DAO Treasuries That Overfloweth

Money makes the world go round, and that’s true even for the world of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs).

Revenues and funds from DAO protocols flow into the organization’s treasury, which can then be deployed in a variety of ways according to the will of the DAO. Like for any business-like organization, the DAO treasury is essential to growing the protocol, supporting it through the rough times, nurturing new projects, rewarding stakeholders, paying team members, etc.

The crypto sector adds its own twist, as DAO treasuries can hold a variety of assets, including fiat equivalents, other cryptocurrencies and the project’s own token. Using stats from DefiLlama, let’s take a look at the richest DAO treasuries, in terms of total holdings and also focusing on stablecoins.

The richest treasury in crypto belongs to the Arbitrum DAO, which is flush after the launch of the Layer-2 Ethereum blockchain’s ARB token. In fact, the entirety of Arbitrum’s $4.23 billion treasury holdings are in $ARB – meaning the value of the DAO’s capital is volatile, potentially upwards or downwards.

The other richest treasuries on the list also have all or most of their holdings in their own tokens:

• Uniswap v3, $2.58 billion
• BitDAO, $2.53 billion
• ENS, $978 million
• Ethereum Foundation, $626 million.

Now let’s look at holdings in terms of stablecoins, which have a predictable value of 1:1 $USD (unless, of course, there’s a catastrophic collapse or depegging, as in the case of TerraUSD).

The top stablecoin-holding treasury is a familiar name, BitDAO, a collective devoted to growing Decentralized Finance (DeFi). One BitDAO project, for example, is the nascent L2 blockchain Mantle.

BitDAO has adopted a relatively diversified portfolio of holdings, with $296 million in stablecoins ($USDC and $USDT) and just over $500 million in $ETH, along with its own $BIT.

Other treasuries with the largest amount of stablecoins include:

• India Covid Relief Fund, $270 million in stables out of $273 million total
• Aragon, $56 million in stables out of $126 million total
• Parrot Protocol, $35 million in stables out of $51 million total
• Euler Finance, $23 million in stables out of $59 million total.