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Governance Article

13 min read • Published on 30 Jun 2025

Governance Review #58

Avatar of Manuel Gonzalez

Manuel Gonzalez

Governance Representative


ETHCC slowed the activity down a bit, but there is still a beat.

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Optimism

Active Votes

Season 8/9 Grants Council Charter - ends on July 2 at 18:57 UTC.

Season 8/9 Milestones and Metrics Council Charter - ends on July 2 at 18:57 UTC.

Governor Update Proposal: Removing Abstain Count from Quorum - ends on July 2 at 18:57 UTC.

Season 8/9 Developer Advisory Board Charter - ends on July 2 at 18:59 UTC.

Season 8: Intent Ratification - ends on July 2 at 19:31 UTC

Governor Update Proposal: Removing Abstain Count from Quorum

Agora created a proposal asking delegates to approve a one-line tweak to the Optimism Governor: exclude Abstain votes from quorum math. Currently, every Abstain increases the “votes cast” total, which ironically lowers the Yes/No threshold and can tip the outcome. The patched contract—already deployed, audited by Trust, and carrying no state changes—counts only ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ toward quorum, keeping ‘Abstains’ truly neutral. If governance signs off, the Foundation will point the proxy to the new implementation with zero downtime.

Collective Year 3 Budget Update and Year 4 Budget Outlook

The Optimism Foundation’s new budget post shows Year 3’s 229.9 M OP spend paying off: Superchain share leapt to 68 %, TVL hit $5.5 B, and protocol fees reached 17,756 ETH on the back of Base and OP Mainnet. With 91% of Retro Funding still unspent, the Foundation requests no new tokens for Year 4—just 51-81M OP from the existing Ecosystem Fund. The lion’s share (25-50M OP) targets new chains and infra, 18M OP shores up the core stack, and 5-10M OP fuels user incentives, all aimed at making Superchain interoperability ubiquitous before July 2026. An ROI dashboard is expected to be released in Q4 2025, with a mid-year check-in scheduled for this December. Dive into the post for full tables and Budget Board notes.

Season 8 Developer Advisory Board Charter Amendment

Wildmolasses proposes a v1.4 rewrite that upgrades the Developer Advisory Board from sounding board to engine room. The new charter makes the DAB the primary gate for protocol upgrades—an optimistic 5-of-7 DAB vote now green-lights any change unless stakeholders intervene—and grants it complete control of “Developer Adoption Grants,” allowing it to fund audits, missions, and tooling on its terms. Board mechanics are tightened as well: at least seven independent members, Joint-House elections, and new conflict-of-interest rules that ban core developers and long-term grantees. Terms stretch to 12 months, covering Seasons 8-9, and all Season 7 cruft is stripped out.

Season 8 Milestones and Metrics Council Charter

PGov proposes a light-touch revamp that locks the M&M Council into Season 8’s governance plumbing. The charter now outlines a 5-of-7 multisig (4 M&M reviewers, 2 Grants-Council representatives, 1 DAB seat) and includes a “Signing Actions” checklist for weekly OP disbursements and grant-close payouts. The wording is reshuffled to match the new Foundation template, but the council size (lead + 3 reviewers), stipends, and retroactive bonuses remain mostly intact. Budget tweaks flagged for later: a small line item to keep the grants-claiming tool alive, funds for a data-dashboard build-out, and a baked-in “bridge” stipend so reviewers can cover the gap between seasons.

S7 Grants Council Impact Analysis

The Optimism Foundation, working with Open Source Observer, tallied up Season 7’s 17 TVL-focused grants (20 Mar – 12 Jun). The cohort attracted $65.3M in new Superchain deposits—approximately $1.58, $3.67, and $9.39 of net TVL per OP at the 25th, median, and 75th percentiles. Morpho-World ($44 / OP) and Euler ($24 / OP) top the chart, while Aerodrome and Uniswap pair solid inflows with the highest volume-to-TVL ratios, a signal that their liquidity may stick around. These benchmarks will steer Season 8 grant picks toward fatter returns.

Futarchy v1 Preliminary Findings

Elizaoak reported that Optimism’s first Futarchy contest drew 430 real forecasters (after weeding out 4,122 bots) who made 5,898 trades with OP-PLAY tokens during Season 7. Against the Grants Council’s parallel round, Futarchy picked two of the same grantees and three different ones—and those three drove $32.5 M more Superchain TVL after 84 days, thanks mainly to its outlier bet on Balancer & Beets. The flip side: predictions overshot reality by roughly $200, and the variance was wider. Futarchy snagged both the best and the worst performers. Lesson learned: markets can spot moon-shots, but real-stakes incentives and tighter sybil controls are needed for sharper forecasts. V2 will test “skin-in-the-game” rewards, bigger sample sizes, and cleaner outcome metrics before Futarchy takes on more Collective decisions.

Discuss with L2BEAT

You can find us to discuss everything related to Optimism’s governance, from current initiatives to high-level conversations, during our Optimism Office Hours every Tuesday at 3 pm UTC.

Arbitrum

Active Votes

Onchain

Register the Sky Custom Gateway contracts in the Router - ends on July 4 at 00:23 UTC.

AIP: Constitutional Quorum Threshold Reduction - ends on July 4 at 01:35 UTC.

Temp-check

Audit Committee Technical Expert Elections - ends on July 3 at 15:13 UTC.

Extend AGV Council Term and Align Future Elections with Operational Cadence - ends on July 4 at 06:28 UTC.

AIP: Disable Legacy Tether Bridge

The Arbitrum Foundation proposes discontinuing the old USDT bridge, now that the faster, OFT-based USDT0 route has been live since January. Leaving the legacy bridge in place forces seven-day withdrawals and can strand smart-contract deposits; a single DisableGatewayAction call (already audited) will instead cause any legacy deposit to revert instantly. If the Snapshot vote clears the 3 % quorum, the change will bundle into July/August’s upkeep vote on Tally and take effect one week after execution.

Proposal: Institutional $ARB Buyback via Bond Issuance

Espressoguy created a proposal with the idea that the Arbitrum DAO should act like a blue-chip treasurer: float zero-coupon convertible bonds with an institutional partner, then use the proceeds to scoop up $ARB on the open market. Most of the repurchased tokens would be burned, thereby tightening the 5 B-token float; a slice could be set aside in reserve for future incentives. The pitch mirrors MicroStrategy’s February debt raise. It aims to swap idle, $1.3 B-plus treasury assets for sustained buy-side demand—sending a loud “we’re long ARB” signal without immediate interest costs.

Proposal: Establishing the Arbitrum Ecosystem Fund

Crypto_Lilia created a post aimed at seeding a VC-run fund that backs builders on Arbitrum. Under the plan, the DAO would park part of its treasury with a top venture firm; the new vehicle would mix token grants, equity checks, and pilot-program financing across infra tools, DeFi, RWAs, gaming, and NFTs. Similar funds on Avalanche, Base, and Solana are cited as evidence that the model is effective. Goals: speed up product launches, diversify the app stack, and create steady buy-side demand for ARB as teams vest and spend their tokens.

Discuss with L2BEAT

You can find us to discuss everything related to Arbitrum’s governance, from current initiatives to high-level conversations, during our Arbitrum Office Hours every Thursday at 3 pm UTC.

Upcoming Events (Times in UTC):

Arbitrum DAO Delegates Dinner - on 30.6 at 18:00.

Uniswap

[RFC] Nibiru Application for Canonical Uniswap V3 Deployment

The Nibiru Foundation, with technical support from GFX Labs, has filed an RFC asking the Uniswap DAO to acknowledge the already-live v3 contract suite on the high-throughput, MultiVM Nibiru chain as an official “canonical” deployment. All contracts—from factory to router and NFT manager—are verified on-chain; the only DAO task is to add their addresses to v3-deployments.uniswap.eth. Nibiru’s 1.8 s blocks, EVM + Wasm support, and integrations with LayerZero, Stargate, and Hyperlane give Uniswap immediate access to cross-chain assets such as SyrupUSDC, oUSD, and uBTC, while planned front ends (Swify) and partners (LayerBank, Friendly, Ichi) aim to deepen liquidity and structured-product volume. No code changes or funding are requested—just a governance nod to make the deployment official.

Discuss with L2BEAT

You can find us to discuss everything related to Uniswap’s governance, from current initiatives to high-level conversations, during our L2BEAT Governance Office Hours every Friday at 3 pm UTC.

Hop

Hop’s governance hasn’t seen any new developments over the last week. If you believe we might have missed something, please let us know.

Discuss with L2BEAT

You can find us to discuss everything related to Hop’s governance, from current initiatives to high-level conversations, during our L2BEAT Governance Office Hours every Friday at 3 pm UTC.

Polygon

Polygon’s governance hasn’t seen any new developments over the last week. If you believe we might have missed something, please let us know.

Discuss with L2BEAT

You can find us to discuss everything related to Polygon’s governance, from current initiatives to high-level conversations, during our L2BEAT Governance Office Hours every Friday at 3 pm UTC.

Starknet

Introducing SN 0.13.6

Ohad-StarkWare announces a config-only upgrade that swaps in the new S-Two Circle-STARK prover. Blocks that once took ~24 minutes to prove with Stone are now cleared in under three minutes, and proving costs are projected to decrease by at least 50%. To stay within S-Two’s trace limits, the release enables per-builtin resource counting and temporarily disables Cairo Native (planned return in Q3 after extra counting logic ships). Gas prices and limits remain unchanged, allowing developers to achieve faster, cheaper finality with no contract migrations required. Further S-Two-friendly tweaks—like a new OS hash—are on the roadmap for v0.14.

SNIP 31: Bitcoin Staking on Starknet

NatanSW has created a proposal that introduces a native staking track for wrapped-BTC on Starknet: approved wrappers (WBTC, tBTC, LBTC, etc.) can be delegated to validators and earn STRK rewards, giving Bitcoin up to 20–25% of total staking power (α). STRK stakers retain their current APR; BTC rewards originate from an additional 0.5% inflation headroom, increasing the theoretical cap to 2.1%—still below the 4% ceiling. Safeguards include a 24-hour deposit delay and emergency delisting of compromised wrappers. Launch is targeted for Q3 2025, with Cairo contracts handling all logic on-chain.

Discuss with L2BEAT

You can find us to discuss everything related to Starknet’s governance, from current initiatives to high-level conversations, during our L2BEAT Governance Office Hours every Friday at 3 pm UTC.

Everclear

Everclear’s governance hasn’t seen any new developments over the last week. If you believe we might have missed something, please let us know.

Discuss with L2BEAT

You can find us to discuss everything related to Everclear’s governance, from current initiatives to high-level conversations, during our L2BEAT Governance Office Hours every Friday at 3 pm UTC.

Wormhole

Hardhat Cross-Chain Simulator Plugin

DappsoverApps proposes a $ 27,000 grant to build a lightweight Hardhat plugin that simulates Wormhole cross-chain messaging locally. Instead of spinning up Tilt’s heavy Docker/Kubernetes devnet or hand-crafting VAAs, developers would add the plugin and call await relayVAA(tx), letting tests capture LogMessagePublished, mint a mock VAA with the Wormhole SDK, and deliver it to the target chain—all inside Mocha/Chai. Milestones run from July 31 to October 4, with six months of maintenance. Success targets include 100 npm installs and 10 public repositories using the tool within three months. The team argues the plugin will halve debugging time, unblock CI pipelines, and bring Hardhat parity with Foundry’s Pigeon simulator, advancing Wormhole’s cross-chain developer experience.

Discuss with L2BEAT

You can find us to discuss everything related to Wormhole’s governance, from current initiatives to high-level conversations, during our L2BEAT Governance Office Hours every Friday at 3 pm UTC.

Lisk

Lisk’s governance hasn’t seen any new developments over the last week. If you believe we might have missed something, please let us know.

Discuss with L2BEAT

You can find us to discuss everything related to Lisk’s governance, from current initiatives to high-level conversations, during our L2BEAT Governance Office Hours every Friday at 3 pm UTC.

ZkSync

Proposal Review Call July 2nd

Shelby has opened the sign-up thread for the following standing ZKsync Proposal Review call. Authors with active or draft proposals can request a slot to present and gather delegate feedback. A tentative agenda already lists a walkthrough of the ZKnomics roadmap plus reminders about upcoming ZIP-level upgrades; the final lineup will be posted the morning of the call. Subscribe to the “ZKsync Delegates Calls” calendar for the link and dial-in details.

Discuss with L2BEAT

You can find us to discuss everything related to ZkSync’s governance, from current initiatives to high-level conversations, during our L2BEAT Governance Office Hours every Friday at 3 pm UTC.

Upcoming Events (Times in UTC):

Standing ZKsync Proposal Review Call - on 2.7 at 15:30

Scroll

Scroll Governance AI Tooling Survey – Results are out!

Jamilya shares the takeaways from a delegate survey. Every respondent was a Scroll delegate, and they are most active in reading, voting, and writing rationales. Pain points: summarising long threads (83 %), tracking deadlines (75 %), and parsing proposals (58 %). Delegates want AI that summarizes discussions and proposals (83%), issues voting-window notifications (67%), and offers topic-based alerts—preferably embedded in the forum. Ninety-two percent are ready to test early tools, but they reject automated rationales or “set-and-forget” voting. A one-minute follow-up poll is open now to rank which AI prototypes the team should build first.

Discuss with L2BEAT

You can find us to discuss everything related to Scroll’s governance, from current initiatives to high-level conversations, during our L2BEAT Governance Office Hours every Friday at 3 pm UTC.

Upcoming Events (Times in UTC):

Weekly DAO & Governance Call - 02.7 at 11:30.

Weekly DAO & Governance Call - 02.7 at 17:00.