MetaDAO: Self-Enforced Tokenholder Rights

Introduction

It’s been one year since we first covered MetaDAO. In that time, the protocol has evolved from a fringe futarchy governance experiment to a crowdsale platform for “unruggable ICOs.” Instead of simply enabling existing organizations to engage in futarchy, MetaDAO is now using futarchy as a capital formation mechanism, enabling high-quality founders to raise money by sending a credible signal to markets around enforceable tokenholder rights.

Futarchic organizations that raise on MetaDAO “self-regulate,” meaning that instead of waiting for regulators to enact legal protections or statutory rights as those enjoyed by shareholders (right to vote, access to financial documents, receive dividends, sue for misconduct), they can effectively and credibly operate in the interest of tokenholders as part of a post-legal system.

This report includes our thesis on MetaDAO and a forward-looking valuation for its token META. We also discuss the recent mtnCapital & Omnipair ICOs, and briefly introduce upcoming ICOs on the platform. Technology needs a compelling narrative to attract capital and adoption, and one of MetaDAO’s biggest struggles has been precisely this: telling a valuable story that helps people discover and underwrite value into its product.

Futarchy & Conditional Markets

Futarchy embraces the economic principle that markets are the best mechanism to determine prices, with proponents arguing that governance should be no different. MetaDAO started out as a platform for DAOs to engage in futarchy, using conditional markets and profit-seeking incentives to guide decision-making.

One can think of proposals run through MetaDAO as prediction markets that enable traders to speculate on whether or not the passage of a proposal will be value accretive to the token’s price. We recommend reading Luke Leasure’s report to dive deep into the mechanics, as well as this post by Rinko of Colosseum that shows how profit-seeking incentives are not only good for traders, but also for projects and tokenholders.

Since its launch in November 2023, MetaDAO has facilitated 81 proposals via futarchy across 13 different organizations. Unsurprisingly, MetaDAO itself is the leading organization by number of proposals completed (31), followed by Island DAO (prev. Dean’s List, 9), Drift (8), mtnCapital (7) and ORE (7). 

Since Q2 2024, ~$3.8M in volume has been traded on MetaDAO’s conditional markets across a total of 65 proposals. Notable Solana DAOs that started using futarchy for some or all aspects  of their governance in 2025 include Jito (first proposal in January, limited to the NCN Grants Committee), Sanctum (February), Save (April), and Flash Trade (June).

As seen in the table below, during this period, MetaDAO has been the leading organization by number of proposals (15) and cumulative volume traded ($1.89M). MetaDAO also registers the highest average volume traded per proposal, at $126k. To date, 11 of its 15 proposals have passed, leading to a pass ratio of 73%.

mtnCapital is the second-leading organization by settled volume, at $570k. mtnCapital, as we’ll discuss later, is a futarchy-governed investment fund. It was the first ICO on MetaDAO’s launchpad, raising $5.75M. mtnCapital has seen an average of $81k in traded volume per proposal, with only a 43% pass ratio. Notably, mtnCapital’s latest proposal “Redeem MTN for Treasury” passed on September 5, 2025, approving the unwinding of the fund.

Outside of MetaDAO and mtnCapital, ORE ($347k) and Sanctum DAO ($321k) are the top organizations by cumulative volume. The table below shows that Sanctum has conducted 5 proposals since February 2025, with every new proposal exhibiting decreasing trading volumes. Sanctum’s proposals #4 and #5, both of which failed, provide examples of bad and good uses of futarchy, respectively.

Sanctum’s Proposal #4 was related to product, specifically building a consumer-facing mobile app called Wonder that the core team argued could improve distribution and monetization for Sanctum. We believe this exemplifies a bad use of futarchy, or any form of decentralized governance for that matter. As we’ll argue in the following section, product & strategy decisions should generally be left to the core team. Moreover, this proposal did not involve community CLOUD funds, so in no way did the decision impact tokenholder rights. 

On the other hand, Sanctum’s Proposal #5 illustrates a constructive application of futarchy. The proposal offered early investors the option to unlock their vesting CLOUD immediately, in exchange for forfeiting 35% of their holdings to the Team Reserve (which was not to be redistributed for at least 24 months). If approved, this would have added up to 27 million CLOUD to the reserve while reducing token supply overhang. To the extent that the proposal benefited a subset of early investors seeking liquidity, futarchy allowed all tokenholders to weigh the pros & cons of doing so, expressing the outcome of pass/fail in the expected price of CLOUD.

Governance is a Balancing Act

Although markets are the best mechanism to determine prices, they are not perfectly efficient, especially when there is a high level of information asymmetry between participants. The best founders & entrepreneurs often have contrarian ideas that are not immediately obvious to the rest of the market. As such, we believe that product and strategy decisions should generally be left to the founder or core team.

Futarchy can lead to improved decision-making, but at the end of the day it’s a form of governance, not a replacement for existing organizational structures. In other words, the goal of using futarchy in the context of a profit-seeking protocol should be to align incentives between tokenholders & the team, and enforce tokenholder rights when necessary. Beyond this very narrowly defined use case, futarchy, just as any other form of decentralized governance, risks sacrificing agility, efficiency & innovation, and becomes an end in itself, rather than a means to achieving a goal. As a classic example, consider MakerDAO’s legacy Core Units framework, where the issue wasn’t the form of governance, but that governance became an end in itself, with people spending more time politicking than actually getting things done.

In this regard, futarchy only works if you define the right metric to optimize. Robin Hanson, futarchy’s intellectual creator and now MetaDAO’s advisor, has acknowledged that a potential limitation of futarchy is that “people will try to encode their favored policies in the outcome metric.” In our view, price is the best metric to optimize for profit-seeking organizations only to the extent that tokenholders have governance rights and a claim on protocol’s profits. Otherwise, why should price reflect the project’s fundamentals? If there is a credible way to establish this value relationship, then tokens should trade or be priced by the market very similarly to equity. Price is the best metric to optimize in this case assuming you want to maximize the present value of expected future cash flows.

The ICO Landscape

Futarchy will be most effective when it’s embedded from the earliest stage of capital formation, ensuring that there are no conflicting equity-token structures and that a set of smart contracts enforce the verdicts of conditional markets. An existing organization like Uniswap would never adopt futarchy because the incentives are broken: VC firms that hold a substantial supply of the token also maintain equity positions in Uniswap Labs, the entity that accrues all revenue generated by the protocol. 

While Uniswap serves as the prime example of the equity-token dichotomy, the reality is that the majority of today’s tokens are suboptimal or outright uninvestable. To understand how we got here, it can be helpful to briefly recount the evolution of capital formation & speculation in crypto markets, as laid out by Kyle of DeFiance Capital:

• 2017-19: ICO era
• 2020-23: Low-float, high-FDV tokens
• 2024-25: Return to extremes (either pure memes or fundamentals-driven assets)

Source: 0xkyle__

The combination of flow-float tokens getting punished in liquid markets and a more favorable regulatory environment has sparked a revival in ICOs over the past year, either through bonding curves (e.g., Believe App) or direct sales (e.g., PUMP, Echo & Sonar, Metaplex Genesis, Katio’s Capital Launchpad, Legion, and the already established CoinList).

However, structural problems remain, and current solutions exhibit a tradeoff between adverse selection (i.e., low-quality founders) and capital formation maturity (i.e., higher valuations). The figure below maps the ICO landscape today across these two variables, showing how MetaDAO differentiates from the pack at present.

Let’s start at the top of the chart: high adverse selection, early capital formation stage. Believe, which caters to Web 2 native indie devs who want to raise small funds to build viral apps, clearly states in its terms of service that “Creator Tokens do not represent any ownership, equity, profit-sharing or entitlement to financial returns.” Founders on Believe essentially structure tokens as memecoins, with no financial upside or equity in the business to tokenholders. While this limitation may be a result of existing laws, it creates a situation where founders on Believe are likely adversely selected, and they are launching there because they couldn’t be funded traditionally. Legally, tokens on Believe are really not much different from memecoins launched on Pump or Heaven.

Now, let’s discuss the opposite side of the chart: low adverse selection, more mature capital formation stage. Echo emerged as a CoinList competitor last year and introduced Sonar in May 2025 as a software that founders can use to self-host a token sale. The platform comes with a variety of configurable compliance tools (KYC, banning certain jurisdictions, etc.). Many products have come to market in the past year offering similar features, including Metaplex Genesis, Kaito’s Capital Launchpad, and Legion. These products mitigate the adverse selection issue since founders can conduct sales in a compliant manner and on their own terms. Still, projects seeking to launch through these platforms must be vetted by the service provider (Echo, Metaplex, Kaito, Legion, CoinList), predisposing sales to take place at more mature stages in the capital formation cycle and thus at higher valuations. Below, we list a few examples.

• Echo: MegaETH at “9-figure valuation”; Ethena at $300M; Fogo at $100M.
• Sonar: Plasma at $500M.
• Kaito’s Capital Launchpad: Espresso at $400M, Novastro at $50M, Anichess at $35M.
• Metaplex Genesis: DeFituna at $50M, Collector Crypt at ~$66M.
• CoinList: Bitlayer at $200M, Pipe Network at $250M, DoubleZero at $750M.

In retrospect, some of these valuations were actually great deals. Investors in the March 2024 ENA sale at $300M are up over 30x on their investment as of writing; Plasma’s XPL is trading at $7B FDV pre-market, meaning that investors will be up about 14x should it open at that valuation; and investors in Collector Crypt’s CARDS are currently up about 4x from the token sale price. More often than not, investing at these stages is “easier” or less risky than pre-seed because projects have already found early indications of PMF, a growing user base, and revenue. The value proposition of products like Echo, Genesis, CoinList, etc. is giving retail a chance to invest on the same terms as accredited investors and VCs. However, they do not solve the structural problems in today’s tokens (equity-token value split, low float, etc.).

In other words, while direct token sales usually exhibit lower adverse selection than bonding curves, it’s important to note that in no way do they guarantee tokenholder rights. PUMP serves as a case study where the project had already found PMF and the team had no issues raising money from VCs at the time of the ICO.  Despite the Pump team being committed to the long-term success of the product, they had no way of sending a credible signal to markets around enforceable tokenholder rights. At the time of TGE, it was unclear for public market participants how value was split between token and equity. The Pump team eventually decided to allocate 100% of revenues to buy back the token, not because it was the most optimal use of capital (it is not), but because it has turned into the only credible signal for teams to tell the market that they care about the token (e.g., HYPE, JUP, RAY, etc.). 

Unruggable ICOs

MetaDAO has entered the highly competitive ICO market with the concept of unruggable ICOs. Unruggable ICOs offer two key differentiating factors vs. normal ICOs:

1. Instead of funds going directly to the team, they’re stored in an onchain treasury with futarchy oversight.
2. The founder assigns the Intellectual Property of the project (domain names, software, social media accounts, etc.) to a legal entity that recognizes the futarchy governance mechanism as the ultimate decider.

This mechanistic and legal design decreases the risk that the team will walk off with investors’ money, and in turn enables founders to raise more and from higher-quality investors than they otherwise would be able to.

To note, on Sep. 21, 2025, a proposal authorizing a MetaLex partnership passed, securing MetaLex’s systems as the foundation for legal and technical infrastructure within MetaDAO. MetaLex will be able to handle all legal aspects of new futarchies (e.g., create legal entities for the DAO, assign the IP to this legal entity, etc.). The team mentioned it will not be mandatory to use MetaLex for all legal aspects, but they will provide this as a key service offering to anyone wanting to ICO with MetaDAO.

How it Works: From Idea to Funded

To date, only two ICOs have taken place on MetaDAO: mtnCapital & Omnipair, which we’ll discuss in more detail later. In both cases, the MetaDAO team spent significant time speaking with the founders, conducting due diligence, and making sure they were a fit before conducting the sale. For instance, Proph3t, MetaDAO’s pseudonymous co-founder, spent three months talking to Rakka, Omnipair’s (also pseudonymous) founder before the OMFG sale.

Kollan, MetaDAO’s other co-founder, told us that the process for convincing founders to raise on MetaDAO has changed from outbound to largely inbound today. They are moving to “quasi-permissionless,” where they still have to approve new launches, but their bar will be much lower now. Emphasis will be placed on the market to judge if founders can raise and if they are reliable (i.e., they meet the minimum goal to fundraise and if the project goes nowhere then tokenholders can raise a proposal to get redeemed). The figure below summarizes how the process will work, with each phase explained in more detail in the following paragraphs.

1. Before the ICO

Projects will go through the following process to complete a raise on MetaDAO:

• Founders provide basic details, including project name, description, intended ticker, anticipated burn rate, minimum viable funding, and priced-based premine % to the team.
• Founders must sign an agreement that transfers the IP of the project like its domain names and social media accounts to a newly-created legal entity. They’ll get this back if the ICO fails to reach its minimum.
• To note, as indicated above, founders can choose to allocate up to 50% of the initial supply to a team premine that unlocks if they hit certain price milestones. Kollan told us that teams will have a configurable but minimum lock period of 18 months. For context, the MetaDAO team has a 4-year lock on their META allocation. 

It’s also important to mention that founders can be pseudonymous, as is the case for MetaDAO (Proph3t) and Omnipair (Rakka). Once they submit the above information on MetaDAO’s website and sign the agreement on MetaLeX’s website, it goes to internal review. Assuming the description is well-formatted (e.g. doesn’t have typos, is logically coherent), the MetaDAO team should approve it within 24 hours. This will make it visible on MetaDAO’s frontend.

2. During the ICO

The founder can decide to initiate the ICO at any point once it’s approved. Once the project kicks off the ICO:

• Anyone can contribute USDC over 4 days. There is no cap once the minimum viable funding is reached.
• If the ICO doesn’t reach its minimum viable funding, everyone is refunded their USDC.
• If it does,
  • The founder can decide how much of the USDC they want the project to keep. For example, a project with a minimum viable funding of $300k could end up raising $1M and the founder could decide that they only want $500k.
  • 10M tokens are then sent out proportionally to everyone who participated in the ICO. Partial refunds are also sent out, so in the above example someone who had contributed $1,000 would get $500 back.
  • 20% of the raised funds are then paired with 2M tokens in a liquidity pool, allowing people to buy and sell tokens on Jupiter.

Regarding monetization, the MetaDAO team told us that they are about to release a futarchy AMM which will have a 25 bps fee on volume that passes through it. The AMM will be integrated with Jupiter and will also contain conditional markets. This means that 20% of funds from the ICO will go into the Futharchy AMM instead of Raydium.

3. After the ICO

All of the money raised and the LP position go to an onchain treasury managed by futarchy. This treasury is technically a 1/1 multisig smart account on Squads where the signer is the Futarchy DAO, which allows anyone to see its assets on Squads’ interface. This smart account lets the founder spend their burn rate every month. Beyond that, or to mint more tokens, they must raise proposals to a newly-created Futarchy DAO. This DAO also has the ability to control the legal entity.

Tokenholder & Founder Benefits

MetaDAO’s design offers two primary protections for tokenholders compared to traditional ICOs:

1. Mechanistic protection against treasury rugs: on MetaDAO, it’s very hard for founders to “rug” and walk away with the money raised from an ICO. For instance, if a nefarious actor raised $1M with the monthly burn set to $50k, they would be able to walk away with $50k but the investors would be able to liquidate and recover 95% of their capital.
2. Legal protection against revenue rugs: Uniswap-like situations, where the Labs entity accrues all revenues at the detriment of tokenholders, are prevented. Because of the legal entity created at launch, tokenholders could sue teams that misappropriate the project’s revenues or compel service providers (domain name registrars, social media companies, etc.) to transfer control of IP to a new team.

Through these two mechanisms, tokens launched through MetaDAO align incentives between tokenholders & the team. Regarding supply dynamics, since the cash in the treasury is 100% owned by tokenholders, the amount raised will provide a fundamental floor for the market cap of the token at launch. Even if the token were to trade below cash holdings (book value), tokenholders have the option to liquidate and redeem the treasury USDC (minus the spent burn rate).

Crucially, founders also benefit from MetaDAO’s model. The primary benefit, which we have alluded to throughout this report, is that quality founders can raise money by sending a credible signal to markets around enforceable tokenholder rights. The team mentioned that the inbound is largely people who do not have access to venture funds or funds of any sort. They told us that it seems venture capital has dried up or been deployed, apparently more so in Asia than anywhere else. These are generally teams who need to raise between $100k-$1M and are looking for investors, but likely wouldn't be able to get it traditionally for one reason or another. With futarchy governing the treasury funds, it means higher risk can be taken on unknowns, but that's to be seen as more ICOs take place on the platform.

MetaDAO aims not only to become the place where founders can raise money, but where they can get their first 100 power users and make it known they’re here to build. For instance, OMFG holders can get whitelisted to the Omnipair private beta and have access to a private channel on Discord where they can submit feedback and interact with the team. So far, OMFG holders have reported minor bugs and provided valuable UX feedback to the team, helping them improve and iterate on the app’s design before public launch.

Finally, another underappreciated advantage for founders regarding the way tokens are designed on MetaDAO is that they move away from the commonplace industry practice of putting a hard cap on token supply (max supply), enabling founders to raise futarchy proposals to mint more tokens. The hard cap practice unnecessarily self-constrains growth initiatives. As alluded to by the MetaDAO team, consider what would happen if companies like Google and Facebook had self-imposed hard caps beyond authorized shares. One immediate consequence is that a lot of mergers and acquisitions would not go through or at the very least would need to be funded by cash at hand and debt. Stock-for-stock deals (e.g., Google’s acquisition of YouTube) or a mix of cash & stock deals (e.g., Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram) would not be possible if companies were unable to issue new shares.

mtnCapital

mtnCapital (MTN) was the first ICO on MetaDAO. A total of $5.8M was raised from 1.9K wallets in the presale, which ended on April 9, 2025. From a game theory perspective, the optimal strategy for an investor looking to allocate into a MetaDAO ICO is to wait until the last minute since everyone gets the same terms and price regardless. The MTN sale exhibited this behavior, with about half of all deposits coming in during the final three hours of the 7-day sale period.

The mtnCapital DAO was largely an experiment built on top of futarchy. It was envisioned as a tokenized investment fund, using capital raised from the token sale to propel Solana ecosystem projects. Notably, many investors contributed to the MTN ICO under the premise that the mtndao team would manage it to invest in mtndao hackathon projects. However, the team pivoted early on and decided they weren't going to work on it full time.

This decision was detrimental for the fund, with all investment-related proposals raised throughout the fund’s existence failing. The most notable was Proposal #5, “Buy $1M RAY OTC at discounted terms.” This proposal offered mtnCapital the option to buy RAY at a 40% discount to spot (7d TWAP starting May 30, 2025), with a 1-year cliff and 6-month linear vest. As seen in the table below, this was by far the most traded proposal, with $229k in volume and 1.1k trades.

After the last investment-related proposal failed (Proposal #6, allocate $250k to invest at mtndao), contributors became increasingly frustrated with the fact that every proposal was getting rejected, prompting tokenholders to propose the unwinding of the fund (Proposal #7).

While mtnCapital failed to allocate capital to value-accretive opportunities, it was the first real-world example of futarchy protecting tokenholder rights by enabling them to redeem their MTN holdings for USDC in the treasury. As Brian from Jito pointed out, “enforceable opt-out rights for tokenholders lower the barrier to investment and accelerate capital formation.” In the regular crypto fundraising paradigm, investors would have had no recourse. Futarchy allowed tokenholders to collectively say "hold on, this isn't what we signed up for... why don't you just return the money."

Regarding the question of why mtnCapital failed as a futarchy-driven investment fund, one of the issues is that operating in public and telegraphing your investment decisions to the rest of the market may be EV-. As it relates to venture and OTC deals, there is also significant friction for founders in having both deal terms and rejections made public, which inevitably leads to reduced deal flow for the fund. 

As of Sep. 23, 2025, there is still about $500k available for redemption in the redemption vault.  

Omnipair

The Omnipair (OMFG) fundraise launched on July 21 and ran for seven days until July 28, 2025. In total, 321 wallets contributed $1.12M to the project. Per the ICO mechanics, 2M OMFG tokens were paired with $224k USDC (20% of funds raised) and sent to a Raydium pool to provide initial liquidity. As mentioned previously, MetaDAO will release their own AMM which will have a 25 bps fee on volume. Thus, in future ICOs, they will funnel 20% of funds raised to their own AMM instead of Raydium.

As seen above, investors in the OMFG sale employed the same strategy as in the MTN sale, waiting until the last hour to deploy their funds. This strategy is the most rational since all contributors get the same allocation and terms as long as they do it within the 7-day window, so by doing it last minute investors can determine if the sale seems oversubscribed, what % of tokens they will likely receive, etc. To note, future fundraises on MetaDAO will run for 4 days.

As of writing, OMFG is trading at $0.65 (implied market cap of $7.8M), meaning that ICO contributors are up about 480% on their investment. 

Omnipair: Protocol Breakdown

Omnipair is a protocol for margin trading & permissionless lending/borrowing on Solana. Omnipair is powered by a Generalized Automated Market Maker (GAMM), a primitive that combines spot liquidity pools with isolated lending logic. Each pool on Omnipair is defined by two tokens (x, y), with liquidity added in a constant product fashion (xy = k). Money market functionality is integrated into these pools and works as follows:

• Users can deposit either Token “x” or Token “y” as collateral.
• Debt is tracked per user using debt shares, ensuring proportional interest accrual.
• The solvency of debt positions is checked against EMA spot prices to prevent manipulation. Note that this eliminates external oracle dependencies.

One of the core motivations behind Omnipair is to remove governance bottlenecks through autonomous risk management. In contrast to traditional money markets where the core team or risk managers determine collateral factors & oracle implementations, Omnipair uses mathematical equations based on real-time AMM conditions, slippage, and market volatility to continuously adjust the collateral factor of any given pool, as well as utilization based-dynamic rates.

Omnipair’s liquidation engine also differs drastically from traditional money markets that rely on external liquidators and auction mechanisms. Omnipair combines immediate debt writeoff with a gradual collateral streaming mechanism:

• Debt writeoff: When a borrower crosses the liquidation threshold (collateral value < debt value based on EMA pricing * collateral factor), their debt is immediately removed from the debt accounting pool. This requires no external liquidator.
• Collateral streaming mechanism: Collateral isn't sold instantly. Instead, it's gradually streamed back into the pool reserves. This "slow-drip" replenishes reserves smoothly, avoiding sudden market impacts. Collateral is incrementally returned to pool reserves over a defined timeframe, restoring pool solvency in a controlled manner.

In summary, Omnipair enables anyone to deploy a GAMM pair with any two SPL tokens. This enables borrowing of either token using the other as collateral (e.g., borrowing OMFG using USDC as collateral). While borrowers are only exposed to collateral risk (as in every other lending protocol), this design means that Omnipair LPs are also lenders, facing both credit risk (in case of defaults) and IL risks, but are compensated with both lending interest and swap fees.

Omnipair: Outlook

Regarding expected use cases, Omnipair will allow users to efficiently gain leveraged exposure to any token pair through recursive borrowing within isolated pools. Unlike traditional margin exchanges or lending protocols, Omnipair is permissionless and does not rely on external oracles, enabling leverage on long-tail assets (e.g., OMFG, memecoins, etc.).

The protocol is currently in mainnet-beta, with access limited to whitelisted addresses. To note, OMFG/USDC is the only working pool as of writing. Leveraging (looping) is on track to go live on mainnet-beta soon, with Rust programs done, but some infra work is pending for it to work correctly in the app. This will enable users to borrow, long and short OMFG/USDC directly in the protocol.

Rakka has mentioned that he does not see perps as the main competitor to Omnipair, but rather AMMs/Lending protocols. The biggest difference to traders will be the fees, since loan-based leveraging is cheaper in longer time periods (think months), whereas perps are usually better for short-term trading.

Omnipair is a team of four as of writing, with a second dev added to the team last week. Rakka mentioned that the current spending limit is below their allowed burn rate ($10k per month), but they will introduce a spending limit increase proposal within the next two weeks. This will be the first Omipair proposal traded on MetaDAO’s conditional markets. In terms of progress, Rakka mentioned that the team is close to rolling out the last beta features before starting external audits.

Upcoming ICOs

A key focus for the MetaDAO team over the past months has been nailing the monetization model. Now that they have revenue baked in via their own AMM with 25 bps fee, they are ready to go quasi-permissionless.

MetaDAO will host 5 upcoming ICOs soon and the team mentioned they will have many more after. In our view, these token sales can be very attractive opportunities for investors given the low valuations out of the gate. That said, more investors have started to pay attention to MetaDAO after the Omnipair ICO, which means that raises may be multiples higher than the $1.1M contributed in the OMFG sale. Note that public sale details are not available yet for the 5 ICOs, and the following is just a brief overview of what each project does.

1) Umbra

Umbra is a privacy wallet leveraging Arcium's confidential computing network, which uses Multi-Party Computation (MPC) to process encrypted transactions. Umbra encrypts transaction data on a user’s device before posting the relevant information to Solana, allowing the user to keep data and transactions private. Umbra has three co-founders, who came together for the Colosseum Breakout Hackathon in July 2025. It was designed from the ground up to be verifiable, trustless, and private while maintaining regulatory compliance.

The Umbra team is now composed of six people. The team mentioned that private transfers are live on Solana Devnet, and that they are now focused on enabling private swaps. Though ICO details are not public yet, the team mentioned recently in a X Spaces conversation that they are trying to raise a minimum of $750k.

2) Avici

Avici’s mission is to build a distributed internet banking network with a modern fintech app, stablecoin spending cards, DeFi native credit scores, and underwriting for unsecured loans while preserving self-custody and privacy.

Proph3t convinced Ram, Avici’s co-founder, that launching a token made sense for their business due to the “distribution edge a token can give you.” To note, Ram is a second-time founder and Avici already generates revenue (figures not public). They have already processed over $1M in beta spends and are gearing up for public rollout with business accounts, metal cards, and the launch of their DeFi credit score (a FICO alternative) in the coming months.

3) Paystream

Paystream came in 5th place on the DeFi track at Colosseum's Breakout Hackathon. Paystream is a peer‑to‑peer lending protocol on Solana that matches borrowers and lenders directly. If no match is found, lending deposits are deployed and continue earning through Kamino and MarginFi. Paysteam’s primary differentiating factor is on the borrowing side. Borrowers can customize their loan repayments with linear, milestone-based, or custom streams that match their cash flows (assuming they are able to match with a willing lender). Paystream’s flexible borrowing was designed for startups, freelancers, and DAOs.

4) Loyal

Loyal is building a permissionless, privacy-preserving decentralized inference protocol. There is not much public information beyond this description regarding the project, though its founder Chris Cherniakov has mentioned they are using MagicBlock's TEE infra in the backend.

5) ZKLSOL

ZKLSOL (Zero Knowledge SOL) is a Solana mixer offering “leveraged privacy.” The protocol seeks to address a very specific issue. In general, all mixers have an inherent limitation: in order to preserve your privacy, you need to have your funds sit in the mixer for as long as possible. This is needed for other users' activity to mask your own activity, but introduces significant friction in the UX since ideally you want your funds back as soon as possible.

ZKLSOL is designed to solve this by denominating the base mixer in an LST. This way, funds earn yield while users wait for the required time to ensure their privacy. Furthermore, ZKLSOL supports Solana Confidential Token Extensions, so users can continue using ZKLSOL after the initial mixing and maintain their privacy without needing to go through the mixer again. Notably, by using a third-party DeFi protocol like Kamino Multiply, ZKLSOL also offers leveraged mixer pools with higher yields compared to an unleveraged LST token.

Regarding monetization, mixer fees will be 0.5% (on volume), and there will be an associated deposit/withdrawal & management fee for LSTs, though the specific figure hasn’t been disclosed.

Out of all the upcoming ICOs, ZKLSOL has the most clear public information on next steps for the protocol and funding needed, described below.

1. Security audit: ~$50K (one-time).
2. Ongoing development: two developers, $10K/month each.
3. Business development: one person, $7.5K/month.
4. Marketing: ~$50K (one-time).
5. SOL to boost ZKLSOL yield and attract more users: ~$250K (one-time, refundable).
6. Community mods & support (Discord, etc.): ~$1K/month.

• Minimum raise: $300K
• Ideal raise: $650K

META Valuation Model

MetaDAO’s business model will revolve around its Futarchy AMM, which charges 25 bps on volume. Per the protocol mechanics, after an ICO is completed, 2M tokens will be paired with 20% of funds raised (USDC) and sent to this Futarchy AMM to provide initial liquidity. The AMM will be integrated with Jupiter and will also contain conditional markets.

We can model MetaDAO’s revenues based on the expected volume that will pass through their AMM. Starting with conditional markets, since Q2 2024, ~$3.8M in volume has been traded on MetaDAO’s markets across a total of 65 proposals. The chart below shows that volumes have decreased considerably in Q3 2025, barely surpassing $200k vs. $890k in Q2 2025, $800k in Q1 2025, and $1.1M in Q4 2024. We expect conditional markets to make up a small percentage of MetaDAO’s revenues.

The bulk of trading volume of the Futarchy AMM will likely come from new ICO tokens. To estimate how much volume we could see for new tokens, we can look at the historical volumes for OMFG. The chart below shows that the highest daily volume for OMFG was registered on the first day of trading, with volume normalizing lower after. Note that we are deliberately not looking at MTN volumes because it is a special case where the token traded very close to NAV by design. In addition, the investment fund has been shut down and MTN is currently being redeemed for USDC in the treasury. Based on upcoming ICO profiles, we believe that the median daily volume of ~$180k observed for OMFG provides a more suitable comp.

With this context in mind, we can lay out a few scenarios regarding MetaDAO’s 1-year forward-looking growth. The most important variable in our model is the number of new ICOs per month, since this will directly scale volumes in the Futarchy AMM and hence protocol revenue. For each scenario, we assume that new tokens launched through MetaDAO will exhibit the median daily volume observed for OMFG to date (~$180k). Note that the Omnipair launch has been relatively low profile, so we think this is a fair and conservative assumption.

• Bear: In our bear case, we assume MetaDAO crowdsale will remain a niche product that mainly appeals to ideologically-driven founders (cypherpunk ideals, privacy-first, etc.).  Thus, we assume an average of 2 new ICOs per month over the next year. Regarding conditional market volume, we assume futarchy proposals will continue exhibiting low volumes, so we annualize the $200k figure observed in Q3 2025.
• Base: In our base case, we assume that MetaDAO will become the most attractive venue for high-quality founders to conduct their token offering as they realize they are able to give a credible signal to markets around enforceable tokenholder rights, in turn being able to raise more money from  investors.  We expect an average of 5 new ICOs per month over the next year in this scenario. Regarding conditional market volume, we believe that based on the number of new organizations joining MetaDAO, it can go back to its peak of $1.1M per quarter achieved in Q4 2024.
• Bull: In our bull case, we take the same premise as in the base case scenario. In addition, we assume that the MetaDAO team will iterate on the crowdsale design to accommodate for teams who have raised before (thus expanding the TAM from just pre-seed to post-raise ICOs). In this scenario, we expect an average of 10 new ICOs per month over the next year. Regarding conditional market volume, we assume $2M per quarter, about 2x the peak rate observed in Q4 2024. 

The chart below models the expected Futarchy AMM volumes in each scenario coming solely from new token launches (conditional markets not included). On a 1-year forward looking basis, we forecast the following monthly volumes: $130M in bear case ($1.6B annualized), $324M in our base case ($3.9B annualized), and $648M in our bull case ($7.8B annualized).

Before conducting our valuation, it’s also important to note that the META token recently underwent a few changes. Specifically, the token is now mintable (gives the optionality to raise proposals to mint new tokens for value-accretive opportunities) and a 1:1000 token split was done to address unit bias, which had been an issue. Per the token split, META’s supply expanded from ~20K to ~20M. Protocol-owned liquidity also shifted from a restrictive 4% fee pool to a 0.50% pool, improving efficiency until the Futarchy AMM is live.

The table below models META revenues & implied valuation based on our assumptions. In our bear case, we think the futarchy AMM could generate $3.9M in annualized revenue. In our base case, annualized revenue rises to $9.7M, and in our bull case it doubles to $19.5M. We don’t think these revenue figures are unreasonable based on the 25 bps take rate and the volume we have observed across other Solana AMMs. Notably, we think the 20x P/S multiple is justified due to enforceable META tokenholder rights and clear value relationship between the token and the project’s success.

We find that META appears undervalued across all scenarios. Based on the 20x P/S multiple, META’s implied market cap would be $78M in our bear case, with an expected price upside of 150% to $3.7 per META. In our base case we see META trading at $9.3 (implied market cap $195M) and in our bull case at $18.7 (implied market cap of $389M). 

Risks

There are a number of risks associated with the protocol and our thesis. First, as we have seen, the ICO landscape is fiercely competitive, with various products entering the market in the past year, including Sonar, Metaplex Genesis, and Kaito’s Capital Launchpad. Still, we believe that MetaDAO’s unruggable ICOs meaningfully differentiate from competitors with a clear value proposition: enforceable tokenholder rights.

Second, MetaDAO’s crowdsale platform is still in an early stage and some aspects of its product have yet to be battletested. To help manage some of the risk associated with novel approaches to governance and legal ownership, the MetaDAO team has a backdoor that could in theory be used to halt, reject, or pass arbitrary proposals. To note, this backdoor hasn’t been used to date and the plan is to eventually deprecate it.

In the report, we argued that futarchy will be most effective when it’s embedded at the earliest stage of the capital formation cycle (pre-seed). In this regard, the MetaDAO team told us that while that is the ideal scenario, they want to iterate on the crowdsale design to accommodate for teams that have raised before. The issue with being constrained to pre-seed raises is that it doesn’t work for all investors. Some may have terms with their LPs for pricing or other constraints that means having an uncapped ICO wouldn’t work for them. These investors represent a substantial source of capital that the MetaDAO team isn’t willing to ignore. The team mentioned that this will likely be an iterative process to ensure they can expand their TAM.

Finally, investors should question our assumptions regarding expected number of ICOs and trading volumes. While we believe that our forecasts are reasonable, we could be overestimating demand from founders to launch on MetaDAO as well as trading demand once these tokens are live. 

Final Thoughts

MetaDAO has a real shot at realizing the Internet Capital Markets vision. The product was built from first principles and is meaningfully different from every other solution in the market. Notably, MetaDAO aims to solve one of the industry’s most important problems today: enforceable tokenholder rights. Although there are clear execution risks, we believe META offers an attractive small-cap bet with significant upside.