DAO treasuries top $25 billion for the first time: DeepDAO

March 31, 2023 Coin Telegraph

DAO treasuries top billion for the first time: DeepDAO

Assets held in DAO treasuries have more than doubled since the beginning of 2023, according to DeepDAO.

Decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) treasuries are rapidly growing having just surpassed a major milestone, according to DeepDAO.

According to figures from the DAO data platform, on March 31, total assets for all decentralized autonomous organizations reached a record $25.1 billion.

The treasury is the total sum of assets the DAO may use at its own discretion. It excludes DAO-managed but unowned assets such as staking accounts and reward fees.

Around $22 billion of that total is liquid with around $3.5 billion set aside for vesting, according to DeepDAO.

Remarkably, assets in DAO treasuries have more than doubled since the beginning of 2023 which is no mean feat for a bear market.

Total DAO treasury assets. Source: deepdao.io

Furthermore, the figure of $25.1 billion represents around 40% of the total value locked for all of DeFi as reported by DeFiLlama. This is currently $61.7 billion following a 39% increase since the beginning of this year.

DeepDAO is a discovery and analytics engine for the DAO ecosystem that lists and analyzes financial and governance data for the fast-growing sector. DeepDAO reports that there are 12,108 DAOs, 2,353 of which are analyzed by the platform.

A DeepDAO representative told Cointelegraph the big movers are layer 2 DAOs, with infrastructure now the leading category overtaking DeFi.

“Up till recently Uniswap and BitDao were biggest with over $2 billion each, now with the addition of Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon we’ve got a whole pack of really big DAOs,” DeepDAO’s Daniel Bar said.

total value across all DAO treasuries surpassed $25B for first time ever pic.twitter.com/VcymWJOkOy
— Jacquelyn Melinek (@jacqmelinek) March 30, 2023

The Optimism Collective is the leader in terms of treasury funds with $5.5 billion giving it a market share of 22%. Optimism is the second most popular Ethereum layer-2 solutions provider after Arbitrum One, according to L2beat.

However, Arbitrum has a slightly lower DAO treasury with $4.4 billion giving it a share of 17.5%.

The remaining DAOs comprising the top five include BitDAO, Uniswap, and Polygon with treasuries of $2.6 billion, $2.5 billion, and $1.5 billion respectively.

DeepDAO also reports that the most active DAO over the past week has been PancakeSwap with 66 decisions. The total number of decisions made for all DAOs analyzed over the past month was 3,300, a fall from February’s 3,700 decisions.

Web3 Gamer: Shrapnel wows at GDC, Undead Blocks hot take, Second Trip

Number of DAOs increases 8X along with spike in votes and proposals

June 10, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

The total number of DAOs has increased dramatically over the past 12 months along with their participation rates, but it may not mean decentralized governance is catching on.

The total number of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO), the number of governance proposals put forward, and the number of votes cast, have all seen astounding 8X growth over the past 12 months.

Data compiled by Snapshot Labs, shared by Electric Capital Engineer Emre Caliskan in a June 9 tweet, highlighted that DAO numbers have increased by 8.8X, from 700 in May 2021 to 6,000 now. The number of proposals has increased by 8.5X, and the number of total votes have increased by 8.3X over the past 12 months, from 448,000 to 3.7 million.

1/ DAO governance activity is exploding . In the last year, we have seen:

• 8.8x in # of DAOs
• 8.5x in # of proposals
• 8.3x in # of votes

Here are 10+ key insights from @SnapshotLabs data on DAO governance pic.twitter.com/45KAOeER5y
— Emre ⚡ (@n4motto) June 8, 2022

Snapshot is a decentralized governance participation portal where DAO members can propose new initiatives and vote on them, the data was compiled in collaboration with Electric Capital, a Web3 investment firm

While the findings look promising for decentralized governance models, the increase in participation was driven by just a small handful of the most active DAOs. New proposals mostly came from just 10% of DAOs, while 60% of DAOs havhad three or fewer proposals since their inception.

Nevertheless, the overall growth is an impressive show of confidence in the DAO structure.

Rival DAO tracking tool DeepDAO has slightly different figures and shows there are only 4,833 DAOS as of June 10.

Caliskan attributed the increase in new proposals to the popularity and wide coverage of Constitution DAO. It was an organization set up last November with the intent of buying an original copy of the US Constitution. The DAO was outbid at the last moment, but it proved the power such organizations can have.

Most DAO proposals come from just 10% of organizations.

According to DeepDAO, PancakeSwap and Decentraland are the two top DAOs by proposal count with 3,300 and 1,200 respectively. Only the top 72 organizations have at least 100 proposals as of the time of writing.

Despite the overall promising numbers in DAO growth, a June 7 draft bill from the US Senate could curtail their growth if no changes are made to it. It initially calls for all crypto projects to register with the government and reveal the identities of their users and founders.

Is Ethereum really the best blockchain to form a DAO?

April 4, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Blockchain Ecosystem

Ethereum’s dominance as the blockchain of choice for DAOs remains strong, but there is a case being made for other chains which may be better suited.

The crypto community and industry have chosen Ethereum as the chain of choice for most blockchain-based decentralized applications, but other chains may be better suited to handle the workload for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).

Technical advantages and cheaper transactions have yet to become a major pull factor from Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chains. EVM compatibility enables a network to use Ethereum’s security features.

Ethereum (ETH) and its compatible chains have a clear advantage in the number of DAOs compared to any other. They house more than 4,200 DAOs and protocols requiring governance participants according to data from blockchain voting platform Snapshot.

Comparatively, the Solana (SOL) ecosystem has only 140, Cardano has 10 DAOs according to ecosystem tracker Cardano Cube, and Polkadot (DOT) Substrate says it has just eight. This is not to discount the fact that among the top 10 DAOs by the number of decisions made over the past seven days, DAO tracker DeepDAO shows that three are based on Solana.

Ethereum’s leg up over the rest may be due to simple, yet practical reasons, according to DAO tracker DeepDAO CEO Eyal Eithcowich in emailed responses to Cointelegraph. He attributes Ethereum’s dominance to the fact that it is “the chain where the DAO movement started.”

“More importantly, (Ethereum’s) the most mature ecosystem in terms of tools for starting and managing all facets of DAOs, mostly financial but not only. This may change as other chains grow in popularity.”

On the other hand, he pointed to high gas fees as a shortcoming of Ethereum. He added that Solana allows DAOs to make fast and cheap transactions, “But, again, the supporting features and tools in the ecosystem are less robust.”

Additionally, Solana has become vulnerable to infrequent network outages.

The co-founder of the nonfungible token (NFT) game on the EOSIO-based WAX network Alien Worlds, Saro McKenna, told Cointelegraph last week that she believes EOSIO (EOS) is better for building DAOs.

In her view, Ethereum is too expensive for voting purposes and was designed to be a “general-purpose blockchain” to handle any number of different tasks. This contrasts with EOSIO, which McKenna said “was partly built for the purpose of DAOs.”

“The EOSIO codebase is extremely powerful, allowing for layered multisig permissions and dynamic collection election mechanisms that are critical for DAOs to function properly.”

Gas fees have long been an issue for Ethereum users, but in March, fees were at their lowest levels since last August.

However, CEO of blockchain consulting firm Koinos, Andrew Levine, had pointed criticisms of EOSIO which could explain why it falls short of Ethereum’s rate of adoption. In February, he wrote that while EOS transactions are virtually fee-less, there is an account creation fee. Furthermore, holding coins on an account is fairly complicated compared to Ethereum:

“The EOS database is built on something called “memory-mapped files,” another vestige of the Steem design, an important consequence of which is that it is designed to use the most expensive form of storage possible: random-access memory (RAM).”

DAO treasuries surged 40X in 2021: DeepDAO

December 31, 2021 Coin Telegraph

BitDAO

DeepDAO ranks the Uniswap DAO, BitDAO and Lido Finance DAO as the top three in terms of treasury value at $2.9 billion, $2.4 billion and $602 million each.

The total combined value of treasuries, or assets under management (AUM) for the use of decentralized autonomous organizations, increased by around 40 times between January and September of 2021.

According to data from DAO stats platform DeepDAO, the total AUM for DAO treasuries listed on the platform increased from around $380 million in January to a peak of roughly $16 billion in mid-September.

Looking ahead at 2022:

✍️How far and how deep will DAOs go into the mainstream, and into which use cases?

✍️(When) will DAO treasuries exceed $100B?

Lots of interesting questions, but together we can BUIDL this! pic.twitter.com/JDEC9JBuHC
— DeepDAO.io (@DeepDAO_io) December 30, 2021

As of mid-December, the total AUM has decreased by 28.1% since the high water mark to sit at $11.5 billion, dropping a hefty $3.6 billion over the past 30 days alone.

User participation in DAOs has surged as well throughout 2021, with the total DAO members and token hodlers tallying in at around 1.3 million in December, marking a 130x increase since the start of the year.

DeepDAO ranks the DAOs for decentralized exchange (DEX) Uniswap, the general purpose BitDAO, and decentralized finance staking platform Lido Finance as the top three in terms of total treasury value at $2.9 billion, $2.4 billion and $602 million apiece.

The Uniswap DAO has roughly 275,000 members that can vote on the project’s roadmap and maintain governance over the DEX. Uniswap has been the dominant DEX throughout 2021, pulling in more trading volume than all of the other DEXs combined according to Dune Analytics data.

The Lido DAO governs its platform, and users are granted governance rights via the Ethereum-based LDO token. Lido Finance has also exploded in 2021, with the platform’s total value locked increasing from $12.5 million at the start of January to a whopping $11.68 billion in late December. According to data from DeFiLlama, Lido Finance currently sits as the sixth-highest ranked DeFi platform in terms of TVL.

BitDAO is focused on supporting decentralized projects across any blockchain that are voted on by BIT token holders.

The DAO has around 10,000 members and focuses on proposals relating to direct partnerships or swaps with projects, and expansion opportunities such as the launching of autonomous artist guilds, farming cooperatives and ecosystem funds.

DAOs are becoming the digital native dream of the future of work

A global movement that is amassing copious amount of capital and has turned into a powerful talent magnet providing alternative to big tech https://t.co/0LxGnRziYN
— DeepDAO.io (@DeepDAO_io) December 28, 2021

DeepDAO secures $3M for expansion even as DAO treasuries halve in one month

June 4, 2021 Coin Telegraph

DeepDAO secures M for expansion even as DAO treasuries halve in one month

Coin Telegraph

Data analytics website, DeepDAO, has secured $3 million from notable investors to expand its data suite for tracking decentralized autonomous organizations.

DeepDAO, a website aggregating data on decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), has raised $3 million for future expansion in a round led by venture capital firms Hypersphere and DFG.

An announcement asserts the “overwhelming demand for DeepDAO’s seed round shows strong interest in data products for the DAO space and the belief the DAO ecosystem will grow.”

DeepDAO v1 currently provides data for more than 100 DAOs, aggregating data on organizations' treasuries, membership, and governance.

According to the site, DAOs currently represent more than 66,000 members and $587 million in assets under management (AUM) — although the AUM has fallen 46% from more than $1 billion in the past month amid the recent crypto market downtrend. DAO treasuries are still up more than 300% since early November however.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, founding advisor to DeepDAO and Bitfwd Capital chairman, Daniel Bar stated the team plans to expand data coverage, integrate DAOs from additional networks, and launch new governance tools using the funds.

Bar also noted the platform will offer an enhanced user experience, including social feeds and forums and added:

“The decentralized governance space is developing at a breakneck speed, DeepDAO is serving [...] the DAO space by providing a one stop shop where governance can be tracked.”

Despite this rapid growth, Bar notes a number of challenges facing the nascent sector, including identity, standardization, and a steep learning curve.

“Most people still think of DAOs as a nebulous concept, the ‘Aha moment’ that DAOs are Web3’s social network didn’t click to most people yet. But it’s getting closer,” he added.

Hypersphere partner, Jack Platts, described the DeepDAO platform as making decentralized governance “easily accessible to everyone,” stating:

“Decentralized protocols are governed by their users, but to unlock the transparency and inclusivity we need high quality tools.”

DeepDAO

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