DeepDAO is the industry's reference dataset for who the DAOs actually are — the analytics and discovery layer often described as the “CoinMarketCap for DAOs”. Where a governance interface like Tally / Cactus or Snapshot runs one DAO's votes, DeepDAO reads across the whole field: it aggregates treasury balances, proposal counts, voter participation and member overlap into one searchable place, so a claim like “the largest DAO treasuries” has a source you can check rather than a number someone asserted.

What it measures

For each organization DeepDAO indexes the numbers a DAO is usually judged by: treasury size and composition, cumulative and active proposal counts, unique voters and governance-token holders, and derived participation rates. It also tracks people across DAOs — the same wallet's activity in multiple organizations — which surfaces the delegate class and the voting-power concentration that a single DAO's dashboard hides. The result is one place to answer comparative questions: which DAOs are largest, which are actually active versus dormant, and how thin real participation tends to be.

Why it matters for the industry

DAO treasuries are on-chain and therefore public, but “public” and “legible” are not the same thing — raw addresses across a dozen chains are not an answer to “how big is this DAO and is it healthy?”. DeepDAO is the layer that turns that raw visibility into comparable figures, which is why its dashboards are routinely cited in governance research and by DAOs themselves. Its own tracker, readable again since the site returned, puts the aggregate treasury of every organisation it enriches at $13.6 billion across 2,461 organisations, of which $12.3 billion is liquid, out of 50,845 governances aggregated in total. Two treasuries clear a billion dollars — Mantle at $3.2 billion and Uniswap at $2.4 billion — followed by ENS ($819.2m), GnosisDAO ($714.2m), the Ethereum Foundation ($683.2m), Arbitrum ($622.7m), Optimism ($574.3m) and Sky ($375.7m). Every one of those figures is frozen at 24 November 2025 and none had moved when the tracker was re-read on 16 September 2026, which is the whole difficulty described below.

Limits of the data

The numbers are only as good as what's on-chain and labelled. Treasury figures are dominated by each DAO's own governance token, so a large headline treasury can be mostly an illiquid position that couldn't be sold without crashing its own price — a distinction covered in treasury management. Participation rates flatter or damn a DAO depending on whether you count token supply or holders. DeepDAO is the best available map, but a map of reported figures — reading it well means knowing what each number does and doesn't include.

Outage, return and final sale (2026)

DeepDAO's public site went dark in mid-2026 and came back. Both halves matter, because the site it came back as is not the site that went away.

The outage. Through July 2026 the hostnames deepdao.io, www.deepdao.io and app.deepdao.io carried no address record at either the Google or the Cloudflare public resolver (checked 31 July 2026) — a DNS-level absence rather than a server error or a bot block. The domain stayed registered through 5 July 2027 and api.deepdao.io kept answering 403 Forbidden to unkeyed requests, so it read as a withdrawal rather than a lapse. No shutdown was ever announced: DeepDAO's Substack has published nothing since April 2025.

The return, and what it actually is. Re-checked on 26 August 2026, deepdao.io resolves again — four CloudFront addresses at the Google resolver — and serves the full application: the organisations directory, treasury totals, the people graph, all of it. It also carries a banner the site did not have before, and the banner is the story:

“DeepDAO is not currently updating data. The last update was on 11.24.25. This site is a static snapshot meant to showcase the platform's breadth. Do not use it for research, analysis, or decision-making.”

So the dataset is live to read and disowned by the people who built it. It has been rolled back rather than resumed: everything on it is dated 24 November 2025, nine months before the site returned and six months older than the last Internet Archive capture taken while the site was still running. app.deepdao.io, the logged-in product, still does not resolve at all. What returned is a showcase, not a service.

For anyone citing it, this is the harder failure. A dead site announces itself: the link fails, a link checker flags it, the researcher goes elsewhere. This one answers HTTP 200, renders thousands of organisations and billions of dollars, and dates none of it anywhere a machine will look — the staleness is declared in on-page prose, which no link checker reads and no screenshot preserves. A figure lifted from it today looks freshly sourced and is nine months old. Treat every DeepDAO-sourced number, including the ones on this page, as dated 24 November 2025, and say so wherever it is quoted.

The sourcing gap it left is still open. Cross-DAO treasury and participation figures — in governance research, in press coverage, and on several pages of this wiki — traced back to DeepDAO as the one index reading across the whole field, and a frozen index does not restore that. The live substitutes each cover part of it: Tally / Cactus and Snapshot for one DAO's votes at a time, Boardroom for aggregated governance reads through its API only, its public app having broken in the same window (checked 22 August 2026), Dune and Token Terminal for treasury and revenue queries. None reproduces the people-and-membership graph across organisations that made DeepDAO distinct, and the snapshot reproduces it only as of last November.

The final sale (September 2026). Re-read on 16 September 2026, the snapshot is still served but it is no longer what the site leads with: deepdao.io now redirects to /products, headed “DeepDAO Products — Final Data Sale”, which describes DeepDAO as “the #1 discovery and analytics platform for the DAO ecosystem from 2021 to late 2025” and offers the dataset for purchase by academic researchers — all proposals, votes and voters across the Governor and Snapshot platforms for the top 100 DAOs at $1,250 or the top 300 at $1,450, delegates for either set as a $250 or $350 add-on, and a treasury AUM time series for the top 300 at $850. Every package ends at 2025-11-25. The organisations directory has moved to /organizations and still serves the same frozen figures; the FAQ is now an empty page, and api.deepdao.io, which answered 403 to unkeyed requests all through the outage, now answers 500.

The sale itself is not new, and that is the part a reader arriving from the outage story would get wrong. DeepDAO announced it on 14 April 2026 — still the pinned post on its X account — offering “the most complete DAO dataset ever compiled” to researchers and linking the same /products page. The sale therefore predates the DNS blackout documented above rather than following it: the dataset was already for sale while the site was unreachable. What is new, or at least newly visible, is that the root now leads there instead of to the directory. The Substack has still posted nothing since April 2025, and the Internet Archive holds no capture of the domain from 1 August 2026 onward, so that redirect cannot be dated more closely than between this wiki's readings of 26 August and 16 September 2026. The past tense in the seller's own copy remains the clearest statement anyone has made about whether the service is coming back: a company selling the archive is not rebuilding the pipeline.

How Caper approaches this

DeepDAO exists because most DAO activity is scattered across chains, forums and off-chain snapshots that need aggregating to be understood. Caper keeps the primary data in one place by construction: a caper's treasury, proposals, votes and executions all live in the same on-chain contract, so the figures an analytics tool would reconstruct are the native, canonical state rather than an after-the-fact estimate. The transparency DeepDAO works to surface for the wider industry is the default a caper starts from.

References

• DeepDAO, deepdao.io — read directly on 26 August 2026; every figure it serves is dated 24 November 2025 by the site's own banner. Note on the archive: the Internet Archive captures of 7 and 20 May 2026, cited here while the site was down, return only the application's JavaScript shell — “You need to enable JavaScript to run this app” — so they resolve at 200 without preserving any of the data they were cited for. A single-page application is not archivable by capture alone.
• DeepDAO, “DeepDAO Products — Final Data Sale” — the data-sale page the root redirects to, read 16 September 2026; the Internet Archive has no capture of it.
• DeepDAO, “Is This a Healthy DAO Treasury?” (methodology).
• Uniswap governance, DeepDAO Pro discussion.