Arbitrum: a path to resume Stylus contract activations after the Council's pause

Offchain Labs posted a Constitutional AIP on the ArbitrumDAO forum on 23 October 2026, proposing a way to resume new Stylus smart contract activations on Arbitrum One. The Security Council had paused new Stylus activations on Arbitrum One and Nova on 2 October 2026. The proposal would reopen activations through a new contract gated by a limited security audit and a signature from the Arbitrum Foundation, rather than lifting the pause outright. As of 28 October 2026, the proposal has not yet gone to a Snapshot temperature check.

What it changes

• Installs a new Stylus Activation Contract: developers submit a valid activation signature through it to activate a new Stylus smart contract
• Delegates the right to issue activation signatures to a multisig controlled by the Arbitrum Foundation; the DAO can change or revoke this delegation at any time through a constitutional vote
• Applies only to Arbitrum One, using capabilities already in ArbOS 61, so no ArbOS upgrade is needed; Arbitrum Sepolia is out of scope but will follow the same process; Arbitrum Nova is out of scope because it is minimized, and independently governed Arbitrum chains are handled separately
• Each new Stylus contract must first pass a limited audit by an Arbitrum Security Program auditor, who posts a pass or fail result on the forum; the audit checks whether the code threatens the Arbitrum network's stability and security, and is not a review of the contract's business logic
• Already-activated Stylus contracts are unaffected: they keep running and can still be renewed through the existing keepalive mechanism
• The Stylus Activation Contract itself will get an independent security audit from Trail of Bits, to be published, along with its source code and deployment addresses, before the onchain vote
• The proposal asks for no new DAO funding; the Arbitrum Foundation and its service providers own the engineering and audit coordination

The case for it

The post frames the mechanism as a way to keep building on Stylus while responding to a new kind of risk: "we remain confident in its value and want to preserve these use cases while taking preventive measures to help prevent Stylus-based attack vectors as AI-assisted attack tooling continues to quickly and impactfully evolve." It also notes the pause has so far been precautionary rather than a response to a loss: "to date, no known and reported bugs have affected or put at risk any user funds," though known bugs have affected chain liveness.

The objections

alex17hourslab, in a reply on 26 October, asked for the operating rules to be published before delegates vote rather than after the AIP passes: "could the Foundation publish the proposed activation Terms of Use, or at least the criteria for issuing or withholding signatures, a target turnaround after a passing audit, and an appeal or escalation path." The reply points out that the signing delegation has no automatic expiry, and argues that seeing the rules in advance would let delegates weigh the chain-liveness benefit against the access and delay costs builders could face.

Where it stands

The proposal is still in forum discussion. It was posted on 23 October 2026. On 28 October the Arbitrum Foundation replied that it will issue an activation signature once a Security Auditor confirms a pass and the developer has cleared basic due diligence, and that it will "publish the Terms of Use shortly". It gave no target turnaround and no appeal path. No Snapshot proposal for it exists yet.

The post's own steps-to-implement section lists forum discussion as the current step, to be followed by a Snapshot temperature check, then finalizing and testing the Stylus Activation Contract and its Trail of Bits audit, and then an on-chain vote: "following a successful temperature check and completion of the implementation materials, submit the Constitutional AIP for an on-chain vote." After that, the plan calls for a governance-execution step to configure the activation mechanism on the affected chains, with new activations only able to begin once that process and the activation mechanism are both operational.