Stephen Goldfeder, co-founder of Arbitrum and CEO of Offchain Labs, claimed that communication before a failed plan to return 700 million ARB governance tokens earlier this month had been less than ideal.
At CoinDesk’s Consensus conference on Thursday, he said, “There was an unfortunate miscommunication, and it was a mistake.” “If you look back with hindsight, it’s obvious, but at the time, it wasn’t.”
Early in April, the decentralized autonomous organization that oversees the Ethereum protocol staged a coup by voting to halt the planned transfer of ARB tokens worth roughly $1 billion intended to fund the Arbitrum Foundation, forcing the Ethereum Layer 2 scaling project to retract a proposal. The action sparked debate over the DAO model and whether or not it could ever be truly decentralized.
In the beginning, the developers of Arbitrum referred to it as “ratification” rather than what many believed should have been more of a consultation. The information, according to Goldfeder, had not been clear.
“The DAO is the most decentralized DAO that exists,” claimed Goldfeder. “As a member of the community, I actually believe that the outcome is even better, and everyone seems happy. The community ended up in an even stronger position as a result of that incident.”
According to Goldfeder, community building is more difficult than technology. We are capable of creating technology, he claimed. But there’s also the issue of creating a community and finding people who are actually interested in it. There is a huge community with a variety of interests as well as businesses, protocols, and projects that are very interested in this. And that is crucial, as all the technology in the world won’t matter if nobody wants to participate, voice an opinion, cast a vote, argue, or engage in a discussion. Not good. All of this discussion is something we want, so I’m glad it’s there.
