The Optimism Foundation has proposed ending the Optimism Security Council elections for its two cohorts of signers, the group that, together with the Foundation, must approve every upgrade to OP Mainnet. Under a ratification proposal posted on the Optimism governance forum on 22 October 2026, tokenholders in the Token House would elect only the Security Council Lead. The Lead would recruit and nominate every other signer, and a nominee would take a seat unless holders of 20% of active votable OP supply vote to block them.
The package covers three documents: version 2.1.0 of the Operating Manual, version 0.2 of the Security Council Charter and a new Member Selection Criteria document, v0.1. “Elections for Security Council cohorts are discontinued,” the proposal says. No date has been published for the ratification vote.
The change is a proposal, not a done deal. It also turns on one question that the only delegate to reply so far has put at the centre of the debate: whether a nominee who draws too little opposition should count as approved.
Optimism Security Council elections today: three votes a year
Today the Security Council is filled by tokenholder votes. According to the Foundation’s post, the Token House runs three elections a year, one for Cohort A, one for Cohort B and one for the Lead, each decided by approval voting. The last Cohort A round, announced on the forum on 29 September 2025, put seven member seats and the Lead up for election, for 12-month terms with no term limit.
Even now, the Foundation has a say in who sits. Under the rules of that 2025 round, elected members had to pass a Foundation screen that could include KYC/AML and sanctions checks, and the next qualified runner-up took the place of anyone who failed it. The Foundation could also appoint nominees itself if fewer than seven eligible members put their names forward. The new texts would move the Foundation’s check earlier, before anyone is put forward, and would remove the election step for everyone but the Lead.
What changes concretely: the Lead nominates, the Token House vetoes
The detail sits in pull request #72 on the OPerating Manual repository, titled “Security Council: Lead-Appointed Membership”. It was opened on 22 October by JSeiferth, is marked as a draft, had no reviews when read on 27 October and would be merged only if the ratification passes.
Under the draft, the Lead becomes the only elected seat on the Security Council. The Lead holds no signing key: under the charter, every other participant controls one key on a Gnosis Safe multisig with a 75% threshold. The Lead recruits candidates, interviews them and checks them against the public selection criteria. Each candidate then goes to the Foundation for KYC/KYB screening. Only after that does the Lead file a new proposal type, a “Council Appointment”, one proposal per nominee.
A Council Appointment uses optimistic approval. It runs a one-week review period followed by a one-week veto period, so a full cycle lasts two weeks. If the veto threshold is not reached, the nominee is seated. If it is reached, the nominee is not seated, the usual appeals process does not apply, and the Lead puts forward someone else.
The same route would cover the cases that elections handle today: a runner-up who would have stepped in, a member who resigns, a member who is removed. The Lead would also propose the Council’s operating budget every 12 months. The manual update cuts the general review period for proposals from two weeks to one, which the Foundation describes as matching current practice, exempts veto proposals from the 30% quorum and deletes mentions of the Citizens’ House.
| Item | Today | Under the proposal |
|---|---|---|
| Elected seats | Cohort A, Cohort B and the Lead | The Lead only |
| Elections per year | Three, by approval voting | One, for the Lead |
| How other signers get a seat | Elected by the Token House, then screened by the Foundation | Nominated by the Lead after Foundation KYC/KYB screening |
| What blocks a nominee | Not winning the election | A veto by 20% of active votable OP supply |
| Appointment cycle | Two-week review, one-week vote | One-week review plus one-week veto period |
| Review period for proposals | Two weeks | One week |
| Removing the Lead | Representative Removal: 51% approval, 30% quorum | Unchanged |
Current signers would not lose their seats on day one. The Foundation writes that the documents take effect with the start of the next Lead election, that the Lead election follows ratification, and that sitting signers stay until their replacements are confirmed.
The 20% veto: what it takes to block a nominee
“A nominee is seated unless 20% of active votable OP supply vetoes that nominee,” the proposal states. The threshold is measured against active votable supply, not against the votes cast. The current Operating Manual, version 2.0.0, defines votable supply as OP that has been delegated and counts it as active if that delegated voting power was used within the past six months.
Because veto proposals would be exempt from the 30% quorum, a veto does not need wide turnout to count. It needs enough OP behind it to cross 20% of that active supply. Opponents would have to gather that much OP within the two-week cycle. If they do not, the nominee goes through.
Removing the Lead runs the other way. The Operating Manual lists Representative Removal as an active-approval proposal that needs 51% approval, and the 30% quorum of active votable supply still applies to it, since the draft exempts only veto proposals. The grounds are narrow: failing the responsibilities set in the charter, or failing to act with honesty and transparency. cp0x asks on the forum whether delegates could use it to show no confidence in a Lead’s nomination policy without proving such a breach. A seat is filled by default; taking one away needs a vote that clears quorum.
The Foundation screens nominees but does not pick them
The Foundation’s role in the draft is a gate, not a choice. Nominations come from the elected Lead. The Foundation runs the legal and compliance check and the Token House keeps its veto.
The Member Selection Criteria v0.1 spell out that check. Passing “Foundation KYC/KYB screening” covers identity and anti-money-laundering checks, sanctions screening and background checks, plus the signing of confidentiality and Council agreements. The Foundation also verifies where participants are based. The Lead must send each candidate to screening before any nomination is filed.
The criteria set composition rules for the Council as a whole:
- At least half of the participants must come from outside the Optimism Core Development teams.
- Each entity may be tied to no more than one participant.
- No single country may hold enough participants to reach the multisig quorum.
Individual candidates are judged on technical skill, operational security (the signing key has to sit on dedicated hardware), reputation and the absence of conflicts of interest. The document expects about five active hours a month from each member.
For readers in Europe or the United States, the screening is a Foundation requirement written into its own governance texts. It is not a rule imposed by a regulator, and no regulator is named in the documents.
Why the Foundation wants to stop the cohort elections
In its motivation section, the Foundation lists three problems with the current system. Too few qualified people nominate themselves, so a lot of effort goes into persuading candidates to run before each election, and a thin field can put unqualified members on the Council. The strongest candidates often do not want to campaign. And delegates, in the Foundation’s view, lack the means to run the interviews and reviews a proper assessment needs.
The post names the main risk itself: an incompetent or malicious Lead could try to capture the Council through nominations. The answers it offers are that the Lead is elected and removable at any time, must show that each nominee meets the published criteria, cannot nominate anyone who has not cleared KYC/KYB, and faces a delegate veto on every name.
What delegates say: silence versus explicit votes
One reply had appeared under the proposal by 27 October. It came from the delegate cp0x on 26 October. The delegate supports a more professional search for candidates but opposes the proposal in its current form. “We believe these decisions should rest on explicit votes rather than on silence,” the post reads.
The figures are the delegate’s own estimates. By cp0x’s count, the 20% threshold works out at around 11 million OP, which it says equals roughly 38% to 55% of the voting power that took part in the 2026 votes it reviewed (20 million to 29 million OP). Low opposition, the post argues, cannot tell apart delegates who agree, delegates who did not read the proposal and delegates who could not organise in time.
cp0x contrasts this with Uniswap, Aave and Lido, which it says count only votes in favour toward quorum, so a proposer has to gather explicit support. Its main request is that a nominee be confirmed when votes for exceed votes against, with a quorum of votes in favour set in advance.
Votable supply and turnout are the other worries
The post also takes aim at the number the veto is measured against. According to cp0x, active votable supply is set offchain and entered into the governor contract by a multisig, and the method was changed in June after the Cohort B election failed to reach quorum. The delegate asks for a reproducible calculation published for every vote, and points to Arbitrum’s work on tracking delegated voting power onchain.
On turnout, cp0x estimates that a contested vote in mid-2025 drew around 68 million OP, against about 20 million to 29 million OP in the 2026 votes it looked at. It warns of a loop in which fewer real decisions give delegates less reason to vote, which makes vetoes harder to organise.
The delegate’s other asks: fixed terms with reconfirmation (the draft charter sets no limit on the number of terms a participant may serve), commercial ties to the Foundation or OP Labs counted in the independence test, a no-confidence mechanism for the Lead, anonymised statistics on KYC/KYB rejections and a pilot that needs an active vote to continue. It also invited L2BEAT to give its view. No reply from L2BEAT or from the Foundation team was visible on the thread on 27 October.
“Silently”? The proposal has been public since 22 October
CryptoSlate covered the proposal on 27 October under a headline, by Liam ‘Akiba’ Wright, saying the draft manual “silently strips” tokenholder elections. “Silently” is the outlet’s own word. The proposal was posted openly on the governance forum on 22 October, with its rationale, a risk section and links to the pull request and all three documents.
The substance behind the word is cp0x’s point: under optimistic approval, inaction confirms a nominee. TokenPost, in a piece by Simon Yoon published on 26 October, reported the same change working from the proposal text. Neither outlet quoted a named person beyond the documents.
What the Security Council controls on OP Mainnet
OP Mainnet is an Ethereum layer 2: it runs transactions off Ethereum and settles them back on it. Its contracts can be upgraded, and whoever approves upgrades controls the code that holds users’ deposits. According to L2BEAT’s page on OP Mainnet, both regular and emergency upgrades currently need the approval of the Security Council and the Foundation, which co-sign through a two-of-two multisig. An upgrade takes effect as soon as both have signed, with no onchain delay; regular upgrades first go through a seven-day veto window in governance.
That is why the selection rules matter to users who never vote. The Council is one of two keys on every upgrade. Who sits on it, and how hard it is to remove them, shapes how independent that key is from the Foundation and OP Labs. The charter also has a fallback: if the number of signers drops below eight, control of the Security Council passes to the Foundation.
The proposal arrived the same day as other news. CryptoSlate notes that on 22 October the Optimism Foundation and Uniswap Labs announced preparations for interoperability between Unichain and OP Mainnet, and that upgrades 20 and 21 prepare the infrastructure without switching it on. For a comparison, our profile of Arbitrum and its Security Council covers how that network splits power, and Arbitrum’s plan to reopen Stylus with a Foundation signature shows another foundation-held safeguard. For the basics, see our guide to layer 1 and layer 2.
What is not known yet: no vote dates
No one has published when the ratification vote opens or closes, and the forum’s announcements page showed no date for it on 27 October. The quorum and approval rules for this ratification vote are not stated in the post either.
The pull request is still a draft and has not been merged. Whether the Foundation will answer cp0x, or change the veto model before the vote, is open. If the proposal passes, the next step is a Lead election under the new rules, followed by the first Council Appointment proposals, each with its own two-week cycle.