The CEO of crypto’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 the point.
Tally, which ran on-chain governance for Arbitrum, Uniswap, ENS and more than 500 other DAOs, will cease operations after six years, CEO Dennison Bertram announced today in a blog post.
Crypto protocols are not governed by directors or boards, but by decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, where token holders vote 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 to manage billion-dollar systems. Tally built the infrastructure that made cryptodemocracy possible, providing voting rails, delegation tools and dashboards used by major DAOs like Uniswap and Arbitrum to run their governance processes.
In an interview with CoinDesk, Bertram said the two forces that sustained demand for governance tools — regulatory threat and a growing ecosystem of decentralized applications — have both disappeared.
Across Protocol recently proposed dissolving its DAO entirely and converting to a US C-corp, arguing that the token structure actively hindered institutional partnerships. Its ACX token surged 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 “sluggish, noisy and often frivolous theater of governance.
“There is a natural tension between building a collaborative, decentralized system and then building it on crypto-economics,” Bertram said. “The crypto-economy implies that we may find some kind of stasis because everyone will pursue their own personal best interest, which is a kind of zero-sum, profit-maximizing mentality.
Gensler forced decentralization. His absence regrets it
Under the SEC’s Gary Gensler-era interpretation of securities law, a token ran the risk of being classified as a security if a clearly identifiable group made management decisions that drove its value, one of the key prongs of the Howey test.
The industry’s response was to push decision-making outward through DAOs and distribute control across thousands of wallets so that no single entity could be said to run the network. Management 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 will stop being a requirement and become optional, with many teams choosing not to pay for it.
“The [Trump] the administration loudly signals that you’re not in trouble, go out and do whatever you want,” Bertrain said. “It gives enormous leeway to existing organizations. It’s actually not clear whether you need decentralization or what decentralization looks like.”
The garden is not infinite
The regulatory change alone did not kill Tally. The company’s business model was built on another bet: that the Ethereum ecosystem would produce a vast, infinite garden of protocols and applications, each of which needed 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 business consulting business.”
This never-ending garden thesis was central to Tally’s $8 million fundraiser last year.
“A big part of our thesis in our last round was, look, there’s going to be thousands of L2s, which was an idea that nobody pushed back on,” he said. “There are not, in the short term, thousands of L2s. And there may never be.”
Instead, the industry consolidated around a handful of dominant protocols.
Crypto found the product market fit into payments and speculation as prediction markets, Bertram said, but the rich consumer application layer that would have sustained a management infrastructure business never developed.
“There is not a venture-backed company in governance tools for decentralized protocols,” he wrote in a blog post announcing the shutdown. “At least not yet.”
Retail doesn’t care about crypto
Beyond the government 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 bigger and much more comprehensive than crypto,” he said. “What it does is that it sucks away the best and the brightest. The most exciting opportunity is 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 buys the argument that it’s early.
“People always say it’s still early days,” he said. “I’ve been in this since 2011. I don’t know. It doesn’t feel early.”
