The platform’s founders warned earlier that without new funding, MetaDAO would have only 24 months of runway.
MetaDAO’s community today rejected a proposal to mint and sell $6 million worth of META tokens to two venture capital firms, DBA and Variant, at a roughly 30% discount.
MetaDAO, a Solana-based governance platform for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), saw the vote close today, Oct. 13, with over 878,800 USDC in volume, marking a clear pushback against a deal that would have diluted existing holders by around 7-8%.
If passed, the deal would have minted roughly 1.47 million new META tokens, with the two VC firms each able to purchase $3 million worth of META for $4.0795 per token — about 30-40% lower than market prices during the voting period. The tokens would have been fully unlocked, the MetaDAO team said in the proposal, adding that they “don’t believe in locking up non-team supply.”
The small team behind MetaDAO — two founders, a part-time designer, and an X intern — said that the proposal was meant to extend runway and allow for possible hiring. Currently, the DAO holds about $1.8 million in cash, enough for roughly 24 months of operations, the vote description notes.
Unlike Snapshot, where voting is purely based on token weight, MetaDAO uses a futarchy system, which combines prediction markets with governance. In simple terms, the community can vote on high-level goals, and markets help predict which decisions will achieve those goals, letting the DAO make more data-driven choices rather than just counting votes.
In August 2024, MetaDAO raised a total of $2.2 million in a funding round led by Paradigm.
‘Wrong Proposal Structure’
Before its conclusion, the vote drew criticism from some of the community members, who argued that the deal gave VCs too big a discount. After the MetaDAO community rejected the vote, DBA co-founder Jon Charbonneau wrote in a Telegram group:
“[…] I think the two biggest high-level problems with our initial proposal were: 1) Too much of a discount to spot price at time of posting. 2) The process of posting specific OTC deal terms is actually just the wrong proposal structure here.”
Charbonneau added that future capital raises may follow a different model, with the team setting pricing bounds and finalizing execution bilaterally, similar to how traditional boards handle share issuance.
Gabriel Shapiro, the founder of crypto-native legal tech organization MetaLeX Labs, commented on the vote in an X post today, saying that MetaDAO is “the only place I see the DAO ethos actually thriving,” adding:
“I can’t picture something like that on Ethereum DAOs today, they are totally captured by a professional governance class.”
META’s price jumped more than 16% to over $6.95 on the vote’s conclusion today, a boost also supported by MetaDAO’s previous success with UMBRA, a privacy coin on Solana that was 50x oversubscribed during its initial coin offering on MetaDAO.
The Defiant reached out to MetaDAO for further comments on the now rejected deal, but hasn’t heard back at press time.
