The Arbitrum DAO announced results today for its March 2026 Security Council election, naming six new members to the 12-person body.

The newly elected members are Michael Lewellen, the head of solutions engineering at Turnkey, DZack23, ArbitrumDAO delegate and former senior blockchain engineer at Offchain Labs, yoav.eth, security engineer and researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, web3 security firm Certora, bartek.eth, the co-founder of L2BEAT and a long-time Arbitrum contributor, and Pablo Sabbatella, the founder of opsek and a member of Security Alliance, the nonprofit on-chain security organization behind SEAL 911.

Lewellen, a returning member, led the field with the most weighted votes. The new cohort officially takes over signing duties on May 21, Arbitrum Governance noted on X, after a standard transition period.

The Security Council is a 12-member body divided into two groups, with elections held for one of the two cohorts every six months. Its stated primary role is to make time-sensitive decisions in emergency situations with the goal of protecting the DAO, token holders and the broader Arbitrum ecosystem.

The election lands at a moment when the Council has landed in the spotlight following its emergency decision around the Kelp exploit. In April, the outgoing members voted to freeze over $70 million in ETH tied to an exploit of Kelp DAO’s LayerZero bridge, which saw attackers drain roughly $290 million. The move kicked off a broader debate about whether a small elected group stepping in to lock funds is appropriate for a decentralized network.

The situation grew more complicated last weekend when a D.C.-based law firm served Arbitrum DAO with a restraining notice targeting the ETH that Arbitrum had frozen to keep it out of the hands of the Kelp attackers.

Aave LLC has since asked a federal court to throw out the notice, arguing the funds belong to exploit victims, not to any state actor, and that the legal move is blocking recovery efforts that the broader DeFi community has rallied around.

ARB rallied around 4% on the news today and is currently trading just under $0.12.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.