Anticapture Commission - Season 7 Retrospective

Elected Representatives 💼 Council Communication Threads
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Hello Collective, here is the Anticapture Commission’s Retrospective for Season 7.

Reference: Season 7 – Anticapture Commission Charter Amendment Proposal

1. What is your assessment of the impact KPIs that were set in your Charter at the start of the Season? Have you made progress towards, or achieved, these milestones or KPIs? If not, why?

Goal: Act as a governance structure composed of high-context delegates, with an aim toward preventing capture in the Token House and across the Collective.

  • Assessment: A total of six onchain votes were subject to a Citizens’ House veto:

    1. Protocol Upgrade: Superchain Registry 2.0
    2. Maintenance Upgrade: L1 Pectra Readiness – optimistically approved (Snapshot: 13 participants to record support).
    3. Upgrade #13: OPCM & Incident Response Improvements
    4. Upgrade #14: Isthmus L1 Contracts + MT-Cannon
    5. Upgrade #15: Isthmus Hard Fork
    6. Maintenance Upgrade: Absolute Prestate Updates for Isthmus Activation & Blob Preimage Fix – optimistically approved (Snapshot: 17 participants to record support).

In each vote, ACC delegates reviewed possible capture vectors (validator collusion, fallback mechanisms) and ensured no latent risk.

  • Result: KPI achieved. All vetoable upgrades were examined and voted on by the Commission.

Goal: Provide alerts to the Citizens’ House when concerns arise over significant imbalances in power between stakeholder groups.

  • Assessment: No formal capture alert was identified during Season 7. However, the ACC should improve its communication with the Citizens’ House and proactively keep the channel open.
  • Result: KPI achieved in terms of availability of the alert channel (though no urgent alerts were ultimately necessary).

Goal: Vote in 100 % of protocol upgrade proposals subject to Citizens’ House veto.

  • Assessment:

    1. Superchain Registry 2.0 – 10 signatures in the Safe.
    2. Upgrade #13 (OPCM) – 16 Snapshot / 10 Safe.
    3. Upgrade #14 (Isthmus L1 + MT-Cannon) – 16 Snapshot / 10 Safe.
    4. Upgrade #15 (Isthmus Hard Fork) – 16 Snapshot / 10 Safe.

In all cases, the ACC voted within the defined period.

  • Result: KPI fully met; no vetoable proposal was omitted.

Goal: Vote on other proposals (not subject to veto) if the ACC believes capture is likely or it serves Collective interests.

  • Assessment:
    • L1 Pectra Readiness – (optimistically approved). The ACC discussed offchain to confirm absence of risk and recorded a Snapshot vote for transparency.
    • Absolute Prestate Updates for Isthmus Activation & Blob Preimage Fix – (optimistically approved); 17 Snapshot participants recorded support.
  • Result: KPI achieved; the ACC engaged (or documented its position) when proposals could affect governance integrity.

2. Impact assessment – how well did your team’s outputs support the Intent they were authorized under?

Season 7 Intent Highlights:

  1. Mitigate emergency capture risks
  • Safe votes on all vetoable upgrades prevented any single stakeholder from concentrating power.
  • During the Isthmus Hard Fork, the ACC detected a potential risk in the fallback mechanism and confirmed its mitigation.
  1. Advance collective decentralization
  • By reviewing Superchain Registry 2.0 and Isthmus L1 contracts, the ACC ensured no group could monopolize messaging channels or validator slots.
  • However, lacking a “scorecard” of quantitative metrics, verification remained based on partial data and community reports.
  1. Ensure transparent communication
  • After each Safe execution, ‘Voting Summaries’ were shared in the ACC’s communication thread, outlining the technical rationale and vote breakdown.

Overall, ACC outputs—coordinated Safe/Snapshot votes, technical summaries, and communications—directly supported Season 7 Intent by mitigating risk, promoting decentralization, and ensuring transparency.

3. What are the major problems you ran into over the course of the Season?

At the beginning of the season, we encountered issues when attempting to remove former signers from the multisig in a batch transaction. This problem took us several days to resolve, and the process was documented here.

After that, operations ran smoothly, though the Commission identified several areas for improvement: establish clearer procedures for assessing capture risk, communicating with the Citizens’ House, and conducting simulated capture scenarios. Some planned initiatives—such as mapping proposal relationships and more clearly defining the ACC’s role within the Collective—have yet to be implemented.

Oversized Membership: With twenty-six members, coordinating input and sustaining engagement proved difficult. Many delegates had limited bandwidth to propose new initiatives or draft concrete action plans, causing most operational work to fall on a small core.

Inefficient Voting Workflow: The dual Snapshot-and-Safe process often felt redundant. One of the ACC’s future missions should be to reach internal consensus in a more streamlined way.

4. What are possible solutions that could be explored next Season?

Plan Safe threshold changes at season start: Increase the threshold required to execute a transaction in order to strengthen the Commission’s multisig security and align with the Optimism Collective Multisig Security Policy.

Optimize the internal voting process: Replacing Snapshot votes with a single Telegram poll to simplify decision-making and cut signature overhead.

Reduction of internal meetings: Instead of holding meetings during each voting cycle, schedule a single meeting around the midpoint of the season to review progress and actions taken. Additional internal meetings should only be held on an exceptional basis if a situation arises that warrants it.

Reduction in Commission size: Streamline the Commission to around a dozen delegates to enable tighter coordination and stronger collaboration. With the announcement that incentives for being part of the Commission are set to expire, this reduction would allow a smaller but highly committed group to sustain the ACC’s efforts and reinforce its role within the Collective.

5. What improvements to the team’s mandate would you suggest for next Season?

Recommendation: Continue the ACC for Season 8, with these mandate refinements and considering inputs from the internal discussion document:

  1. Incorporate a formal “capture/risk detection framework”: Define clear metrics and procedures to identify technical and financial risks before each critical vote.

  2. Establish a new Safe threshold procedure at season beginning.

  3. Allow a mid-season IOP review window (for operational adjustments only, not Charter changes): Enable a 2-week period halfway through the season to propose urgent IOPs procedural fixes (Snapshot coordination, Safe protocol, “optimistically approved” workflow) if necessary or if a critical issue arises.

6. The Future of the ACC

One standout moment in Season 7 was the ACC’s discussion into its own future, reviewing where it began, how it has evolved, and whether it still makes sense. That conversation was addressed with a data-driven analysis that digs into possible capture scenarios.

Faced with these context, the future of ACC sketches three possible paths: streamline the ACC into a “call-when-needed” body; pursue direct onchain rights to cancel malicious proposals (ideally alongside the Security Council or Citizens’ House); or transform into a lean, research-focused team that builds clear metrics and dashboards to warn of capture before it happens. These aren’t abstract ideas but questions backed by numbers.

A heartfelt thank you to all ACC members for your dedication, insightful feedback, and meaningful contributions throughout this season. Your commitment to strengthening governance, navigating complex challenges, and upholding high standards of accountability has been key to shaping the ACC’s evolving role within the Collective.

Gratitude as well to the Foundation team for their ongoing guidance, and to my SEEDGov teammates for their unwavering support during the season.

-@Pumbi/@SEEDGov, ACC Season 7 Lead.

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This is much faster and more convenient than Snapshot voting. Great solution!

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Thanks for putting this together @ACC!

A few questions:

  • If individual member votes are collected in a private telegram poll, how will the community be able to verify that the ACC is casting its vote in accordance with the outcome of internal votes? Or does this just replace a redundant internal process but the public vote still must be cast with a majority of signatures?

  • In The Future of the Anticapture Commission, you raise concerns around the concentration of power among participating delegates. In this retrospective, you propose reducing the number of participating delegates from ~26 to ~12. Wouldn’t this exacerbate the power dynamics among participants?

  • In terms of your suggestions for paths forward for the ACC, we would recommend “streamlining the ACC into a ‘call-when-needed’ body” if the ACC is to continue. It’s important to note that assigning the ACC rights to cancel proposals, or other changes that alter the control structure and/or metagovernance parameters of the Collective, are not currently within scope.

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Thank you for addressing these questions and recommendations @lavande!

In practice traceability shouldn’t be affected. ACC needs to maintain good practices for how consensus is reached. There are ways to make this visible and the outcome should still be public. For example, if the ACC didn’t use Snapshot and only used telegram, the thresholds established in the current season’s IOP would still be respected. With this change, the goal is to add flexibility and speed, not to reduce the Commission’s level of accountability.

Additionally, although the telegram polls will be private, the final poll results will be shared with the community in each of the ACC’s corresponding voting posts to ensure greater transparency.

Thanks for pointing this out, we weren’t precise. We believe that using a reasonable activity-based determination method could reduce the number of seats to only those who actively contribute, but not necessarily down to 12. This isn’t intended to concentrate power but to allow seat reductions only when members are demonstrably inactive. For example, season 7 participation data shows that 12 of 26 delegates voted in at least 75 % of rounds, and 7 below 50 % (including 2 with no participation).

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As this is the reflection period, it is an appropriate time to remind the ACC that it was in breach of its own charter throughout Season 7 with regard to the first criterion for membership:

Members must be an individual or professional delegate and not a representative of a protocol or corporation.

The language of the charter is explicit: members must be either individuals or professional delegates AND must not serve as representatives of any protocol or corporation.

However, during Season 7, the ACC included members who, while categorized as “professional delegates,” also served as representatives of protocols or corporations according to their own delegate statements. This rendered them ineligible for membership under the current rules.

If the ACC is to be renewed, this membership criterion should either be revised to reflect current practices or enforced as written. Allowing it to remain unenforced undermines the integrity of the body.

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