so fast that's really easy to measure you know you could just do analysis of the text and figure out why so I've ran out of time so now is the Q&A so there's any questions then I'm down down for a Q&A awesome that was was a great presentation uh on arbitrum Dow from the last year now there are a couple of questions but uh if you have any burning questions here for Patrick please um either scan this QR code or go into the Devcon app and just ask some questions using your zoo pass we already have one question here that is definitely the most highest voted which is a question that I think many of us have is how do you actually encourage active participation in the Dow given that most people simply care about making profits instead of actually being involved in the decision- making process which can be lengthy why should people care yeah exactly I think people should follow the money you know most people want to make an income they want to have a salary they want to be paid I think what's important is like most people want to be paid for their Merit and not their geographical location so if you have a skill that you can contribute to a community you should be paid for doing that and that's the same for Dows you know a lot of our contributors who interact with the Dow directly you know they eventually get a proposal passed and they get paid from that proposal and you should be paid from your proposal if you're going to run an initiative you should be able to make money for doing that so you know it's not an alteristic thing you just have the right to make some money just like everyone else you know Dows aren't free they're not voluntary trying to make some money if youon awesome thanks for that how do you verify that the decision makers really have the expertise to make the right decisions they may have the votes though oh 100% this is one huge issue for Dows so I think one of the problems we have now is is not even just expertise but uh when you have four proposals a week and now let's say 380 380 proposals over you know two years not only do they not have the expertise but they may also just not have the time to do their proper due diligence so I think what you really want is the Dow to vote on big important initiatives not small grants for example if there's a proposal to the Dow for $40k probably not worth the time of the Dow itself go to a ground program what you really want is then they vote on big proposals but also hire experts so in our Dow the Dow has hired the arc the arbitrum research development Collective and their job is to provide expert advice to delegates based on certain proposals that come along like Risk you know technical or even just economics or anything business but of course delegates themselves may not have that expertise and there's a huge risk in that and another one is we don't have it but you also have liquid democracy I know that's more experimental where I could delegate I vote on certain topics to certain people so that can help but that requires more participation we've got a lot of questions coming in here some of them actually aren't appearing right now on the screen so I'll ask one that's on the screen what would we need to develop uh Dow in a dictatorship country like Burma where we are not legally able to establish any sort of blockchain initiative to scale fund educate ourselves more about blockchain and Dows what we need to develop Dows I mean I'm not a lawyer so that's not really the one for the answer but what what I would say is you know Dows aren't restricted to your geographical location they're typically centered around topics so in our case we're centered around you know a rule up a software topic and that's what people interact with youve got a constitution now where just just again random people on the internet that wanted to buy the US Constitution but then they got rugged by you know Wall Street but they're mostly around like you know initiatives and not locations so that's probably the best way I can answer that gotcha I have a cheeky question here actually too how do you vet proposals to prevent malicious proposals from being pushed through but I have an addition to that question sorry um and that's how do you actually vet your contributors because increasingly we're seeing a lot of problems with contributors being uh not exactly the people you want contributing to your core projects and instead putting back doors in so I mean I mean I think that was like was that not tornado cash but they got rugged by their Dow proposal if I remember right yes tornado cash but there have been several other Dows that have been rugged like this so I think like at least in in the technical sense there's two as there's three aspects one we vet the code ourselves if it's going to go through because we need to protect our Dow they have the ardc I think is open Zeppelin right now that should also vet the code and sort of give a sign off to say it looks good um then the third one is like also like compliance isn't if you're going to get funds of someone then we take care of all the compliance needs and the legal agreements and everything else you know I I know someone in the audience who takes care of all of that for us uh w't Point them out but yeah generally it's uh and also the last one is our Dow has a maximum politeness policy so if you're not polite then you shouldn't be involved and that's done a really good job the make sure is not toxic H interesting we have one more I want to ask one more question while we're here um how do you get involved in darb arbitrum Dow to become a delegate how do you get involved in arbit oh sorry I read the wrong one how do you avoid political groups in the Dow having so much power so that they can block proposals sorry there's two sides of this isn't there so I was saying this to someone earlier in the hallway a dow is a representation of the values of that Community um so for example if you're interested in like defi you know smart contracts you probably end up in the arbitrum Dow if you're interested in I don't know uh something that's completely not arbitrum then you'll probably not join our community so what happens there is you just naturally get these political parties forming but what you really want is you want Poli party not political parties you want voting blocks there to make sure decisions do get made but you want to make sure they're diluted there shouldn't just be one party that can veto any proposal in the Dow and the only way to dilute them is through delegation and you have to really trust the token holders who are delegating for example we at the Arbitron Foundation we can't delegate so we can't impact how people vote at all but that really comes down to people delegating in a way that makes views more diverse but of course making sure the voting blocks can still exist so decisions can be made because otherwise you're paralyzed gotcha thank you thank you so much Patrick cool GG guys