ACC’s Statement on the Proposal for Accelerated Decentralization for Optimism
On 26th September 2024, the Anticapture Commission (ACC) held an Internal Meeting where one of the key agenda items was the discussion on the Petition for Accelerated Decentralization for Optimism. Along with the Delegate members of the ACC, we also invited GFX Lab’s PaperImperium and members of the Foundation to discuss the petition.
There was wide agreement among all parties that the proposal represented a step in the right direction, in pushing for the decentralization of key components of Optimism. The issues raised in the proposal were well received, and have ignited a healthy conversation within the Optimism community on our path towards decentralization. Delegates stressed a need for moving towards decentralization by ceding more power to token holders and delegates. The Foundation reaffirmed their full commitment to decentralizing the protocol and working with the community to iron out a more granular path forward. The Foundation will publish concrete proposals, which are already in audit, in the coming weeks as part of Phase 1 of the path towards decentralization. Recently, the development process has been opened up to a good extent with public specs published in repositories. This has enabled external groups, beyond OP Labs and the Foundation, to contribute to the OP Stack development process. External teams like Flashbots, are now able to propose features related to the OP Stack, and have the designs reviewed and merged into the codebase.
The ACC members discussed with Foundation that there are concrete proposals for decentralization coming up in the next few Voting Cycles and gradually but surely, more control is being ceded to governance in a progressive manner. To this effect, the Petition for Accelerated Decentralization felt like a timing issue while we are all on the same path towards decentralization. As per the bicameral nature of Optimism’s Governance, one of the main mandates of the ACC is to alert the Citizen’s House if there is a possibility of capture in the Token House. However, the Citizens are not involved in this conversation that is currently before the Token House. To this effect, the ACC will seek to facilitate the role or voice of Citizens in this discussion such as creating standards for signaling proposals.
Considering the Charter of the ACC, the members were in agreement that at this stage, the ACC will not vote directly on the Snapshot proposal with the voting weight delegated to the ACC multisig. There however, is no restriction on individual delegates who are part of the ACC in signaling their opinion on the proposal.