Stake DAO

Stake DAO is a set of DeFi products built around vote-escrow tokens, the model Curve introduced with veCRV, where locking a governance token for years earns voting power and boosted rewards. Stake DAO's pitch is that users should not have to give up liquidity to get those benefits. It launched on 20 January 2021 with an airdrop of its SDT token.

The protocol is governed by SDT holders, who vote on proposals in the stakedao.eth Snapshot space after discussion on its governance forum. Development, operations and maintenance are done by the Stake DAO Association, which its grant proposals describe as a Swiss not-for-profit association based in Zug. The Association asks the DAO for a grant every half-year against milestones: $840,000 for the second half of 2025 and $962,000 requested for the first half of 2026, with costs of $737,000 reported for the earlier period. Stake DAO's legal disclaimer says it is not registered with any financial regulator and does not consider itself a crypto-asset service provider under MiCA, because it never holds user funds.

The founders are not named in Stake DAO's current docs or site. SDT's original allocation gave 36% to initial contributors, angel investors and a foundation, vested over two years from January 2021.

Stake DAO has three core products, and most of its scale comes from Curve.

• Liquid lockers: deposit a governance token such as CRV and receive an sdToken such as sdCRV. Stake DAO locks the underlying for the maximum term and keeps re-locking it. sdTokens earn the underlying protocol's rewards, a share of strategy fees and vote incentives, and can be sold on a DEX at any time, though the price can sit below the original token. Stake DAO's January 2026 review listed 10 lockers, including sdCRV, sdBAL, sdPENDLE, sdFXN, sdFXS and sdYFI; sdBAL has since been wound down.
• Strategies: deposit Curve or other LP tokens and earn rewards boosted by the locker's veToken balance. Since Staking V2 (September 2025), rewards are credited instantly at each harvest rather than streamed over a week. OnlyBoost, for Curve, splits a deposit between Stake DAO and Convex by formula to get the higher combined boost.
• Votemarket: an on-chain market where protocols pay veToken holders to vote for their gauges. Stake DAO says it has directed more than $70 million in rewards across over 2,200 campaigns. Version 2 verifies Ethereum votes on layer-2 chains using storage proofs.

Stake DAO competes most directly with Convex, which holds more veCRV and pioneered the model. Stake DAO's January 2026 review claims it controls over 25% of veCRV boost supply through delegation. Newer products let users borrow stablecoins against strategy positions and deposit into curated vaults run by outside curators. For how its record compares with other yield products, see Stake DAO next to other yield aggregators.

Stake DAO charges performance fees only, at harvest. Deposits and withdrawals are free apart from network gas. The docs do not publish one fee table: each strategy and locker shows its own rate in the app, and the split between sdToken holders, vlSDT holders and the treasury varies by protocol. That makes it necessary to check the fee on the specific product before depositing.

SDT is the governance token, with a fixed total of 100 million. CoinGecko showed about 68.6 million circulating in October 2026. New SDT is minted from a MasterChef contract at a rate governance sets. SDT holders stake it as vlSDT, a model adopted in 2026 that gives flat, non-decaying voting power, a share of protocol fees paid each weekly epoch and the ability to boost their sdToken voting power by up to 2.5 times. Leaving vlSDT takes an eight-week unstake queue. The older veSDT lock, of up to four years, is closed to new positions, and holders can migrate.

Stake DAO is non-custodial: deposits sit in its contracts, and its timelock docs state that withdrawals stay available even when deposits are paused. Changes to the current protocol go through a 48-hour OpenZeppelin-based timelock, with a governance multisig as proposer. Guardians can pause deposits or shut down a gauge immediately. Treasury wallets on six chains are 4-of-7 multisigs.

Stake DAO says its contracts have had 14 audits by ChainSecurity, Omniscia, Trust Security, Pashov Audit Group and Zach Obront, with reports in a public GitHub repository. It added Hypernative for real-time threat monitoring in 2025. Its bug bounty pays up to $100,000 for a critical issue, but excludes compromised keys and admins acting within their powers. Optional cover through OpenCover, underwritten by Nexus Mutual, is sold in the app; claims need Nexus membership and KYC.

Both 2026 incidents happened outside the audited core. On 12 March 2026, a logic error in a peripheral oracle-updater contract, live for about 17 months, let an attacker forge vote data and drain about $175,000 of incentives from 54 Votemarket campaigns. On 27 May 2026, a deployer account that had never handed ownership of the vsdCRV token contract on Arbitrum to the multisig was compromised. The attacker minted unbacked tokens and drained about $91,000 from a Curve pool, and the price collapse in that pool briefly broke an oracle used by a lending market on Arbitrum, liquidating some borrowers. The incident report says the same deployer had residual roles on other contracts across several chains.

Governance approved refunds for both. SDGP-65 covered the March losses from the treasury. SDGP-70 and SDGP-75 approved about 1.55 million sdCRV in ex gratia payments, most of it from the secured backing of legitimate vsdCRV, with the treasury covering the rest. The Association stresses these are voluntary and not an admission of liability.

A self-custody wallet on a supported chain is all that is needed; there is no account or identity check for the protocol itself. The app at www.stakedao.org covers lockers, strategies and SDT staking, and zaps routed through Enso can convert a single token into a position in one transaction.

• Strategies: withdraw LP tokens at any time, with no fee.
• Liquid lockers: the underlying token is locked permanently. Exit by selling the sdToken in its DEX pool, at the pool's price. sdBAL holders are an exception: after Balancer ended veBAL, SDGP-68 set up a 1:1 claim on the underlying BPT once the veBAL lock expires on 1 April 2027.
• vlSDT: request an unstake and wait eight weeks, or cancel to restore voting power.
• Legacy products: SDGP-81, proposed on 21 October 2026, retires 16 old products across 187 contracts. Stake DAO says withdrawals from them will have no deadline and no fee, through withdraw.stakedao.org or directly on-chain, though some depend on third-party protocols that may no longer work.

Most of Stake DAO's history is a steady expansion of the liquid-locker idea to new vote-escrow tokens, and 2026 has been about consolidation and security clean-up.

• January 2021: launch and SDT airdrop.
• 2022: liquid lockers and veSDT introduced. In June, market maker GSR proposed an SDT token-loan deal on the forum; Stake DAO said in August that market making had not started.
• 2024: OnlyBoost launches; Chainlink CCIP integration for cross-chain SDT in March; Votemarket v2 in November.
• 2025: Hypernative monitoring added in August; Staking V2 with instant reward claims in September.
• 2026: Votemarket incident in March; vsdCRV incident in May; Balancer-related products wound down after BIP-919; migration from veSDT to vlSDT; legacy product retirement proposed in October.