TheDAO Security Fund is building a long-term, bottom-up funding engine for Ethereum security, and today we’re inviting round operators to apply to be a part of it!

Our first round will be a broadly scoped quadratic funding round on Giveth. QF gives the community a voice, helps projects build awareness, and can bring in meaningful donations on top of the matching pool. We kept the scope broad because so much of the work that makes Ethereum safer every day is easy to miss if you're not deep in it already, and this round gives that work a chance to be seen. Giveth is the only Ethereum-focused team still actively running QF at scale, so they were the natural choice. But future rounds are meant to be run by external DAO tooling providers, supported by Giveth, using the lessons learned in this round to support the process behind-the-scenes. 

Round Operators (ROs) are ecosystem partners who will design and run our funding rounds end-to-end. TheDAO Security Fund handles the final on-chain distribution to projects from our multisigs, but everything else is up to ROs: the design, the execution, the community feedback, and most importantly, the learnings.

The other critical piece: ROs should be pushing their DAO tooling forward in some way. ROs can’t just run their go-to playbook; they have to innovate and improve their mechanism.

We’re specifically looking for DAO-style rounds. That means either:

• AI-assisted decision-making, where agents help shape or execute the allocation (like the work we’ve been doing with Bonfires.ai on ETHSecurity Badges), or

• 200+ meaningful participants with real influence over the final distribution.

The mechanism proposed can distribute funds to projects directly, as done in quadratic funding or deep funding rounds. Or the round can allocate a budget to RFPs, as was done in Optimism’s Season 7 missions-based grant round. 

On the participant side, we’ve already got a natural voter pool to offer: the ETHSecurity Badge holders. We’re building toward 200 of the top minds in Ethereum security, and any RO working with us can tap them as a curated voter set. We also actively encourage ROs to create new voter sets that make sense for the mechanism being run.

We expect to run large rounds, million-dollar-plus pools. Big rounds are good for Ethereum security, obviously, but they’re also meaningful case studies for ROs trying to show off the power of their tooling. That being said, we are also open to smaller rounds depending on the context. There are several forms of capital besides financial, and we would love to work with teams that have ideas in that direction!

The plan is to run three or four rounds per year, though timing will depend on ETH price and staking performance. TheDAO Security Fund is operating as an endowment. We fund rounds out of our staking rewards. That means when ETH is doing well, we can run more rounds and have more impact. Applications are open now and will stay open, so there’s no real rush. Based on current conditions, we expect to select the next Round Operator in June or July.

Short answer: ROs will get paid fairly for their work.

We’re heavily influenced by the Fair Fees model that was discussed in the Gitcoin governance forums. Fees scale with pool size in a non-regressive way, bigger rounds run at lower percentages, smaller rounds at higher ones, and everything is proposed by the operator and reviewed as part of round selection. The RO’s fee sits on top of the round’s pool, so it never eats into what goes to grantees.

We’re also open to KPI-based compensation upside on things like engagement & co-funding raised. The goal is simple: ROs should be able to sustain themselves doing this work, and great ROs should do better than average ones.

Running a round with TheDAO Security Fund is a real partnership, and there are a handful of baseline expectations we want to be upfront about. ROs will need to apply eligibility criteria consistently, declare and manage conflicts of interest, keep processes neutral and transparent, and publish a public retrospective after each round so the ecosystem can learn from what worked and what didn’t. None of this is meant to be scary, it’s just the stuff that makes a round credible and lets the DAO ecosystem learn from what you built.

The full picture of who we can work with lives in our RO eligibility criteria. Before you put in an application, please read it, it’s short. Read it with your own eyeballs, not an AI! It will give you an advantage after applying when we actually talk with you to understand your application.

👉 TheDAO Security Fund: Round Operator Eligibility Criteria

If you read that and think your team is a fit, apply here:

👉 Round Operator Application Form

Selected ROs will work directly with Giveth, the Ethereum Foundation’s grants management team, and security ecosystem partners to launch the round. Giveth will be the primary point of contact.  Giveth’s job is to make running a round with TheDAO Security Fund as smooth as possible so you can focus on the mechanism and the users.

If you’re building DAO tooling in 2026, TheDAO Security Fund can provide your mechanism a real use case, with real funding and real stakeholders excited to use it. Ethereum security is a public good that deserves bottom-up feedback mechanisms for the underappreciated & underfunded heroes that are protecting all of us. Help make it happen!

If you think your team has something interesting for us to play with, confirm you are eligible and apply! If you know a team that would be a good fit, send them this post. And if you have questions, reach out!

Let’s get to work.