Tally was, for most of the on-chain-governance era, where major DAOs ran their binding votes. Where Snapshot handled gasless off-chain signaling, Tally was the binding on-chain layer: a hosted interface sitting on top of the OpenZeppelin Governor contracts, where a proposal moved from draft to an executed transaction that moved the treasury. Launched in 2020 by CEO Dennison Bertram, it powered governance for Uniswap, Arbitrum, ENS, Aave and more than 500 other DAOs. In March 2026 the hosted product announced it was winding down; the platform has since been taken over by ScopeLift and rebranded Cactus.
A Governor DAO's state lives in a contract: who can propose, the voting delay and period, quorum, and a timelock that queues a passed proposal before it can execute. Tally read that state directly from chain and wrapped the whole proposal lifecycle in one interface – draft a proposal as executable calldata, open it for token-weighted voting, watch it reach quorum, queue it in the timelock, then trigger the on-chain execution. Because it indexed every OZ-Governor deployment the same way, any DAO using the standard contracts got a working governance front-end for free, and delegates got one dashboard across every protocol they participated in.
Its clients included Uniswap, Arbitrum – one of the largest DAO treasuries anywhere – ENS, Aave, ZKsync, and hundreds of smaller protocols. Because so many DAOs ran their binding votes through one hosted interface, its wind-down left each of them to find another.
From 2024 Tally built products that held value rather than displaying it. The first was governance staking. The Tally Protocol, announced in June 2024, proposed liquid staked governance tokens: a holder stakes and delegates and receives a transferable token, while the staking contract keeps the voting power and passes undelegated power to active delegates (Tally). Its case was that holders had to choose between voting and earning yield elsewhere, and it claimed that Uniswap had 158% of its quorum sitting in DeFi and on exchanges.
Arbitrum was the first DAO to vote for it. A proposal by Frisson, Tally's chief revenue officer and an Arbitrum delegate, to fund ARB staking passed on 9 September 2024 with 134.45m ARB for, 4.5m against and 7.42m abstaining, most of the abstentions his own (Tally). Tally's staking contracts later ran ZKsync's delegation incentive and Obol's staked token (see delegate incentive programs).
In 2025 Tally repositioned itself as a platform for launching tokens: airdrops, token sales and vesting. It ran Hyperlane's HYPER airdrop to more than 235,000 addresses on five chains at once, and built the sale interface for Hyperwave's Balancer liquidity bootstrapping pool (Tally).
Its last project was its own token. On 3 February 2026 Tally announced an ICO and began a 60-day public log of the process (Tally). It chose Uniswap's continuous clearing auction as the sale mechanism (Tally; see liquidity bootstrapping pools), and on 26 February its token-sale platform ran its first external sale, for idOS, a privacy-first identity network (Tally). On 3 March the log described a soft market and said Tally was building tools for AI agents to run their own auctions (Tally).
On 17 March 2026 Bertram announced that Tally would not go ahead with the ICO and was shutting down after more than five years. The notice gives the reasons in order. The sale no longer made sense in that market, and the team was not confident it could keep the promises it would be making to buyers. Behind that, it said, there was not yet a venture-backed business in governance tooling: the thousands of protocols and millions of active participants Tally had been built for had not arrived, and crypto had found product-market fit in payments and speculation instead.
In an interview the same day Bertram added a regulatory argument: the Gensler-era SEC had forced decentralization through legal risk, and the new administration's signal that projects were not in trouble made it optional (CoinDesk). The notice put Tally's record at more than $1bn in payments through its infrastructure, over a million users, hundreds of organisations and no major security incident, and warned that many smaller teams could not be told directly because Tally had never collected their contact details. CoinDesk set the closure beside Across Protocol’s proposal to dissolve its DAO into a US C-corp and the 2025 decisions by Jupiter and Yuga Labs to abandon their DAO structures.
Engineering studio ScopeLift took over the platform and relaunched it as Cactus – “new name, same platform” – keeping the Governor-indexing interface alive for the DAOs still running binding on-chain votes. Each DAO’s OpenZeppelin Governor contracts belong to the DAO and were unaffected when the interface changed hands. The rename did not come with a new domain. Checked on 20 August 2026 and again on 24 October, tally.xyz serves the Cactus product directly, at 200 and with no redirect – the page it returns is titled “Cactus – Explore DAOs” – while the unrelated cactus.build, read the same day, is a design-template company for coding agents and has nothing to do with governance.
Tally's DAOs also had a second destination. On 19 March 2026, two days after the announcement, Snapshot added native support for Governor and Governor Bravo and offered migration that keeps a DAO's proposals, votes, activity history and delegate statements, free for six months to DAOs that got in touch before April. ENS and Uniswap were running their on-chain governance through it at launch (Snapshot).
Arbitrum built its own. On 28 April 2026 the Arbitrum Foundation announced a governance interface made with Offchain Labs, which launched with Security Council elections and proposal voting, and paid Snapshot to integrate the DAO's Governor contracts as a backup. Read on 10 October 2026, Arbitrum's page on tally.xyz is marked archived, with governance actions disabled (Arbitrum DAO).
Tally’s DAOs depended on a hosted interface that one company could sell, rename or shut down. A caper has no separate governance vendor: members propose, vote and execute through Caper’s own component on Radix from their own wallets, so a caper keeps governing itself if every website that shows Caper goes offline.