The Arbitrum Watchdog Committee wants $ARB holders to permanently block three projects and their founders from future ArbitrumDAO programs. The Sept. 3 proposal, posted by OpCo for the committee, follows findings that grants from older DAO incentive rounds were misused. It shifts the grant-misuse program from clawbacks to exclusion. Two projects already stopped operating in 2024. The third merged into Aster, a perpetuals exchange tied mostly to BNB Chain.
What the committee found
The committee flagged 142,839 $ARB against Good Entry, 75,000 $ARB against Limitless, and 239,714 $ARB against APX Finance, formerly ApolloX. Added up, that is 457,553 $ARB, about $76,000 at $0.166 per token. The proposal gives no combined figure. All three were labeled high severity, a category defined as large-scale, deliberate misuse, including fabricated deliverables and theft.
Good Entry received 200,000 $ARB in the first Short-Term Incentive Program round, approved in late 2023. On-chain analysis found 142,839 $ARB went to 1,032 ineligible users during and after the STIP period. The committee also points to self-farming by wallets tied to team addresses. It says the team refused to cooperate. Good Entry sunset its main product in June 2024, then stopped development in July.
Limitless and APX
Limitless, a margin trading venue, swapped its entire 75,000 $ARB LTIPP allocation into USDC and bridged the funds to Base, according to the committee. It called this suspected theft because the money left Arbitrum. The committee says it could not reach the team. DefiLlama marks the protocol deprecated.
APX Finance is the largest case and the one with a live counterparty. It was approved for 525,000 $ARB in LTIPP to grow its perpetuals DEX on Arbitrum. The committee found 239,714 $ARB tied to unspent funds in team treasury addresses, late distributions to distributor contracts, and a sybil cluster traced to team addresses. It says it could not reach the team either.
APX announced a merger with Astherus in December 2024. Astherus later rebranded to Aster. The @APX_Finance account now directs users to convert APX to ASTER. Aster holds $814 million in TVL and did $1.9 billion in perpetuals volume over the past 24 hours, per DefiLlama. Nearly 70% of that value sits on BNB Chain.
What happens next
Each project has until Sept. 10 to reply on the forum. Six days after publication, there were no replies. If the committee is not satisfied and funds are not returned, three separate Snapshot votes will ask whether each project, including founders, current team members, and affiliated contributors, should be permanently banned from all future ArbitrumDAO programs. For projects no longer operating, the ban would apply only to founders.
There is no on-chain component. The proposal says each Snapshot vote will be the final decision. The DAO approved the Watchdog Program in May 2025 with 189.97 million $ARB in favor. As of Sept. 2, the program had received 90 reports, recovered about 532,000 $ARB, and paid roughly 268,000 $ARB in reporter bounties.
