The CEO of cryptocurrency’s largest decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governance platform says the Biden administration was better for his industry than its successor — and is shutting down his company to prove his point.
Tally, which provided on-chain governance for Arbitrum, Uniswap, ENS and more than 500 other DAOs, will end its operations after six years, CEO Dennison Bertram announced in a blog post today.
Crypto protocols are not governed by executives or boards of directors, but by decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, where token holders vote on everything from pricing structures to software upgrades.
In practice, turnout is often low and decision-making slow, leaving a small group of active voters to run systems worth billions of dollars. Tally built the infrastructure that made crypto democracy possible, providing the voting rails, delegation tools, and dashboards used by leading DAOs like Uniswap and Arbitrum to manage their governance processes.
In an interview with CoinDesk, Bertram said the two forces supporting demand for governance tools – the regulatory threat and a growing ecosystem of decentralized applications – have both disappeared.
Across Protocol recently proposed dissolving its DAO entirely and converting it into a US C-corp, arguing that the token structure actively hindered institutional partnerships. Its ACX token jumped 80% on the news.
Last year, Solana-based exchange Jupiter and NFT conglomerate Yuga Labs both abandoned their DAO structures, with Yuga CEO Greg Solano calling his project’s governance “slow, noisy, and often unserious governance theater.”
“There is a natural tension between building a collaborative, decentralized system and grounding it in the crypto-economy,” Bertram said. “Cryptoeconomics implies that we can find a kind of stasis because everyone is going to pursue their own self-interest, which is a kind of zero-sum, profit-maximizing mentality.
Gensler forced decentralization. His absence undoes him
Under the SEC’s interpretation of securities law, in Gary Gensler’s era, a token was at risk of being classified as a security if a clearly identifiable group made management decisions that determined its value, one of the key prongs of the Howey test.
The industry’s response has been to push decision-making outwards via DAOs, spreading control across thousands of wallets so that no single entity can be seen as managing the network. Governance systems and tools like Tally weren’t just features: they were part of a legal strategy.
Bertram sees this as the end of his business: if teams no longer believe they will be penalized for operating like traditional companies, decentralization stops being a requirement and becomes optional, with many teams choosing not to pay for it.
“THE [Trump] The administration is signaling loud and clear that you’re not in trouble, go ahead and do what you want,” Bertrain said. “It gives a huge amount of leeway to existing organizations. We don’t really know whether decentralization is necessary, or what decentralization looks like.”
The garden is not infinite
The regulation change alone didn’t kill Tally. The company’s business model relies on a second bet: that the Ethereum ecosystem would produce a vast, infinite garden of protocols and applications, each requiring governance infrastructure.
“For Tally and organizations like Tally to exist, it’s not enough to have a Uniswap, an Aave, one or two L2s, and that’s it,” Bertram said. “It’s a very different type of business advisory activity.”
This infinite garden thesis was at the heart of Tally’s $8 million fundraiser last year.
“A big part of our thesis in our last round was that there would be thousands of L2s, which was an idea that no one pushed back on,” he said. “There will not be thousands of L2s in the short term. And there may never be.”
Instead, the industry has coalesced around a handful of dominant protocols.
Crypto found a product and market fit in payments and speculation like prediction markets, Bertram said, but the rich layer of consumer applications that would have supported a governance infrastructure business never developed.
“There is no venture-backed company in the space of governance tools for decentralized protocols,” he wrote in a blog post announcing the closure. “At least, not yet.”
Retail doesn’t care about crypto
Beyond the governance crisis, Bertram sees a more existential problem for the industry.
“AI has really become the new narrative of the future, and its narrative is actually much larger and more encompassing than crypto,” he said. “What that does is it sucks the best and the brightest out. The most exciting opportunity isn’t there, so we don’t have the most exciting founders, we don’t have the most exciting builders.”
Bertram said he still believes in the industry, but no longer accepts the argument that it’s too early.
“People always say it’s still early,” he said. “I’ve been in this field since 2011. I don’t know. It doesn’t seem early.”
