Arbitrum team is trying to siphon 750 Million tokens from DAO to a slush fund controlled by the team, so that insiders and VCs can cash out while pretending their allocation is “locked”

So Arbitrum distributed tokens last week and as per their tokenomics, it seemed that the team and VC allocation is locked for a year.

Well, they just made a proposal to grant themselves another 750 Million ARB tokens, worth almost $1 Billion from the DAO. They claim its for an “Administrative Budget Wallet”. In reality, it looks like a blatant cash grab. Its the first governance proposal and they aren’t even trying to be subtle about siphoning funds out.

Administrative Budget Wallet proposal

Under the disguise of operational and administrative efficiency, they are seeking to transfer 750 million tokens from the DAO to their own pockets, from which they will make “special grants” and what nots.

In crypto, these things almost entirely mean cashing out for real world riches. We have seen thousands of examples of teams cashing out treasury funds. In Arbitrum’s case, since the team and VC token allocations are locked, they are creating this new channel of funding which they can splurge on while their actual allocations remain locked.

Some groups have already raised alarm against this blatant cash grab.

Blockworks Research is voting against this.

These 750M tokens were supposed to be part of the treasury but now seemingly lay under the centralized control of 3 individuals.

I hate to say it, but these kind of shady activities actually make people like Gensler right – by using shady structures from Cayman Islands, under the disguise of “DAO”, they are staging a standard insider dumping scam where the team dumps token without any transparency while pretending their original allocations are locked.