Abana Philemon O

Surely one of the most complex decisions ever made in Arbitrum governance history but a few things worth noting: 1. To all those screaming for the past few days “Arbitrum has a centralized sequencer so they can move funds”, take a few minutes to learn how Arbitrum works. The sequencer has absolutely no power to move funds and was not the one who acted here. 2. The decision to act was made entirely by the Arbitrum Security Council, a group of 12 individuals elected by the Arbitrum DAO (the annual election is currently underway — vote now!), which required 9/12 of them to agree. The council is independent from the Arbitrum Foundation and Offchain Labs (1/12 of the elected members is an OCL engineer), and came to this decision by themselves after much deliberation. You may not like the existence of security councils and you can form your own opinion on whether you agree with their actions, but this process was extremely distributed and coordinated by independent actors, and ina world where security councils exist, Arbitrum’s is a masterclass on how a truly independent security council should operate. 3. For many, the ultimate goal is to get rid of the security council entirely, but this is complicated. Technically it’s easy — the security council is elected by the DAO and operates at its pleasure, and the DAO can turn it off at any time. But the harder question is _should_ the DAO do that? L1s have the ability to hard fork. Security councils control the analogous power for the L2. If you get rid of it, you lose the ability to hard fork. You can still update the chain via DAO vote but that’s a slow process and you can no longer do fast emergency actions (which includes both actions like the security council took today as well as the ability to quickly upgrade the code in case an exploitable vulnerability in the software stack is discovered). As I’ve said many times, the best path that I see to getting rid of security councils is for the L1 itself to take on this burden for its most important L2s (as defined by objective criteria). In that case, in the case of a vulnerability or an exploit the conversation for L1 and L2 will be identical — does this warrant an L1 hard fork. I’m hopeful that we can reopen this conversation in the coming weeks.