Arbitrum Foundation to Receive $1 Billion if Proposal Passes

Lemma has asked for an additional 750 million in $ARB tokens to go to a wallet that the Arbitrum Foundation would control

article-image

FacesPortrait/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks

share

Days after Arbitrum’s ARB governance token airdrop, the voting on a proposal to introduce a governing body for the freshly formed decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) has begun.

The proposal, named Arbitrum Improvement Proposal 1 (AIP-1), outlines steps to create what it calls The Arbitrum Foundation, a company that would be responsible for growing the Arbitrum ecosystem.

The foundation would be based in the Cayman Islands and would require $3.5 million — set to cover legal fees, as well as administrative and registration expenses. 

Roughly 3.5 billion $ARB tokens — worth roughly $4.8 billion — have so far been transferred to an address named “Arbitrum DAO Treasury1,” making it the largest $ARB token holder.

“The ArbitrumDAO will have direct on-chain governance powers over the DAO Treasury in accordance with the AIP process as delineated in the ArbitrumDAO Constitution,” according to Lemma, the entity behind the proposal.

A representative of the Arbitrum Foundation told Blockworks that Lemma is a service provider to the Arbitrum Foundation and is primarily focused on governance components of operations. 

Lemma has also asked for an additional 750 million in $ARB tokens (roughly over $1 billion) to go to a secondary Administrative Budget Wallet, which The Arbitrum Foundation would control. 

The proposal has so far named three initial directors for the would-be foundation: Campbell Law, Edward Noyons, and Ani Banerjee. There would also be a 12-member Security Council Committee.

Law appears to be the co-founder of digital assets compliance firm Provenance, while Noyons is a director at Marfire, a consultancy firm that works with DAOs. Banerjee’s background is unclear.

Although the proposal has not yet been approved, a multi-signature wallet with an address named “Arbitrum DAO Treasury2” was created and has since received nearly 700 million $ARB tokens.

A representative for the Arbitrum Foundation confirmed to Blockworks this address is the Administrative Budget Wallet.

The proposal opened for votes on Snapshot on Monday. Voting is set to end on April 3 before being finalized on-chain. At the time of writing, almost 90% of votes are in favor of the proposal, with 10% against.

The Arbitrum Foundation did not immediately return a request for further comment.


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily, with Byron Gilliam.

Upcoming Events

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

Unlocked by Template (10).png

Research

Innovations on Aptos’ technical design through Raptr, Shardines, and Zaptos approach near-optimal latency and throughput by unlocking 100% utilization of network resources, with the capacity to settle 260k transactions per second with latencies less than 800ms. The original Move language was revamped with the launch of Move 2, supporting more expressivity in smart contract logic and a scalable ability to interact with high volume datasets. The ecosystem has benefitted from strong asset inflows, now hosting over $1.3B in stablecoins, $450M in bridged BTC, and $530M in RWAs. Activity in the Aptos ecosystem has grown notably over the past year, with monthly application revenue reaching ~$835k and monthly DEX volumes growing to over $5B, both at new all time highs.

article-image

Asset allocator says fee compression could be a challenge as Grayscale converts more crypto funds to ETFs

article-image

The Stripe-acquired firm has big plans for a streamlined, multi-wallet future

article-image

Both founders of the former crypto lender have now landed in new crypto industry roles

article-image

Bitcoin’s recent peak is a victory lap for curvers left and right

article-image

Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo says institutions are eager to get exposure to tokenization