MetaCartel Ventures (MCV) is a for-profit DAO in which members pool capital on Ethereum, vote on early-stage projects to back, and hold the investments through a Delaware limited liability company. The members are its investors: according to the whitepaper, they source deals, run due diligence, propose investments and vote on them, with no fund manager between them and the money. A smart contract holds the treasury and records each member's shares, and a legal agreement makes those shares a membership interest in the company.
The initial mandate was the Ethereum application layer. Crypto Briefing reported in December 2019 that the fund would deploy capital into decentralized applications in areas including NFTs, gaming and tokenized marketplaces; the whitepaper also lists less conventional bets such as over-the-counter trades of unlisted tokens, sponsoring teams in crypto games and seed capital for other DAOs. When the whitepaper came out, The Defiant called MCV the first for-profit DAO since The DAO of 2016, whose token sale U.S. regulators later found to have broken securities law.
MetaCartel began in September 2018 as a technical working group on meta transactions, which let people use Ethereum applications without holding ether to pay fees; that work became the Gas Station Network, which spun out in early 2019. In April 2019 the community turned to grants and set up MetaCartel DAO, which the whitepaper describes as the first fork of MolochDAO, the grants DAO whose minimal contracts many later DAOs copied. MetaCartel DAO's contracts went live on 5 June 2019; by December it had raised more than 1,100 ETH from over 60 participants and given $44,450 to more than 13 projects, among them early DAOhaus tooling and the Mintbase ticketing experiment.
MCV was the for-profit step that followed. Its whitepaper, dated December 2019, is credited to Gabriel Shapiro, who designed the legal structure, Peter Pan (pet3rpan), MetaCartel's founder, and Ameen Soleimani, who led work on the Moloch v2 contracts; it says SpankHouse incubated the project. The Moloch v2 README records that MetaCartel, The LAO and MolochDAO designed v2 together and that the MetaCartel Venture DAO was expected to be its first deployment. The company was filed with the Delaware Division of Corporations on 12 February 2020, and the DAO's Moloch contract was created on 15 February 2020.
MCV pairs code with law. The code is a deployment of the Moloch v2 contracts; the law is the Grimoire, the company's operating agreement, read together with the Delaware Limited Liability Company Act. The whitepaper calls the approach qualified code deference: rather than declaring that code is law, the Grimoire is an ordinary legal agreement that points to the contract's data and events for its results. Anyone who acquires shares through the contract becomes a member of the company, each share is a percentage membership interest, and members bear no personal liability for the company's debts beyond what they put in.
The Grimoire sorts decisions into two kinds. Ordinary proposals, covering admissions, expulsions, payments to service providers and investments, run entirely on-chain and pass by a majority of votes cast, with no quorum. Extraordinary proposals change the meta-rules, such as amending the Grimoire, selling more than half the investment assets, merging the company or starting a lawsuit; they need legal formalities and the approval of 69% of shares, and an on-chain vote without those formalities is invalid. The Grimoire waives fiduciary duties as far as Delaware law allows and gives no member a right of indemnification, on the reasoning that a member who can leave at any time does not need a manager owing them a duty. For tax, the company is treated as a U.S. partnership, so profits and losses pass to members, who each receive a Schedule K-1.
The deployed contract, per the deployment configuration, counts time in 2-hour periods: proposals run a one-week vote and then a one-week grace period, a proposal needs a 0.2 ETH deposit, and the processing fee is 0.00666 ETH.
Admission is permissioned. An existing member has to champion a candidate, the members assess fit, expertise and legal eligibility, and the candidate is then admitted by an on-chain vote and signs the Grimoire or a joinder agreement. The Book of Rituals, an exhibit to the Grimoire, adds a background check through CoinList and excludes anyone who would bar MCV from private placements. Shares cannot be transferred, and the Grimoire forbids members to share the private keys of the address that holds them.
The whitepaper names three roles:
The accreditation line comes from U.S. securities law. Many of the deals MCV wanted rely on Rule 506(c) of Regulation D, which admits only accredited investors, so the whitepaper limits initial membership to people with net worth above $1m or income above $200,000 a year ($300,000 jointly with a spouse). Unaccredited people could join as Mages only once MCV managed more than $5m. Because every member has full management and information rights, the whitepaper argues MCV may be a general partnership whose interests are not securities, but it treats them as securities anyway.
Exit is permissionless. Any member can rage-quit, the Moloch function that burns some or all of a member's shares and pays out the matching share of the treasury, at any time. Because MCV holds illiquid investments as well as tokens, the whitepaper splits the payout in two: RageTokens, the member's share of the tradable tokens such as ETH and DAI, paid at once; and RageClaims, non-transferable tokens giving the member the same share of future proceeds from the investments MCV held at the moment of exit. Its example is a member with 5% of the company, who leaves with 5% of the cash and a continuing right to 5% of profits from the assets then held. All members agree in the Grimoire that this payout is the fair market value of their interest and cannot contest it.
Moloch v2 adds guards. A member who voted yes on a proposal that has not yet been processed cannot rage-quit until it is, so nobody can approve spending and leave before it lands. Members can expel another member with a GuildKick proposal; an expelled member who has pending yes votes is held as a non-voting holder of loot, the Moloch term for shares with economic rights only, for up to two weeks until those proposals clear. If a token contract blocks a payout to a member, safeRageQuit lets the member leave without that token, and as a last resort a multisig of trusted members and Summoners can take the stuck funds and distribute them.
The MCV website lists its members by name and affiliation, among them Ameen Soleimani, the creator of Moloch; Stani Kulechov of Aave; Stefan George of Gnosis; Hugh Karp of Nexus Mutual; Bobby Ong of CoinGecko; and Peter Pan, listed as co-founder of MetaCartel Ventures. It also credits the builders: Gabriel Shapiro for the Grimoire, Ameen Soleimani for the Moloch v2 contracts, Andy Gray of BlockRocket and RaidGuild for the onboarding app, and Dekan and Ven of RaidGuild for the DAOhaus and PokeMol interfaces. The wider MetaCartel community runs separately, with its own site at metacartel.org and its own DAO on DAOhaus.
The DAO's contract records 3,441 transactions since 2020. The most recent governance calls came in October and November 2025, when members submitted, sponsored, voted on and processed proposals; the last call of any kind was a withdrawal on 14 November 2025. As of 23 October 2026 there has been no call to the contract since, though tokens have continued to arrive in it. The website is online and still lists members.
MetaCartel Ventures keeps two doors open: any member can rage-quit at any time, and a Mage who stops contributing is demoted or expelled by peer review. Both rest on shares a member bought in with. A caper folds them into one rule: a member who has voted can exit at any time for their fair share of the treasury, and vote weight is earned by voting as well as by holding, so a big bag alone can't capture control. There is no admission vote and no membership list; holding the token and having voted is the credential (leaving a caper).