Who manages DAO treasuries and token liquidity — and how openly

A crypto market maker keeps a token tradable by posting buy and sell orders on exchanges, earning the spread between them. For a token issuer or DAO, hiring one means its token has steady quotes and depth on the venues where people trade it.

The firms in this rating describe two ways of being paid. Under a retainer, the client pays a fee for the service. Under a loan-and-call deal, the client lends the market maker its tokens to quote with, and at the end of the term the market maker either returns them or pays a cash amount fixed in advance. Flowdesk and Kairon Labs offer both, and Keyrock runs its work under a Master Services Agreement and a Master Loan Agreement whose terms are not public.

The loan-and-call structure works like an option held by the market maker. If the token ends the term above the price implied by the cash amount, paying cash and keeping the tokens is the cheaper choice for the firm. If it ends below, returning the tokens is. The DAO keeps the downside either way, and gives up gains above the agreed price.

An automated market maker (AMM) is a different thing with a similar name: a DEX pool that prices trades from its balances, with no firm quoting at all. On concentrated-liquidity AMMs such as Uniswap v3, liquidity sits in a chosen price range and stops earning fees when the price leaves it. Someone has to move it back, and that is the job the liquidity vaults in this rating sell.

Arrakis Finance shows the custody model at its clearest. Its docs, as of October 2026, say the issuer holds an NFT that represents the vault, and whoever holds it can pause, reconfigure or withdraw at any time. Arrakis rebalances within limits, and changes to core vault parameters wait two days. Steer Protocol, Gamma and ICHI run similar automated vaults, mostly for on-chain liquidity.

A vault manages DEX pools. It does not quote on centralized exchanges, which is where most market makers spend their effort. Many token projects use both.

The DAO keeps custody by granting narrow, revocable permissions instead of handing over the assets. Three mechanisms in this rating do that.

• Safe plus a roles module. The DAO's assets stay in its own Safe, and the Zodiac Roles Modifier grants the manager the right to call specific functions on specific contracts with allowed parameter values, without the Safe's signers approving each transaction. kpk works for the ENS Endowment this way.
• Vaults with separated roles. On Morpho, a curator sets caps, an allocator moves funds between approved markets, and a sentinel can cut risk or cancel pending changes. Harmful curator actions wait behind a timelock of zero to three weeks.
• Guardian vaults. On Aera, the vault owner sets what the guardian may do, and the guardian cannot withdraw funds or widen its own permissions.

Each of these leaves a trail on-chain that the DAO's members can read. A multisig is the base layer for all three, and our guide on multisig wallets explains how one works.

Where fees are public, they are usually a share of what the strategy earns or a small annual percentage of assets. As of our September 2026 review:

• Steakhouse Financial: 0.5% a year for curating up to about $12M of Compound's USDC, with 30 days' notice to end it.
• Steer Protocol: a 15% performance fee on its Smart Pools.
• Gamma: 14% to 20% of earned fees on its vaults.
• ICHI: a 10% performance fee taken from swap fees by default, with custom terms for larger deployments.

Market makers' fees are rarely public. Under a loan-and-call deal, the main cost is economic rather than a line item: the option the DAO grants on its own tokens.

Each firm is graded A to F on three blocks, mandate, money and transparency, and the overall grade is their average. A, C and F have written conditions, shown in the rubric. B and D are given when the condition for the grade above is partly met.

Of the 15 firms graded, four are A overall, five B, four C and two D. One more, a former Aave service provider, is held back because it no longer offers the service. Losses appear on each firm's page rather than in the grade. For example, an ICHI-run lending pool took on bad debt in 2022, and an Arrakis vault lost 2.94 WETH to an exploit in August 2026. Shrinking vaults are recorded too: ICHI's fell from $35.4M to $8.1M in a year, and Gamma's by about 94% since January 2025.

How we grade evidence across all categories is set out on our methodology page.