The CEO of cryptocurrency’s largest decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governance platform says the Biden administration will be better for his industry than his successor and is shutting down his company to prove it.
Tally CEO Dennison Bertram announced in a blog post today that Tally, which provides on-chain governance for Arbitrum, Uniswap, ENS and more than 500 other DAOs, will end operations after six years.
Rather than being governed by executives or a board of directors, the crypto protocol is governed by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), with token holders voting on everything from fee structures to software upgrades.
In practice, participation is often low and decision-making slow, leaving a small group of active voters at the helm of a multibillion-dollar system. Tally builds the infrastructure that makes cryptodemocracy possible, providing the voting rails, delegation tools, and dashboards that major DAOs like Uniswap and Arbitrum use to run their governance processes.
In an interview with CoinDesk, Bertram said that the twin forces of continued demand for governance tools — regulatory threats and the growing decentralized application ecosystem — have both disappeared.
Across Protocol recently proposed disbanding its DAO entirely and transforming into a U.S. C-corporation, arguing that the token structure is actively hindering institutional cooperation. Its ACX token surged 80% after the news broke.
Last year, Solana-based Jupiter exchange and NFT group Yuga Labs both abandoned DAO structures, with Yuga CEO Greg Solano calling the project’s governance “slow, noisy and often unserious.”
“There’s a natural tension between building a collaborative, decentralized system and then basing it on cryptoeconomics,” Bertram said. “Cryptoeconomics means we can find some kind of stasis because everyone is pursuing their own personal best interests, which is a zero-sum, profit-maximizing mentality.
Gensler forced decentralization. His absence is ruining everything
Under the SEC’s Gary Gensler-era interpretation of securities laws, a token is at risk of being classified as a security if a clearly identifiable group is making management decisions that drive its value, one of the key prongs of the Howey test.
The industry’s response has been to push decisions outward through DAOs, spreading control among thousands of wallets so that no one entity can be said to be running the network. Governance systems and tools like Tally are more than just functionality, they are part of a legal strategy.
Bertram sees this as the end of his company: if teams no longer believe they will be penalized for operating like a traditional company, then decentralization ceases to be a requirement and becomes optional, with many teams choosing not to pay for it.
“this [Trump] The government is saying loudly that you are not in trouble and can do what you want,” Beltran said. “This gives existing organizations a huge amount of leeway. It’s not actually clear whether decentralization is needed, or what decentralization would look like. “
The garden is not infinite
The regulatory shift itself didn’t kill Talley. The company’s business model is built on a second bet: that the Ethereum ecosystem will spawn a vast, limitless garden of protocols and applications, each requiring governance infrastructure.
“For Tally and organizations like Tally, it’s not enough to have a Uniswap, an Aave, an L2 or two, and that’s it,” Bertram said. “It’s a very different kind of corporate consulting business.”
The Infinite Garden thesis was the centerpiece of Tally’s $8 million in funding raised last year.
“An important part of our last round of papers was, look, there are going to be thousands of L2s, and that was an idea that no one objected to,” he said. “There won’t be thousands of L2s anytime soon. And there probably never will be.”
Instead, the industry has consolidated around a handful of dominant protocols.
Cryptocurrencies found product-market fit in speculative areas such as payments and prediction markets, but the rich consumer application layer that sustained the governance infrastructure business never developed, Bertram said.
“There is no venture-backed business when it comes to governance tools for decentralized protocols,” he wrote in a blog post announcing the closure. “At least not yet.”
Retail doesn’t care about cryptocurrencies
Beyond the governance crisis, Bertram sees a more important problem in the industry.
“Artificial intelligence has really become the new narrative of the future, and its narrative is actually broader and more inclusive than cryptocurrency,” he said. “The consequence of that is it sucks away the best and the brightest. The most exciting opportunities are not here, so we don’t get the most exciting founders, we don’t get the most exciting builders.”
Bertram said he still believes in the industry but no longer believes it’s too early.
“People always say it’s still early,” he said. “I’ve been in this industry since 2011. I don’t know. It feels like it’s not that early.”
