Funding for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) is growing rapidly and just passed a major milestone, according to DeepDAO. According to data from The DAO Data Platform, the total assets of all decentralized autonomous organizations hit a record $25.1 billion on March 31.
The treasury is the total amount of assets that the DAO can use at its discretion. It excludes assets managed by the DAO but not owned, such as staking accounts and reward fees. Of that, about $22 billion is liquid and about $3.5 billion is vested, according to DeepDAO.
Notably, DAO treasury assets have more than doubled since early 2023, no mean feat during a bear market. DeepDAO founder Eyal Eithcowich told Cointelegraph, “The first time we aggregated DAO funding on DeepDAO, it was $23 million, so we saw a 1,000x increase.”
Additionally, the $25.1 billion figure represents roughly 40% of all DeFi’s total value locked, as reported by DeFiLlama. It is now at $61.7 billion, up 39% since the beginning of the year. DeepDAO is a discovery and analysis engine for the DAO ecosystem, listing and analyzing financial and governance data for fast-growing industries. DeepDAO reported 12,108 DAOs, of which 2,353 were analyzed by the platform.
The biggest movers are layer 2 DAOs, and infrastructure is now the leading category beyond DeFi, Eithcowich said. Daniel Bar of DeepDAO said, "For a long time, only Uniswap and BitDAO have been the DAOs holding more than $2 billion in treasury bills, but in the past week alone, the DeepDAO organizational ranking board has added three giants: Arbitrum (more than $4B USD) Optimism (over $5B) and Polygon (over $1B). This marks the total DAO treasury aggregated by DeepDAO over $25B" Optimism Collective is the leader in treasury funds with $5.5 billion in funds and a 22% market share. According to L2beat, Optimism is the second most popular ethereum layer-2 solution provider after Arbitrum One.
However, Arbitrum’s DAO funding was slightly lower at $4.4 billion, accounting for a 17.5% share. The remaining DAOs that make up the top five are BitDAO, Uniswap, and Polygon, with $2.6 billion, $2.5 billion, and $1.5 billion in funding, respectively.
DeepDAO also reported that the most active DAO over the past week was PancakeSwap with 66 decisions. The total number of decisions across all DAOs analyzed in the past month was 3,300, down from 3,700 decisions in February.
