Arbitrum L1 Recovery Path Adds Up To 63 Days Of Delays

What if Arbitrum's own governance broke and its Security Council could not step in? A proposal on the table would give the DAO a way out through Ethereum. The Arbitrum L1 recovery path would let ARB holders propose, vote and execute from Ethereum mainnet, with delays that add up to 63 days.

How the Arbitrum L1 recovery path would work

Today the DAO votes on Arbitrum One. The proposal, written by Offchain Labs, describes a second route. Voting power would still come from delegated ARB, proven against confirmed Arbitrum state. Approved actions would pass through a new Ethereum timelock to the existing upgrade executors.

The authors call it a last-resort tool for the case where L2 governance is broken and the Security Council cannot act. It would not replace the normal process or change the council's powers. Delegates who use contract addresses would register an Ethereum voting address first. Those using ordinary wallets could claim one with a signed message.

The deployment parameters in the proposal on the Arbitrum forum. Source: Arbitrum governance forum.

Where the 63 days come from

The deployment parameters set a voting delay of 17 days, a voting period of 21 days and a timelock delay of 25 days. Added together, that is 63 days from proposal to execution. The 63 is our sum of the three figures.

The authors say each phase is padded for a seven-day censorship budget, so delegates keep the same exit window as on the normal path. Quorum is 50% of delegated tokens. The floor is 150 million ARB and the cap 450 million, the same as the core governor.

What delegates asked about the Arbitrum L1 recovery design

The forum thread opened on October 2 and has seven replies. Offchain wrote on October 13 that there is no maximum assertion age and that nothing pauses. If the rollup stalls, checkpoints fall back to the last confirmed assertion. Arb_Junior had asked about stale state and asked again on October 15 for tests and a permissions map.

The delegate cp0x wrote on October 18 that they back the direction. They noted that the section on affected chains still reads "to be confirmed". They also said the text makes the path available at any time, while the motivation calls it a last resort. One idea they floated is a Security Council cancellation role on the new timelock.

The Arbitrum L1 recovery vote so far

The temperature check on Snapshot shows about 24.0 million ARB for, 9,364 against and 748 abstaining, from 543 voters. It ends on October 22. Entropy posted it for Offchain. It wrote that, as far as it can tell, no other major L2 gives token holders an independent L1 route for governance recovery.

The Snapshot results panel for the Arbitrum L1 recovery vote, with times shown in East Africa Time. Source: Snapshot.

Because the proposal is constitutional, it would also need an onchain vote and a change to the ArbitrumDAO Constitution before anything is deployed. The new Ethereum timelock would hold executor roles on both the L1 and L2 upgrade executors, as the existing one does.