Abstract

The Arbitrum DAO voted to delegate 7,000,000 ARB from its treasury to Event Horizon’s Voter Enfranchisement Pool in September 2024 for one year. At the time of posting this proposal, Event Horizon’s pool is the 19th biggest delegate by voting power, with almost all of the voting power being due to the ARB delegated from the treasury.

This proposal seeks to officially approve the pivot from the original proposal toward agentic governance and potentially significantly reduce the voting power delegated to Event Horizon’s pool.

Motivation

The main motivation behind Event Horizon’s proposal, according to them, is that

…there are likely tens of thousands more incredibly talented community members who are very capable of adding to the collective cognition of the ecosystem, but simply lack the capital means to have a voice and are left discouraged from voting at all.

This is also the premise on which we (L2BEAT) decided to vote in favor of the original proposal — to experiment with enabling many community members to participate meaningfully in governance.

We haven’t seen the program fulfill this premise so far. Moreover, we understand that the program pivoted towards AI-agentic voting, which was not in the scope of the original proposal. Although we think the pivot is a good approach, we believe it deserves to be ratified by the DAO, and the voting power dedicated to Event Horizon should be adjusted until the community can get more context on and through the AIG proposal.

Regardless of how the original experiment went, we appreciate Event Horizon’s willingness to find a way to make it work. We have been communicating with them over the past few months, and we appreciate their enthusiasm for helping increase governance participation. We see value in them continuing experimentation with agentic governance, but at a point where it does not significantly impact the DAO.

Rationale

Simply put, a lot has changed since Event Horizon presented its original proposal. We think it’s reason enough to justify revisiting the topic of the voting power delegated to Event Horizon’s pool.

The DAO can discuss whether we should keep delegating the same amount of voting power to the voting block, amend the delegated amount, or wind down the whole initiative and return the ARB to the treasury.

Specifications

After posting this proposal to the forum, we’ll post a Snapshot vote with the following options on May 29th.

A) Do nothing - acknowledge the pivot but keep the same amount of VP delegated to EH.

B) Acknowledge the pivot and reduce delegation to 100,000 ARB.

A voting power of 100,000 ARB would keep Event Horizon among meaningful-sized delegates but would not put them in a position to swing any vote decisively.

C) Wind down the whole thing and return the ARB to the treasury.

---

• If the proposal’s outcome is ‘A’, EH’s pivot will be ratified, but no change to VP will be introduced.
• If the proposal’s outcome is ‘B’, the MSS will return the 6,900,000 ARB (7,000,000 minus the 100,000 delegated to Event Horizon) from the respective Safe to the DAO’s treasury.
• If the proposal’s outcome is ‘C’, the MSS will return the entire 7,000,000 ARB to the DAO’s treasury.

The DAO will incur no overhead in terms of resources or additional costs for executing this proposal.

Timeline

May 22 - 29 → Forum Discussion

May 29 - June 5 → Snapshot Vote

June 6 → Appropriate action by the MSS if needed