Offchain Labs became the sole member of Arbitrum’s Developer Guild, collecting all of its revenue, and proposed that the Arbitrum Foundation sign off on new Stylus activations on Arbitrum One.
Key Takeaways
Guild members need 12-18 months of production work
Guild takes 2% of chains’ net protocol revenue
No active Stylus contract expires before August 2027
Trail of Bits to audit the activation contract
The Arbitrum Foundation announced the Guild’s first member on October 23, the same day Offchain posted its Stylus activation proposal.
How the Guild is funded
The Developer Guild was first introduced in January 2024 alongside the Arbitrum Expansion Program, which lets projects launch their own Arbitrum chains. Offchain was invited in recognition of its role as the protocol’s primary architect and maintainer. It will receive the funds the Guild has already collected and 100% of its revenue for as long as it remains the only member. The Foundation describes the Guild’s funding as “relatively nascent” and did not disclose the balance.
| Revenue source | Share to the Guild |
|---|---|
| Net protocol revenue from Arbitrum chains outside One and Nova | 2% |
| Arbitrum One Priority Gas Auction proceeds | 3% |
| Arbitrum One Sequencer Fast Feed proceeds | 3% |
Under the Guild specification, chains launched through the program pay 10% of their net protocol revenue to the ecosystem: eight points to the DAO treasury and two to the Guild. A chain with $1 million in qualifying revenue would send $80,000 to the treasury and $20,000 to the Guild. More than 30 chains already contribute, according to the Foundation.
The Foundation expects the arrangement to push Offchain to focus more of its work on growing the DAO’s revenue, now that it shares in those cash flows. It also expects the Guild to become one of Offchain’s funding sources, so that the company asks the DAO for less in future.
The Foundation decides who else gets in
Membership is by invitation, with several conditions. A member’s business model must rely substantially on Arbitrum succeeding, its core components should have been in production for 12 to 18 months, its code must sit in public repositories under approved licences, and it must pass identity checks, sign an agreement with the Foundation and publish yearly updates.
Under the specification, the Foundation approves members, decides each one’s share of the funding and can suspend or remove them at its sole discretion. Trivial activity such as typo fixes or dependency bumps does not count as meaningful work, and member names and allocations are to be published periodically on the governance forum. Every example of qualifying work in the document is an Offchain Labs repository, from the Nitro node software to the cargo-stylus toolchain.
The same day, Offchain proposed a Foundation key for Stylus
Stylus lets developers write Arbitrum contracts in languages such as Rust that compile to WebAssembly. On October 2, the Security Council paused new Stylus activations on Arbitrum One and Nova, citing a growing number of AI-assisted attacks using hand-crafted WebAssembly programs that skip the standard Stylus toolchain and can degrade chain performance. Known bugs affect chain availability, and no attack allowing theft of user funds has been found, the Council said.
Under Offchain’s proposal, a developer would submit source code to an auditor from the Arbitrum Security Program. The auditor would rebuild the contract with cargo-stylus, the same toolchain listed in the Guild specification, confirm it matches the deployed code and contains no hand-crafted WebAssembly, and post a pass or fail on the forum. After a pass, a Foundation-controlled multisig would issue a signature, and the developer would activate the contract through a new activation contract. The audit does not review a contract’s business logic, and the Foundation would rely on the auditor’s result without making its own assessment.
For most builders, the change is narrower than the pause suggests.
Unchanged
Solidity contracts deploy and run as normal.
Active Stylus contracts stay callable and renewable.
ArbOS 61 renewed all active contracts on One, so none expires before August 20, 2027.
Through the new gate
New Stylus code, including new versions of existing apps.
Reactivating expired contracts or after a Stylus version change.
Arbitrum One only. Nova, which is being scaled back, is excluded.
The gate also carries trade-offs, which the proposal itself lists.
The signing right has no automatic expiry, though the DAO can change or revoke it.
Requests would be handled on a reasonable-efforts basis, with no fixed turnaround.
A compromised signer could approve harmful code, and the proposal adds no way to deactivate a contract.
The proposal goes next to a Snapshot temperature check. Trail of Bits will audit the activation contract, and the report, source code and multisig configuration are due before the on-chain vote. A vote against would not lift the pause, and the proposal asks the DAO for no new funding.
Where that leaves ARB holders
The Guild pays its members, and the 8% share goes to the DAO treasury. Neither arrangement pays ARB holders directly. The token’s documented role is governance, which here means voting on the Stylus proposal and on any later change to the signing right, while Guild membership rests with the Foundation. As an earlier look at why ecosystem revenue does not automatically become ARB-holder income explained, a bigger funding pool is not a claim on it.
Snapshot result on the Stylus proposal
Trail of Bits report and the published multisig signers
First published Guild allocation and the size of the pool
A second Guild member, and how much of the revenue Offchain keeps
This article is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Governance proposals can change before approval and implementation.
Kosta has reported on cryptocurrency markets and blockchain infrastructure since 2020, bringing over six years of hands-on experience in the crypto industry built through daily tracking of markets, trends, and emerging blockchain developments. Specializing in Bitcoin on-chain analysis, institutional ETF flows, and digital asset price action, his work at Coindoo has been cited by other news agencies and consistently covers market developments with a focus on data-driven reporting across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and XRP.
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