Uniswap is the largest DAO, holding $5.4B in its treasury. Even after distributing rewards, Uniswap showed its potential for DAO-based governance.
The leading DEX, Uniswap, is also the largest DAO, with a $5.4B treasury at the beginning of the new year. While DAOs were not among the top hype narratives in the past year, increased Web3 activity and the bull market boosted the treasuries of multiple organizations. Uniswap is also far ahead of high-profile DAOs like the Ethereum Foundation, which now holds around $919M in its reserves after years of actively selling ETH.
Uniswap was also the leader with 356.9K token holders, accrued since its initial airdrop. UNI tokens have strong incentives for holding ever since their initial airdrop. Out of all token holders, 35.6K were the lifetime participants in the Uniswap DAO. The project’s treasury holds UNI, in addition to ETH, USDC, DAI, and OP.
Uniswap DAO members vote on issues on average once or twice a month, and have shown readiness to defeat proposals they consider harmful. The last vote rejected Forse by StableLabs as one of the data providers for Uniswap.
DAOs expand treasuries in the past 12 months
In total, DAOs hold up to $34B in various crypto tokens and reserves, based on data from DeepDAO. Most DAOs hold a mix of ETH, stablecoins, and native or partner tokens. DAOs emerged from the long list of Web3 projects from previous bull markets, with varied profiles.
In the past year, a new class of DAOs emerged, based on the Decentralized Science (DeSci) trend. Those organizations are still relatively small, but are a deliberate attempt at building new communities. However, the largest and best-funded DAOs are based on DeFi projects, which produce regular fees from trading or other activities.
Most of the L2 projects have also formed a DAO. In total, up to 129 tokens have a DAO, which may be beneficial for their long-term price. However, the size of the DAO treasury does not always translate into token price action.
The expansion of DAOs also shows a readiness to hold for the long term. A total of 11.3M holders in various DAOs were eligible for governance at the beginning of the new year.
Communities and governance became increasingly important during the 2024 bull market. Meme tokens were the new organizing principle, which created new communities, but are not explicit DAOs. DAOs are extremely transparent, and often gain attention in case of contentious proposals. The health of a DAO can partially serve as a metric for a project’s overall perspectives.
However, the richest and most active organizations have built up their presence over the past few years, showing their capability of surviving a bear market. The one exception is Bonk (BONK), which has a clear goal of popularizing Solana. The Bonk DAO is one of the active voting tools, recently achieving a large-scale token burn.
The past year warned of governance attack risks
While DAOs grew, so did the attempt to hijack their treasuries. For DAOs like Polkadot, the voting led to a fair, but relatively aggressive distribution of funds toward influencers.
The biggest DAO attack for 2024 included the hijacking of Compound DAO. A group known as the ‘Golden Boys’ hijacked the voting process, leading to a transfer of $24M of COMP tokens into a whale-controlled wallet.
Uniswap is one of the DAOs to take security seriously, setting up a plan against malicious voting. The Uniswap DAO started a discussion on preventing attacks from holders of more than 51% of DAO tokens. The measures included the creation of a Veto Council, as well as a proposal staking requirement. All proposer issuers would have to post UNI tokens before requesting a vote, with the risk of slashing the stake in case the proposal is deemed harmful.
Smaller DAOs with less active voting are more at risk of malicious proposals or whale takeover. Some of the DAOs have accrued a large and attractive treasury, while only having a handful of voters. Projects like DeXe Protocol hold more than $348M in their treasury, while having a few thousand token holders, and a few hundred voters.
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