Arweave TX
Wild Tales
DAOS.FUN has a combined market cap of 435 million but manages less than 7 million in assets, showing a big gap between value and actual funds.
The platform raised 8.19 million USD across 265 DAOs, using Solana’s Token2022 standard for fundraising, with most of funds going to risky assets like memecoins.
Most DAOs performed poorly, with only 31 out of 161 having positive returns, while 40 lost 80-100% of their value, highlighting the high risk and volatility of the platform.
Since its September 2024 launch on Solana, DAOS.FUN has turned the blockchain into a hub for memecoin-fueled DAOs, raising $8.19M USD across 265 launches by February 26, 2025. Founded by @baoskee and backed by Alliance DAO, this platform merges meme culture with structured fundraising via Token2022—a Solana standard for programmable tokens. Creators set targets (50–4,000 SOL) over a week, with successful DAOs investing 90% of funds in volatile assets and 10% seeding liquidity on AMMs. Yet, its $435M market cap dwarfs a less than $7M AUM, hinting at speculative fragility.
Key features include:
Tokenized DAOs: All DAOs are represented as a Token2022 Program. Once created, the DAO sets fundraising targets (e.g., 50–4,000 SOL) and a 1-week deadline. If the target is met, the token is issued to investors at a fixed price, ensuring a fair launch.
Risk-Reward Dynamics: Investors gain exposure to high-risk memecoins while retaining redemption options if fundraising fails. If the target isn’t met, investors can redeem their SOL with a 10% penalty. If successful, 90% of the raised SOL is invested in Solana protocols or memecoins, while 10% is used to create liquidity for the DAO token on an AMM. This setup allows the token’s price to fluctuate based on trading activity, providing liquidity and exit opportunities for investors.
Transparent Metrics: Real-time tracking of portfolio value, market capitalization, and fundraising progress.
The platform has launched 265 DAOs (including test/failed projects), with total assets under management (AUM) of less than $7M and a combined market cap of 435M at the time of this writing.
ai16z, the leading DAO on DAOS.FUN, has captured the crypto community’s imagination with its AI-driven investment model powered by Eliza, an AI framework inspired by early natural language processing systems. Launched in late October 2024, it soared to a $2 billion market cap by December 2024, fueled by its innovative approach and humorous branding. As of now, ai16z boasts a market capitalization of $379 million, a portfolio value of $662,610, and an impressive 796% return on investment. It leads in holders (115,000), traders, market cap, and portfolio value. However, its market-to-asset ratio of 572.7 underscores the speculative frenzy surrounding its token, raising questions about sustainability while solidifying its status as a groundbreaking experiment in decentralized finance.
Solana’s memecoin mania exploded in late 2024, driven by platforms like pump.fun, where daily token launches averaged 8,000–9,000 in October, spiking to 66,000 by late January 2025. DAOS.FUN capitalized on this frenzy, with ai16z’s AI-meme fusion and KOTOPIA’s 4,206 SOL haul reflecting peak hype. However, the bubble showed cracks after high-profile failures like the Melania token and Javier Milei’s Libra token, where insiders exploited early access to pump-and-dump schemes, souring sentiment. This slowdown saw assets flee Solana, underscoring the mania’s unsustainability and DAOS.FUN’s reliance on fleeting trends.
As mentioned, 265 DAOs have been created on the platform, including test, duplicated, and failed launches. One even attempts to inject a script in its name, possibly exposing a naming vulnerability. According to the latest data, 137 DAOs remain active (with portfolio holdings or tokens being traded).
ai16z is the DAO with the most holders, with around 115,000 holders. It is followed by Big Pharmai ($DRUGS) with almost 9,000 holders. Only 15 DAOs have more than 1,000 holders.
After a peak in valuation and activity on January 1, 2025, most DAOs have seen their number of holders drop slightly.
KOTOPIA raised the most funds, totaling 4,206 SOL (approximately $734,000 USD) from 576 unique depositors, part of a platform-wide 40,170 SOL from 12,696 depositors. Six DAOs have raised at least 1,000 SOL. Note that USD conversions reflect transaction-time rates, explaining variability.
The top fundraising day was November 27, 2024, with a total of 5,540 SOL ($964,000) raised from 762 depositors. The top DAOs financed that day were KOTOPIA (4,207 SOL) and Degen Capital Guild (1,000 SOL).
January 1st, 4th, and 6th were the days with the highest number of depositors, each surpassing 1,000. The DAOs funded on these days included REDACTED (████████) with 1,220 SOL and BERADIGM with 1,100 SOL, among others.
You may notice that the number of depositors is 0 on some dates. This is due to how the query was structured—some depositor fields are empty, and the exact cause is still unknown.
At the time of this writing, there were around 30,000 unique deposits to fundraising DAOs. The average deposit is 1.44 SOL, but the median is only 0.36 SOL. The 75th percentile is 1 SOL, meaning 75% of deposits are for less than 1 SOL.
After fundraising, DAO managers can use the funds to invest in other Solana assets. An interesting detail is that the latest Token2022 standard is not supported for the assets. It’s evident that most DAOs invest in high-risk assets like memecoins, which is reflected in their performance.
The Assets Under Management of DAOs peaked on January 7, 2025, surpassing $80 million before falling to less than $7 million at the time of writing. These fluctuations mirror the volatility of the memecoin market, where a token can be highly valuable one moment and nearly worthless the next.
For some strange reason, probably related to the tables used, the query that calculates the value of the portfolio has gaps in the dates that have been insurmountable, and attempts to repair it have generated errors in other DAOs, this is the result with the information available in daos.fun, as there are prices of some tokens that DAOs have that are not tracked in Dune or not updated for several days, this is also seen in the market capitalization of some DAOs that returns 0.
Out of 161 DAOs, only 31 had a positive portfolio return since their fundraising up to the date. The rest had negative returns, with 40 DAOs experiencing drawdowns of -80% to -100%. Some DAOs have a market-to-asset ratio of several multiples, indicating significant overvaluation that may not hold over time.
Some assets are not being tracked, i.e. they do not have an available price to refer to, which results in some DAOs such as 'INNOVATIVE BIORESEARCH VOUGHT' showing a portfolio that is worthless, although the DAOS.FUN frontend does show an AUM of $63k.
However, many others have brought the value of the funds raised to zero and we should not consider it normal for so many DAOs to fail, at least we should not aspire to returns lower than those of other safer activities, such as staking. These failures hide rug pulls of insider traders, unscrupulous or incompetent managers that end up deteriorating the confidence in these type of products.
Trading activity peaked on January 17, 2025, with over 30,000 unique traders. Bot traders accounted for less than 20% of the activity. The identification of bots comes from a Dune table, where there are at least five million addresses listed as such. The list is not exhaustive, but it does give us an idea of the percentage of activity that corresponds to bots automating exchanges.
A total of 216 pools were created, most of which involved pairs of ai16z tokens. Logically, the pairs that concentrate the most volume are Solana's native currency, SOL, and the USDC stablecoin; the rest correspond to other DAOs or other memecoins.
The volume of tokens exchanged also clearly reflects this trend, with exponential growth after the last weeks of December until the last week of January this year, with volume exceeding $100 million most days. That said, the ai16z token always leading the exchanged pairs. It is important to recognize that the volume shown does not capture wash trading, an activity that involves selling the same token in short periods of time to artificially increase volume, which would allow us to show how much of the activity is “fake”.
While DAOS.FUN is a fun and innovative idea, creating short-term investment vehicles focused on memecoins is extremely high-risk. Each DAO has its own accountability, and the meme narrative is showing signs of exhaustion, especially with the increasing number of rug pulls and scams in the memecoin space. The platform’s success hinges on balancing innovation with risk mitigation. By fostering transparency and community involvement, DAOS.FUN could pave the way for a new era of decentralized finance. However, investors must remain vigilant and conduct thorough due diligence to navigate the platform’s inherent risks.
Looking ahead, DAOS.FUN’s viability may depend on addressing its opaque governance and portfolio tracking. With 40 DAOs losing 80–100% of value and ai16z’s outlier 796% return skewing perceptions, the platform risks alienating investors unless it provides detailed manager stats and real-time asset evolution data. Without such reforms, its $435M market cap could evaporate as trust wanes in this speculative experiment.
All information has been obtained from my Dune dashboard.
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