Arbitrum Foundation Promises New Voice, No ‘Near Term’ ARB Sale Amid Community Uprising

Following a noisy uprising by holders of its ARB token, the Arbitrum Foundation said late Sunday it would split the mooted governance package into separate votes in response to community demand.

The Community Leader, identified on Discord as Eli Defi, said, “AIP-1 is too long and covers too many areas. We will follow the advice of the DAO and divide the AIP into sections. The Foundation, a centralized business tasked with promoting the purportedly decentralized environment of Arbitrum, conducted a “ratification” vote over previous choices, including sending around $1 billion of tokens to itself, sparking days of outrage among the Arbitrum community.

Arbutrim recognizes that the vote “is unlikely to pass” and vowed to hold a iteration of every component of the omnibus bill “early this week” as the bill heads for a landslide rejection Sunday.

It was enough to coax some strong voices. One of Arbitrum DAO’s largest delegates and pseudonym ChainLinkGod told CoinDesk in a Telegram chat that the foundation “listens to the community and adopts our feedback.”

I think this is a good step in the right way, said ChainLinkGod. Eli DeFi stated in the Discord thread that a separate vote will now be required for the allocation of 750 million ARB tokens. He noted that Foundation tokens would not be used in voting and said, “We are working on alternatives to provide additional accountability.” The Foundation starts spending and sending tokens even before the current vote takes place, therefore it is assumed that it will have some control over the amount (the current vote considers this a giveaway).

The Arbitrum Foundation is committed to “providing context on how funds will be used”, as well as “transparency reporting” on the Foundation’s budget. The “special grants” program, which has been at the center of controversy, will be renamed the “Ecosystem Development Fund.”

The statement stated, “Despite this communication failure, we will continue to actively pursue this goal. The intention of installing Arbitrum DAO is to lead by example to build the most decentralized rollup possible.

The Arbitrum Foundation added assurances that there are “no short-term plans to sell more tokens,” in response to the controversy over the sale of ARB worth millions of dollars without community permission for “operational purposes.”