đŸ‘ĢDAOs

There are currently around $12 billion dollars in assets across DAO treasuries. However, most of this is DAO tokens which are extremely volatile assets. And if the 2017 bear market was any indication, this is a risk many teams can't afford to take.

What is the problem?

Unlike individuals, funds, or whale investors, DAOs don't have one person executing decisions. This complicates trading DAO treasury assets on centralized services:

  • Regulatory Risk: Select one person from DAO to complete KYC/AML

  • Custodial Risk: Trust this individual to custody and trade

  • Transparency Risk: Trust CEX to give you the best fill behind closed doors

  • Counter Party Risk: see FTX and a slew of other centralized services that have lost customer money

There are great teams like Llama, Karpatkey, and Aera among others that are building risk and treasury management software to address these issues.

Why DAOs need TWAMMs?

Treasury Diversification

Suppose a DAO wants to sell $50m of its treasury token. It currently has a few options for execution:

As you can see in the options listed in the table above, DAOs need to optimize for low: value left on table and high: transparency. TWAMMs are the only solution that gives you OTC-level execution with DEX-style transparency.

Here's an example of what happens when DAOs leverage Market Orders on DEX Aggregators.On a CEX, the DAO would have saved ~$100k! TWAMMs would execute this order much better, and potentially capture the move upside of the risky asset given a long enough time horizon.

Stock Buybacks

Here's an example of a DAO conducting buybacks of their token. They relied on an OTC desk to conduct a simple TWAP buy instead of doing it all in a single block.

The savings are roughly 190M (+40%!) in Spell tokens, by simply conducting TWAP buys. This particular DAO has an individual executing transactions on behalf of the DAO, a luxury and risk many DAOs don't want to take.

Damping Token Sell Pressure

There are a few times DAO tokens are under very high sell pressure:

  • Investor token vest unlocks

  • Grants program funding in native tokens

And the biggest one of them all:

Instead of having people dump tokens in a single block which causes network congestion and heavy sell pressure on the token price, trades can be completed over multiple blocks giving the market enough time to digest the price action.

Examples

Below are a few examples of DAO governance proposals that could leverage TWAMMs to manage treasury positions.

Yearn

ENS

Others

Tribe/FEI

KeeperDAO

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