State of the DAOs — May 23rd

3 min readMay 23, 2023

In a development that may indicate further maturing of the DAO space, the number of DAOs continued falling slightly, while the total treasury amount actually rose by $1.3B, matched by a 13.3k increase in DAO membership (quality over quantity!). Maybe this is a sign that fad-based DAOs are falling apart while those based on passion are thriving.

DAO News

A devastating governance attack on Tornado Cash, where the hacker gave himself 1,200,000 votes (while there are only around 700,000 actual votes in the DAO), thus seizing full control of all governance decisions, including those over Tornado Cash’s… cash. Plot twist: the hacker put forward a proposal to give back governance control — but is it a token-pumping trick?

Apparently, Aragon was also a target of a governance attack by a group of investors and restructured its $177M treasury into developer grants to prevent it.

With all the liquid ETH staking success, Lido’s community is considering staking and/or buyback options for its LDO token amid debates about giving LDO more utility.

The Founder of MakerDAO wants it to have its own blockchain along with new MKR and DAI tokens in order to streamline the governance of this massive DAO.

Bancor’s promises of protection against Impermanent Loss did not deliver for some investors who are now suing Bancor DAO.

The BIT token will soon officially become MANTLE, as BitDAO’s BIT-21 passes and leads to the optimization of BitDAO and its token structure.

A bug in Aave v2 on Polygon is getting some user assets stuck — but not to worry, as a proposal is on its way to fixing this.

DAO Proposals

No high-importance proposals for a second straight week, with only 23 medium and 41 low-importance ones. Spartan Council and Decentraland have quite a few proposals active this week.