$ARB's Whale Delegates
AIP 1.05 aims to return 700M $ARB to the DAO treasury, as a means to highlight holders’ authority. However, with a few large voters holding significant voting power, the decision could easily be overturned. Here is an overview of the situation.
Early voting saw strong support with 21M tokens mainly led by individual wallets. However, the situation quickly changed as a small group of large voters stepped in and voted against it.
The voting distribution reveals that 90% of voters support the proposal, while only 8.3% are against it, and 2.3% abstained. This highlights that, despite majority support, most of the voting power is concentrated in a few wallets.
Notably, the top 20 wallets voting against the proposal hold 18M $ARB tokens, accounting for 43.2% of the voting power.
Amongst them are ChainLinkGod, AlphaInsiders and lito.eth.
They've mentioned it introduces unnecessary risks to the DAO, with potential legal issues and development delays, and that the revisions made in AIP 1.1 & AIP 1.2 already address the transparency and communication concerns
A few other delegates have yet to vote, including TreasureDAO, which is the largest voter with over 20M tokens.
They've hinted against the proposal for the reasons pointed out above, and, should they indeed do it, it would be enough to stop the proposal.
Ultimately, AIP 1.05 brings to light the power dynamics within $ARB governance. Most individual token holders support the proposal, but the concentrated voting power of a few individual wallets might determine the outcome, a usual phenomenon observed in DAOs governances.
It is important to remember that these votes are delegated, meaning that decentralization could happen if token holders choose to distribute their votes among other delegates and make the governance process more decentralized.
Although the proposal is likely to fail as the remaining large voters step in, it highlights the importance of a democratic governance process, which is the fundamental piece of the $ARB token and where most of its value proposition comes from.