DAOs & CAOs

A DAO worth holding has three things: real revenue, a quorum that actually meets it, and a treasury that survives a year of zero token issuance. We measure all three before we measure anyone's narrative.

Token-weighted governance can be theatre. We track vote participation, proposal pass-rates and the share of the float that has ever voted. A DAO with ninety percent of governance tokens dormant is closer to a single-signer multisig than a community — and we price it that way.

CAOs (crypto-autonomous organisations) sit between traditional companies and DAOs — central operators with on-chain accountability layers. Done well, they combine the reflex speed of a normal team with the auditable rule-set of a smart contract. Done poorly, they offer the worst of both. The desk decides which it is on a case-by-case basis.

• 01Protocol DAOs with verifiable fee accrual to token holders.
• 02Decentralised exchanges with real-yield staking funded by trading volume.
• 03Lending markets where governance controls risk parameters subject to a published process.
• 04Treasury-management DAOs with audited accounts and published budgets.
• 05Public-goods CAOs with a clear principal and on-chain reporting.

Where we won't go: any DAO whose treasury is dominated by its own native token, any governance design where founders retain more than a defined share of voting power past a published cliff, any CAO whose 'on-chain accountability' turns out to be a Notion page.

• 01Realised treasury cash flow versus token emissions.
• 02Voting participation across the last twelve proposals.
• 03Concentration of voting power in the top wallets.
• 04Off-chain legal wrapping and jurisdictional exposure.
• 05Public commit cadence on the underlying protocol.