Arbitrum: an L1 recovery path for governance if L2 and the Council are stuck

The vote, as read on 28 October 2026

• For210.6m100%
• Abstain846.6<0.1%
• Against9.7k<0.1%

Voting power, not people: 1,035 votes cast.

Offchain Labs posted a Constitutional AIP on the ArbitrumDAO forum on 2 October 2026, proposing an L1 voting recovery system. The system would let ArbitrumDAO proposals be created, voted on, queued and executed from Ethereum L1 if L2 governance and the Security Council are both unable to act. The forum thread fed into a Snapshot temperature check that ran 15 to 22 October 2026 and closed with almost all voting power For. The proposal still needs a security audit, a finalized executable payload, and a separate Constitutional onchain vote before it can be deployed.

What it changes

• Adds a new L1 Voting Procedure to Section 2 of the ArbitrumDAO Constitution, alongside the existing L2 AIP process, which stays unchanged
• New contracts: L1ArbitrumGovernor, L1ArbitrumTimelock, DelegateMapping, L2StateMirror, ProofHelper and VotingTokenMirror, deriving voting power from ARB delegations proven on L1 against confirmed Arbitrum assertions
• Deployment parameters: a 17-day voting delay, a 21-day voting period, a 25-day L1 timelock delay, a quorum numerator of 5000 (50%), and a minimum and maximum quorum of 150 million and 450 million ARB
• The new L1 timelock receives the executor role on both the existing L1 and L2 upgrade executors
• Delegates using contract addresses register an L1 voting address through DelegateMapping on Arbitrum One; delegates using externally owned accounts can register with an EIP-712 signature instead
• Does not replace the ordinary L2 AIP process and does not modify the Security Council's powers under the Constitution
• Offchain Labs says it did the engineering and research at no explicit or additional cost to the DAO

The case for it

Offchain's motivation section argues the DAO currently has no independent way to fix a broken governance system if both of its safeguards fail at once: "a simultaneous failure of L2 governance and the Security Council could prevent the DAO from repairing its governance contracts." The stated goal, in the proposal's own rationale, is to "maintain an always-available L1 governance path so that it remains accessible during an emergency."

The objections

cp0x supports the direction but, in a reply, flagged a gap between the proposal's stated purpose and its constitutional text: "the motivation describes the L1 path as a last resort, while the constitutional text makes it available at any time in addition to the ordinary process." It also asked for the affected governed chains to be confirmed, since the draft still read "to be confirmed" past the point the proposal said that would happen, and for the AIP-pending rule to be fixed so a stalled recovery proposal is not blocked from resubmission indefinitely.

GMX's governance committee, echoing concerns also raised by Arb_Junior, TodayInDeFi and cp0x, pointed to the lack of a maximum age on the L1-confirmed state used for voting, saying in its post: "since there is no maximum assertion age, delegations can change on Arbitrum without being reflected on L1 if confirmations stall, so a proposal could be voted on with voting power that is weeks or months out of date." It suggested each L1 proposal display the date of the confirmed assertion behind its voter snapshot. Offchain Labs had answered earlier: "There is no maximum assertion age and nothing pauses: checkpoints fall back to the last confirmed assertion, so the L1 route still works when the rollup stalls."

Where it stands

The Snapshot temperature check ran 15 October 2026 to 22 October 2026 on the arbitrumfoundation.eth space and closed with about 210.6 million ARB of voting power For, about 9,716 ARB Against and about 847 ARB Abstain, out of 1,035 votes. The latest reply in the forum thread is dated 27 October 2026.

The proposal's own implementation steps place a security audit and finalized technical specification between the temperature check and a final vote, and its timeline lists the "Constitutional on-chain vote" as following "successful technical review, audit, testing, and publication of the executable payload," with the final Constitutional AIP then submitted through the DAO's standard governance process. The proposal lists the security audit and testing as ongoing and gives no date for the onchain vote.