---
title: "DAO mergers and token consolidations"
url: "https://caper.network/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/dao-mergers"
updated: 2026-08-27
license: CC-BY-4.0
license_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# DAO mergers and token consolidations

| Concept | DAO mergers and token consolidations |
| --- | --- |
| Also called | Unification, token merge, DAO M&A, alliance, consolidation |
| Category | Analysis & lifecycle |
| Core idea | Three separable decisions – merge the _token_, merge the _treasury_, merge the _governance_ – almost always bundled into a single yes/no vote |
| How it is ratified | Each side passes its own proposal, and each is written to be contingent on the other passing |
| What the dissenter gets | Whatever the merger plan wrote down _before_ the vote. Afterwards the old token's conversion route is usually operated by the surviving side |
| Worked example (merge) | [Fei – the amended Fei\|Rari merger proposal](https://snapshot.box/#/s:fei.eth/proposal/0x3ff3e641c682d5d6d8b6945c33ee3d13fe24cd129a1f7ce7da6a83fa57a5a725), December 2021 – 97,031,533 for, 4,814,015 against |
| Worked example (unwind) | [Tribe DAO – TIP-121c, Final Redemption](https://snapshot.box/#/s:fei.eth/proposal/0x1170ff147279ebdfc6d74811d689391a9b9ae7983db6a9783efb66b0d7b2c30f), September 2022 – carried on a 0.67-point plurality of 186 voters |
| Related | [Winding down a DAO](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/dao-wind-downs) · [How DAOs fail](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/how-daos-fail) · [Rage quit & exit rights](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/membership/rage-quit-and-exit-rights) · [Treasury management](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/treasury/dao-treasury-management) |

Companies merge under a body of law that has spent a century deciding what happens to the shareholder who votes no: appraisal rights, a court that can price the dissenting share, a registrar that records the surviving entity. A [DAO](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/fundamentals/what-is-a-dao) merging into another DAO has none of that. What it has is a proposal on each side, a token contract that can be pointed at a new one, and a treasury that either moves or does not. Everything a merger statute would have settled has to be written into the proposal text before the vote, because nothing will settle it afterwards.

The useful first move is to notice that **a “merger” is three decisions, not one**, and that they can be taken separately:

- **Merging the token.** Holders of A convert to B at a fixed ratio, usually through a bridge or migration contract. This is the leg that is hardest to reverse, because it changes what each individual holder owns rather than what the organisation owns.
- **Merging the treasury.** Two pools of assets become one, under one set of spending rules. This can be done without touching either token – and often should be, because it is the leg a vote can actually undo.
- **Merging the governance.** One forum, one proposal process, one quorum. The slowest leg, and the one most likely to be quietly abandoned while the other two stand.

Proposals routinely present the three as a single package. Reading them apart is the whole skill, because the risk profile of each is different and only one of them is close to irreversible.

## Ratification: two votes, each conditional on the other

There is no joint electorate, so a merger cannot be put to one ballot. The workable pattern – used by the clearest documented case – is a mirrored pair of proposals, each explicitly conditional. The Fei side's [amended merger proposal](https://snapshot.box/#/s:fei.eth/proposal/0x3ff3e641c682d5d6d8b6945c33ee3d13fe24cd129a1f7ce7da6a83fa57a5a725) says so in its own voting rules: the snapshot “indicates the Tribe community commitment to proceed with the merger as outlined in the amended unification plan… This merger occurring is contingent on the parallel proposal submitted to the Rari snapshot also passing.”

That conditionality is doing real work. Without it the first community to vote binds itself to an offer the second can still refuse, which is the on-chain equivalent of signing before the counterparty. It also creates a scheduling problem nobody writes down: the two votes close at different times, and between them the terms are public, priced, and tradeable.

The same proposal shows the second thing a merger plan has to carry, because the amended version added it and the original did not: **an exit for the dissenter**. The amendment's own change list includes the “addition of a ‘low-water-mark’ for the ‘Tribe Ragequit’ feature” – a floor on what a holder who votes no can redeem. A merger without that clause offers the minority one option, selling into whatever market the announcement has already moved.

## Case: Fei + Rari, and the nine months to redemption

The Fei Protocol / Rari Capital combination is the best-documented DAO merger on the public record, because both the merger and its unwinding were decided in the open on [Snapshot](https://snapshot.box/), and the space is still readable.

- **December 2021 – ratification.** The [amended Fei|Rari merger proposal](https://snapshot.box/#/s:fei.eth/proposal/0x3ff3e641c682d5d6d8b6945c33ee3d13fe24cd129a1f7ce7da6a83fa57a5a725) closed with **97,031,533** in favour and **4,814,015** against, on 101,845,548 of weight cast. A follow-up, [Amendment 1 to FIP-51](https://snapshot.box/#/s:fei.eth/proposal/0x4d0ed6ab3d152853d4bb7ce12a27f0ce049c0199eb26fb6213a137c4634bcec4), passed ten days later 36,797,601 to 3,892.
- **January 2022 – completion.** [FIP-68, “Finalize Fei-Rari Merge”](https://snapshot.box/#/s:fei.eth/proposal/0xcec9f09baa20b7032b35c5af90aa7144efac83d861fab321c8d9a3b5a32cfcdb) settled the loose ends, including whether to pay off a debt instrument and when to end the token swap.
- **August–September 2022 – the unwind.** After the April 2022 exploit of the merged lending markets, the DAO moved to consolidate and redeem. [TIP-121a, “Consolidation”](https://snapshot.box/#/s:fei.eth/proposal/0xfe4dd76c4bea843fc5a422e1c0cb5dca2f7e985419d2ceeea7618e8c20dcef11) voted asset by asset on what to keep and what to sell, on 89 voting addresses.
- **20 September 2022 – the redemption vote.** [TIP-121c, “Final Redemption”](https://snapshot.box/#/s:fei.eth/proposal/0x1170ff147279ebdfc6d74811d689391a9b9ae7983db6a9783efb66b0d7b2c30f) offered three options and drew 186 voters. “Start Redemption” took **96,705,200**; “Wait on OTC” took 10,105,544 and “More Discussions” 85,375,181. The winning option carried a plurality, not a majority: it beat the other two combined by 1,224,475 of 182,085,297 cast, a margin of **0.67 percentage points**.
- **27 September 2022 – the last proposal.** [TIP-122, “Deprecate the Fuse Protocol”](https://snapshot.box/#/s:fei.eth/proposal/0xf3fd34ab84d4a70312b2d3021a2d6f8cb6f196d8aa06ce40d094216edf732bf3) passed 68,518 to nil on 49 voters. Nothing has been proposed in the space since.

Two things are worth taking from the arc rather than from any single vote. First, the merger was ratified overwhelmingly and the redemption that ended it was decided by well under one point – the exit is always the closer vote, because by then the disagreement is about money in hand rather than about a plan. Second, the elapsed time between finalising the merger and voting to redeem it was about eight months. A merger is not a durable state; it is a transition that either completes into one organisation or decays into a redemption queue.

## Case: the ASI Alliance, and what a token merge does to holders

The Artificial Superintelligence Alliance is the largest token consolidation attempted between independent crypto organisations: [Fetch.ai](https://fetch.ai/), [SingularityNET](https://singularitynet.io/) and [Ocean Protocol](https://oceanprotocol.com/) converting three tokens into one. Ocean's foundation describes it as an alliance “founded on voluntary association and collaboration to promote decentralized AI through a token merger.”

On **9 October 2025**, effective immediately, the Ocean Protocol Foundation [withdrew its designated directors and resigned as a member](https://web.archive.org/web/20251009211001/https://blog.oceanprotocol.com/ocean-protocol-foundation-withdraws-from-the-artificial-superintelligence-alliance-4619c4604ea3?gi=01d25070c399) of Superintelligence Alliance (Singapore) Ltd. The announcement is unusually informative about the mechanics, because it had to tell holders where they stood:

- **81%** of the $OCEAN supply had been converted into $FET since July 2024.
- **37,334** holders, representing **270 million** $OCEAN, had not converted and remained on the original token contract.
- The conversion bridge was “fully managed and controlled by Fetch.ai” – i.e. by one member of the alliance, not by the alliance and not by Ocean – and remained open at a fixed 0.433226 $FET per $OCEAN.
- Exchanges that had delisted $OCEAN were invited to consider relisting it. Delisting is the practical consequence a token merge has for the minority who decline it: the asset still exists and stops being tradeable in the places that matter.

Ocean's own long account of the dispute is [public, partisan and contested](https://web.archive.org/web/20251026080632/https://blog.oceanprotocol.com/the-asi-alliance-from-oceans-perspective-f7848b2ad61f?gi=5fbe732b9ea3), and the other members dispute it; this page cites it for what Ocean asserts, not as a settled account. What is not in dispute, and is the point for anyone reading a merger proposal, is structural: **a token merge is the one leg that individually re-denominates each holder, and the route back is operated by the counterparty.** An organisation can resign from an alliance in a day. The 81% who converted cannot.

## What to check before voting for one

1. **Which of the three legs is this?** If the proposal merges the token, treat it as irreversible for holders regardless of what it says about governance.
2. **Is the counterpart proposal live, and is this one contingent on it?** An unconditional vote on one side is an option written for free to the other.
3. **Who operates the migration contract after the vote?** Name the party, not the alliance. A bridge with a single operator is a single point of governance, whatever the announcement calls it.
4. **What does the dissenter get, in the text?** A redemption floor, a [ragequit](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/membership/rage-quit-and-exit-rights) window, a price. If the answer is “sell on the market,” that is an answer, and it should be said aloud.
5. **What happens to the loser's obligations?** Grants in flight, streams, vested contributor packages and outstanding liabilities do not merge automatically, and a merged treasury with an unmerged liability schedule is where the next year's disputes come from.
6. **Is there a stated way to unwind?** Almost never. The Fei case shows what the absence costs: the unwinding took its own six-proposal sequence and closed on a plurality.

## How Caper approaches this

A [caper](/wiki/foundations/what-is-a-caper) has no merger primitive, and the absence is structural rather than an omission. A caper's treasury moves only through the typed executive proposal kinds the contract recognises – `PAYOUT`, `INVEST`, `DIVEST`, `VOTE` and `UPGRADE`, the last raisable only on the $CAPER caper itself – and none of them converts a token, merges a member roll, or points one caper's governance at another. There is no proposal a caper can pass that makes it into part of a different caper.

The nearest thing is `INVEST`, and the difference is worth being precise about: it withdraws treasury XRD and buys another caper's tokens on that caper's [bonding curve](/wiki/markets/bonding-curve), holding the position in the treasury; `DIVEST` sells it back. That is one organisation taking a position in another. No holder is re-denominated, no bridge is created, both token supplies keep their own governance, and either side can reverse its half unilaterally.

What replaces the merger's dissent clause is the standing [exit](/wiki/foundations/leaving-a-caper). `exit()` in `contracts/logic/src/lib.rs` is a public method any member who has voted may call at any time: it takes their governance tokens and their soulbound vote tokens, computes their share as the same canonical weight that sized their vote – `(t · v) / (V · T)`, bounded to [0, 1] by an assertion in `treasury_exit` – and pays it out of the treasury and the curve reserve. It needs no proposal, no quorum, no counterparty and no negotiated low-water-mark, because it was not invented for the merger. It is the same right on the day of a controversial vote as on any other day.

That is the honest comparison, and it is narrow: Caper does not solve DAO M&A, it declines to offer it. The claim is only that the thing a merger has to bolt on under time pressure – a priced, guaranteed way out for the holder who disagrees – is the default rather than a clause. (Verified against `compute_vote_weight` in `contracts/common/src/lib.rs`, `exit()` in `contracts/logic/src/lib.rs`, and `treasury_exit` in `contracts/core/src/caper_dao.rs`.)

## References

- [Fei – “FIP-XX: Amended Fei|Rari Merger Proposal” (Snapshot, December 2021)](https://snapshot.box/#/s:fei.eth/proposal/0x3ff3e641c682d5d6d8b6945c33ee3d13fe24cd129a1f7ce7da6a83fa57a5a725)
- [Fei – “Amendment 1 to FIP-51: Amended FeiRari Merger Proposal” (Snapshot, December 2021)](https://snapshot.box/#/s:fei.eth/proposal/0x4d0ed6ab3d152853d4bb7ce12a27f0ce049c0199eb26fb6213a137c4634bcec4)
- [Fei – “FIP-68: Finalize Fei-Rari Merge” (Snapshot, January 2022)](https://snapshot.box/#/s:fei.eth/proposal/0xcec9f09baa20b7032b35c5af90aa7144efac83d861fab321c8d9a3b5a32cfcdb)
- [Tribe DAO – “TIP-121a: Consolidation” (Snapshot, August 2022)](https://snapshot.box/#/s:fei.eth/proposal/0xfe4dd76c4bea843fc5a422e1c0cb5dca2f7e985419d2ceeea7618e8c20dcef11)
- [Tribe DAO – “TIP-121c: Final Redemption” (Snapshot, September 2022)](https://snapshot.box/#/s:fei.eth/proposal/0x1170ff147279ebdfc6d74811d689391a9b9ae7983db6a9783efb66b0d7b2c30f)
- [Tribe DAO – “TIP-122: Deprecate the Fuse Protocol” (Snapshot, September 2022 – the space's last proposal)](https://snapshot.box/#/s:fei.eth/proposal/0xf3fd34ab84d4a70312b2d3021a2d6f8cb6f196d8aa06ce40d094216edf732bf3)
- [Ocean Protocol Foundation – “Ocean Protocol Foundation withdraws from the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance” (9 October 2025, Wayback capture)](https://web.archive.org/web/20251009211001/https://blog.oceanprotocol.com/ocean-protocol-foundation-withdraws-from-the-artificial-superintelligence-alliance-4619c4604ea3?gi=01d25070c399)
- [Ocean Protocol Team – “The ASI Alliance from Ocean's Perspective” (October 2025, Wayback capture – Ocean's contested account)](https://web.archive.org/web/20251026080632/https://blog.oceanprotocol.com/the-asi-alliance-from-oceans-perspective-f7848b2ad61f?gi=5fbe732b9ea3)