Arbitrum Puts Bounties on Bloated DAOs—$100K for Whistleblowers
Arbitrum just turned governance watchdogs into bounty hunters. The Layer 2 heavyweight is offering up to $100,000 per report exposing DAO inefficiencies—because nothing screams ’decentralization’ like financial snitches.
Got receipts on wasteful treasury spending? Suspiciously overpaid contributors? Submit evidence and cash in. Just don’t expect DAO treasuries to appreciate the irony of using centralized incentives to police decentralized profligacy.
Bonus jab: Meanwhile, traditional VCs quietly siphon 2-and-20 fees without a single transparency report.
How the Watchdog program works
The Watchdog program, which is proposed to operate like the more common bug bounty program, encourages community members to report inappropriate use of DAO funds privately through GlobaLeaks, the open-source whistleblowing platform used by governments, NGOs, and investigative journalists.
As stated in the proposal, all submissions are private and secure, and whistleblowers can earn between $5,000 and $100,000 per confirmed report, with payouts determined by the severity of the violation and the quality of evidence provided.
The process begins with a confidential submission of findings to a review committee, composed of members from Entropy Advisors, Arbitrum Foundation, and SeedGov.
The committee of reviewers then go on to test the validity of the submission and also determine the severity of the misuse of funds.
The severity, which ranges from low to high, in turn determines the amount that will be paid out to the whistleblower. For low severity submissions, whistleblowers can get a base payout of 1,000 ARB, which is deducted from the recovered funds if applicable, with the total possible reward being capped at $10,000.
For cases with medium severity, the proposed bounty is a base payout of 10,000 ARB, and the maximum reward yield in the category is $25,000. Finally, for cases that rank high in order of severity, the bounty prize is a base payout of 30,000 ARB, while the maximum payout here is capped at $100,000.
Cases like that of Furocombo fall under the medium category due to severity, as it involved the misuse of DAO-allocated funds that impacted the DAO’s resources.
Proposed timelines for implementation
The proposed launch date for the Watchdog bounty program is the end of May, with the Entropy Advisors proposal being subject to on-chain voting from May 8 to May 22. The results of the voting will greatly impact the program‘s launch date.
Entropy Advisors also propose that an initial 400,000 ARB tokens be allocated to fund the program.
According to them, the implementation of this program will not only deter malicious actions and actors, but it will also attract sophisticated on-chain sleuths and investigators to Arbitrum.
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