TVL in DAOs Almost Doubles to $15B in Q4 Surge

This quarter Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) have grown dramatically, with the total value locked (TVL) of DAO Treasuries gaining 90% since the start of October to $15.2B.

Citing data from DeepDao, Messari researcher Roberto Talamas recently tweeted that DAO membership has increased by 133% since August, with more than 1.6M entities spanning 164 organizations.

The number of DAOs this year boasting treasuries valued at seven figures or greater has also increased almost 400%, to 58 from 12; DAOs with a membership of 100-plus have increased to 71 from 41 — a 73% jump.

Bubbling Treasuries

Talamas created a treemap showing the top 30 DAOs by membership, led by Uniswap with 275,652, Kusama with 250,496, and MetaCartel Ventures with 244,104. Compound ranks fourth with 174,329, then Aave with 103,753, while all other DAOs have memberships below 60,000.

Uniswap also leads the value of its treasury, commanding roughly $3.83B in UNI tokens. BitDAO ranks second with $3.13B, followed by Olympus DAO with $929M in assets, Lido with $880M, and Compound with $803M.

Despite bubbling treasuries and memberships, DAO-based governance appears to be gaining less traction, with 58 of 164 DAOs (including many of the largest) typically seeing voter participation of below 10%. Less than half of members have participated in voting for 55% of DAOs, while few DAOs with high rates of participation have, while just one-quarter of the DAOs with voter participation above two-thirds have double-figure member counts.

Talamas also examined the assets most popular among DAO treasuries. He found that Ether and stablecoins were by far the leading assets, with nearly 100 DAOs holding ETH, 70 DAOs holding DAI, USD Coin with nearly 60, and then Wrapped Ether with 41, and Tether with 36. The next most popular tokens were Balancer (BAL), Uniswap (UNI), Ethereum Name Service (ENS), Compound (COMP), and Gitcoin (GTC).