'Gensler and Biden were just better for crypto,' says Tally CEO as DAO governance platform shuts down
End of DAOs? Firm behind Uniswap and Arbitrum governance says easing regulation made decentralization optional
By Sam Reynolds|Edited by Stephen Alpher Mar 17, 2026, 2:30 p.m.
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What to know:
- Tally, a leading governance platform for more than 500 crypto DAOs including Uniswap and Arbitrum, is shutting down after six years as CEO Dennison Bertram says the regulatory and market forces that justified on-chain governance have faded.
- Bertram argues that the Biden-era SEC under Gary Gensler effectively forced decentralization through legal risk, but the Trump administration's more permissive stance has made DAO-style governance optional, undermining demand for tools like Tally.
- Tally's closure also reflects a broader industry consolidation and the failure of the "infinite garden" thesis, as crypto has not produced the vast ecosystem of consumer applications once envisioned and now competes with AI for top talent and attention.
The CEO of crypto's largest Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) governance platform says the Biden administration was better for his industry than its successor — and is shutting down his company to prove the point.
Tally, which powered on-chain governance for Arbitrum, Uniswap, ENS, and more than 500 other DAOs, will wind down operations after six years, CEO Dennison Bertram announced today in a blog post.
Crypto protocols are governed not by executives or boards, but by decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, where token holders vote on everything from fee structures to software upgrades.
In practice, participation is often low and decision-making slow, leaving a small group of active voters to steer billion-dollar systems. Tally built the infrastructure that made crypto democracy possible, providing the voting rails, delegation tools, and dashboards used by major DAOs like Uniswap and Arbitrum to run their governance processes.
In an interview with CoinDesk, Bertram said the twin forces that sustained demand for governance tooling — regulatory threat and a growing ecosystem of decentralized applications — have both disappeared.
Across Protocol recently proposed dissolving its DAO entirely and converting into a U.S. C-corp, arguing the token structure was actively impeding institutional partnerships. Its ACX token surged 80% on the news.
Last year, Solana-based exchange Jupiter and NFT conglomerate Yuga Labs both abandoned their DAO structures, with Yuga CEO Greg Solano calling his project's governance "sluggish, noisy and often unserious governance theater.
"There's a natural tension between building a collaborative, decentralized system and then founding it upon crypto economics," Bertram said. "The crypto economics implies we can find some sort of stasis because everyone is going to pursue their own personal best interest, which is kind of a zero-sum, profit-maximizing mentality.
Gensler forced decentralization. His absence is undoing it
Under the SEC's Gary Gensler-era interpretation of securities law, a token risked being classified as a security if a clearly identifiable group was making managerial decisions that drove its value, one of the key prongs of the Howey Test.
The industry's response was to push decision-making outward through DAOs, distributing control across thousands of wallets so no single entity could be said to run the network. Governance systems and tools like Tally weren't just features — they were part of a legal strategy.
Bertram sees this as the end of his company: if teams no longer believe they will be penalized for operating like traditional companies, decentralization stops being a requirement and becomes optional, many teams choose not to pay for it.
“The [Trump] administration is loudly signaling that you're not in trouble, go forth and do what you wish," Bertrain said. "That gives an enormous amount of leeway for existing organizations. It's not actually clear if you need decentralization, or what decentralization looks like.”
The garden isn't infinite
The regulatory shift alone didn't kill Tally. The company's business model was built on a second bet: that the Ethereum ecosystem would produce a vast, infinite garden of protocols and applications, each needing governance infrastructure.
"For Tally and organizations like Tally to exist, it's not enough to have a Uniswap, an Aave, one or two L2s, and that's it," Bertram said. "That's a very different kind of enterprise consultancy business."
That infinite garden thesis was central to Tally's $8 million fundraise last year.
"A big part of our thesis in our last round was, look, there are going to be thousands of L2s, which was an idea that no one pushed back on," he said. "There are not, in the near term, thousands of L2s. And there may never be."
Instead, the industry consolidated around a handful of dominant protocols.
Crypto found product-market fit in payments and speculation like prediction markets, Bertram said, but the rich consumer application layer that would have sustained a governance infrastructure business never developed.
"There isn't a venture-backed business in governance tooling for decentralized protocols," he wrote in a blog post announcing the shutdown. "At least not yet."
Retail doesn't care about crypto
Beyond the governance crisis, Bertram sees a more existential problem for the industry.
"AI has really become the new narrative of the future, and its narrative is actually much larger and much more encompassing than crypto," he said. "What that does is it sucks away the best and the brightest. The most exciting opportunity is not here, so we don't get the most exciting founders, we don't get the most exciting builders."
Bertram said he still believes in the industry but no longer buys the argument that it is early.
"People always say, it's still early," he said. "I've been in this since 2011. I don't know. It doesn't feel early."
DAOsDecentralized Autonomous OrganizationsDao governanceToken GovernanceMore For You
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