Polygon’s chief information security officer Mudit Gupta has been removed from the election process for Arbitrum’s Security Council despite having the most votes out of the 44 candidates that applied.

Gupta was disqualified because of a stipulation in the Arbitrum constitution that prevents any candidate with a conflict of interest from joining the council, which would prevent them from acting in the best interests of the chain.

“Potential conflicts of interest could be, but are not limited to, affiliations with direct Arbitrum competitors, proven histories of exploiting projects and others,” reads the Arbitrum constitution. 

The disqualification didn’t come as much of a surprise to many industry watchers, and even Gupta himself, because of his association with Polygon — a chain that many consider to be a direct competitor to Arbitrum.

“I wasn’t involved here and have no doubt that you have no ulterior motives,” said Steven Goldfeder, the founder of Arbitrum developers Offchain Labs, in response to Gupta’s X post. 

“But this is a technicality since the constitution explicitly doesn’t allow this (and the community can absolutely debate whether this is a good thing or should be changed for future elections),” he added.

In a blog post addressing the conflict of interest, Arbitrum said that two candidates from Polygon had applied to be part of the Security Council and would be removed from the elections during the compliance stage. 

The Arbitrum Security Council is a committee of 12 members who are signers of a multi-sig wallet, which can perform emergency and non-emergency actions to uphold the ArbitrumDAO’s constitution. Candidates will need to meet a threshold of 5.43 million ARB to qualify for the next stage of the election on April 13.