Paying for the work

Part of a series covering all 72 Ekubo DAO proposals. This post is about money going out — what the treasury holds, and who the DAO has agreed to pay.

Period covered: July 2024 – July 2026.

The treasury had a concentration problem

Ekubo received a 6M STRK Catalyst grant from Starknet — half vesting immediately, half linearly over 48 months.

In July 2024, “Diversify DAO treasury” made the argument for selling it. The reasoning was not that STRK was a bad asset; it was that Ekubo’s success was already correlated with Starknet’s. Holding the treasury in STRK doubled a bet the DAO had no way to hedge and had not chosen to make twice.

The proposal sold all of the immediately-vested half, less the 180k STRK already committed to delegation rewards, targeting a 1:1:1 STRK:ETH:USDC treasury.

By January 2025 the residual STRK was put to work rather than sold: “Delegate STRK to community” staked 1.1M STRK across five validators — Argent (400k), AVNU (300k), Braavos (150k), Fibrous (150k) and Teku (100k). The split is explicitly political as well as economic: partners driving development, longtime supporters, and one smaller validator for decentralisation. The DAO was buying staking yield and goodwill in the same transaction, and said so.

The last of the grant was claimed in April 2026 alongside a round of buybacks.

The company contract

July 2024’s “Confirm Ekubo Inc Role in DAO” is the largest single commitment in the archive: $1.5M over two years to fund Ekubo, Inc.’s services to the DAO, against the vision document.

The proposal shows its work on treasury composition — roughly $1.9M in ETH, plus STRK discounted 75% for the four-year vest and ~15% for the volatility of an ongoing DCA sale. It is unusually explicit about haircuts for a governance post, and that transparency is the reason the number is arguable rather than opaque.

Everything else in this post is small by comparison, which is itself the finding: the DAO’s compensation structure is one large contract with the company that builds the protocol, plus a long tail of individually-voted engagements.

The long tail, and how often it fails

Nine proposals fund contributors, media, research and data work. Five of them did not pass.

Approved: Twitter Takeover (15,000 USDC for a year of X curation, June 2025), Blockworks Advisory (90,000 USDC, 12 months, August 2025), GentlemenGerald as technical contributor (22,500 EKUBO vesting over 13 months, October 2025), and GeckoTerminal integration (30,000 USDC, November 2025).

Rejected: Clutch Town’s $60k Q2 2025 growth engagement, 2,500 USDC for the Arabianhorses Dune dashboards, the first GentlemenGerald proposal, the X management renewal in May 2026, and the KOL onboarding plan in June 2026.

Two of those rejections are instructive because the same work was later approved. GentlemenGerald’s first proposal (12 months, 22,500 EKUBO) failed on October 1, 2025; a near-identical proposal (13 months, same 22,500 EKUBO) passed six days later. The economics barely moved. What changed was the process around it.

The pattern in the failures is harder to miss: the DAO has consistently approved technical and data-infrastructure work, and consistently declined open-ended marketing and growth mandates. The Twitter curation funding passed in 2025 and its renewal failed in 2026. A KOL programme failed. A growth-strategy engagement failed. Whether that reflects discipline or a blind spot depends on what you think marketing is worth, but it is a clear revealed preference across four separate votes.

And one capital allocation

July 21, 2026 — Provide capital for STONX launch. The DAO sent its Ethereum USDC-USDT and ETH-USDT positions to Ekubo, Inc. to withdraw enough capital to buy 333,333 USDG on Robinhood Chain, funding the DAO’s side of the STONX launch. Positions and excess returned.

That capital is the DAO-owned side of the STONX/USDG pool, and the mechanism it funds is described in Ve33: a token-governed liquidity marketplace.

The proposals

Next: where the protocol’s revenue goes.