Thanks for laying this out. Recruiting strong candidates is a real problem, and a professional search process could improve the quality of the Council. Our main question is why better selection requires removing delegates’ active consent to who holds the upgrade keys. The Lead can search, interview and recommend nominees while the Token House keeps the final say. We believe these decisions should rest on explicit votes rather than on silence.
Our concern also comes from the combined effect of recent governance changes. Delegates’ powers have been steadily reduced, and active approval is increasingly replaced by the option to veto. With participation declining, this concentrates influence with those who set the agenda and propose candidates, since they no longer need to win explicit support. We think the new appointment process should be judged by whether the community keeps a practical ability to control the composition of the Council.
Silence as approval. Under the proposal a nominee is seated unless 20% of active votable supply objects. Based on recent quorum figures, that is around 11M OP, which equals roughly 38–55% of the voting power that took part in this year’s votes we looked at (20–29M OP). Low opposition on optimistic votes does not tell us whether delegates agree, did not review the proposal or lacked the resources to organize, yet the outcome is the same in every case. Many large DAOs take the opposite approach. Uniswap, Aave and Lido count only votes in favor toward quorum, so whoever proposes a decision has to gather explicit support, and Aave additionally requires a clear margin of votes for over votes against. We would prefer appointments to the Security Council to work the same way, with a nominee confirmed when votes for exceed votes against and a quorum of votes in favor set and justified in advance. If the optimistic model stays, a low objection threshold could move a nomination to a regular active vote instead of rejecting it outright.
Terms. The revised Charter removes cohort elections, and while it states there is no limit to the number of terms a participant may serve, we could not find a provision setting a fixed term length or a mandatory reconfirmation for appointed members. Could the Foundation add a fixed term with periodic reconfirmation by the Token House?
Independence. We appreciate that the Selection Criteria require at least 50% of participants to be outside the Optimism Core Development teams and no more than one participant associated with any one entity. Formal affiliation is only part of the picture, though. The criteria explicitly treat being an Optimism customer, such as an OP Enterprise customer, as a sign of strong alignment, but a significant commercial relationship with the Foundation or OP Labs can also create dependence. How will such relationships be weighed against independence?
Accountability. Appointing and removing a member follow very different rules. A nominee is seated unless an optimistic veto is reached, while Representative Removal requires an active vote with quorum and 51% approval, and its grounds are failing Charter responsibilities or failing to act with honesty and transparency. It is unclear whether delegates could use it to express no confidence in the Lead over their nomination policy without having to prove a violation, and replacing the Lead does not revisit appointments already made. Would the Foundation consider a clear no-confidence mechanism for the Lead, and clarify what happens to pending nominations if the Lead is removed?
Votable supply. With thresholds resting on active votable supply, the calculation itself becomes important. Today the figure is set offchain and entered into the governor by a trusted multisig, so delegates cannot verify it independently. In June the methodology was changed after the Cohort B election failed quorum, and the vote was rerun with a lower quorum. We would ask that the calculation be published for every vote in a reproducible form (snapshot block, addresses, activity window and formula), and that methodology changes be agreed in advance rather than applied after a vote. Arbitrum has been working on a model where delegated voting power is tracked directly in the token contract, which shows that a verifiable onchain calculation is achievable.
Pre-screening. KYC/KYB is not new, but it used to happen after an election, so its outcome was visible to delegates. Now nominees are filtered by both the Lead and the Foundation before anyone sees them. We are not asking for personal data, but anonymized statistics and categories of rejection would make this step accountable.
Participation. A contested vote in mid-2025 drew around 68M OP, while the 2026 votes we looked at drew about 20–29M. This does not prove that the decline is caused by the reduction of delegates’ powers, but the risk of a feedback loop is real. When delegates can less often decide outcomes, they have less reason to take part, lower participation makes a veto harder to organize, and that makes further reductions easier. How does the Foundation plan to prevent this, and how will it measure whether delegates keep real influence? We would also welcome the view of L2BEAT (@kaereste) on how the model affects the actual independence of the Security Council.
To summarize, we support professionalizing the search for candidates, but not at the cost of the delegates’ final say. Our main request is to change how these decisions are made. Appointments to the Security Council should be decided by explicit votes, where the outcome reflects the delegates who actually voted, rather than by silence being counted as approval. More broadly, we believe the same principle deserves discussion for other optimistic proposals, for example by measuring the veto against votes cast rather than against total supply. In addition, we ask the Foundation to set fixed terms with periodic reconfirmation, account for commercial ties in the definition of independence, introduce a clear no-confidence mechanism for the Lead, publish a reproducible calculation of active votable supply, and run the new model as a pilot that requires active ratification to continue. Without changes along these lines, we would find it difficult to support the proposal in its current form.