- Arbitrum’s Security Council paused new Stylus contract activations on October 2, 2026, an action that remains in effect while a longer-term fix is developed
- Offchain Labs proposed a new Stylus Activation Contract that would require any new Stylus contract to pass a limited security audit from an approved auditor before the Arbitrum Foundation issues an activation signature
- The temperature-check vote on the proposal, part of Arbitrum’s November 2, 2026 governance roundup, runs through November 5
Arbitrum’s governance forum flagged a temperature-check proposal in its November 2, 2026 roundup of active votes aimed at resuming a feature that has been paused for roughly a month. Stylus is Arbitrum’s system for writing smart contracts in programming languages beyond Solidity, including Rust and C, letting developers who are more comfortable in those languages build directly on the network. On October 2, 2026, Arbitrum’s Security Council paused the activation of any new Stylus contracts as a precaution, a pause that has remained in place since.
The new proposal, put forward by Offchain Labs, describes a path back to allowing new activations. It would introduce a dedicated Stylus Activation Contract that any new Stylus contract would need to pass through before it can go live on Arbitrum One. Under that process, a developer’s new contract would first need to undergo a limited security audit performed by an auditor approved under Arbitrum’s existing Security Program. Only once that audit is complete would the Arbitrum Foundation issue an activation signature, which the developer would then use to actually activate their contract on the network.
Governance over the mechanism itself would stay firmly with the DAO rather than resting on an administrative decision made once and left unchecked. The proposal states that ArbitrumDAO would remain the sole administrator of the new activation contract, and that the DAO could modify or fully revoke the Arbitrum Foundation’s signing authority at any point through a constitutional vote, preserving a check on how that authority is used going forward.
The proposal is also careful to limit its own scope. It states explicitly that Stylus contracts already activated before the October 2 pause are unaffected by any of this, and that implementing the new activation contract would not require any new funding from the DAO treasury.
As a temperature check rather than a binding on-chain vote, this stage gathers community sentiment before a more formal constitutional vote would follow. Voting on this temperature check runs through November 5, 2026. The full roundup is posted on Arbitrum’s own governance forum.
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