Why did the celebrity Web3 project Across Protocol choose to abandon the DAO?

Original Title: What Across Protocol’s going private proposal really means for its token holders and DAO

Original Author: Jacquelyn Melinek

Original Compilation: Ken, ChainCatcher

Nowadays, as many traditional companies dig deeper into the tokenization space, Across Protocol is proposing a different path to its token holders: making it a private company by buying out their tokens, or exchanging them for equity.

@AcrossProtocol co-founder @hal2001 Lambur said on @TokenRelations’ @_TalkingTokens podcast: “The protocol is seeking to go private because its DAO structure is preventing it from growing.”

“I’ve always been a token maximalist,” Lambur said. “We launched the Across token very early, when the market cap was extremely low, and we did a very broad airdrop—mainly because we wanted to build in the open and accumulate value for our community and users. But I think the macro environment has changed.”

Across Protocol connects multiple major networks (including @Ethereum and @Solana), allowing users to bridge or swap tokens across chains. To date, it has handled more than $35 billion in transaction volume.

But as demand from institutions and enterprises has grown, its structure has proven to be a bottleneck. Lambur believes the protocol “would grow better with a more traditional structure.”

As far as we know, Across’s proposal to go private is a rare move, but it comes at a time when the industry is starting to acknowledge that a DAO is a hard-to-operate organizational structure.

In August 2025, when @UniswapFND proposed creating the legal entity DUNI, the protocol said that a formal structure would bring more “capabilities and greater autonomy.”

And earlier this week, @Aave founder @StaniKulechov wrote about the friction that comes with running a DAO. “It’s like how we’ve always operated—DAOs are extremely difficult, and that difficulty is different from the kind of difficulty in building complex things. The difficulty is that you’re fighting with your own organizational structure every day.”

For Across, Risk Labs is the “foundation and legal entity currently responsible for signing contracts” and building the protocol, but Lambur says that the DAO and it are separate.

The protocol currently operates under a “classic token structure,” where you own an on-chain protocol and a legal entity that works together with the protocol in a loose, collaborative way. But Lambur says they are two independent structures. “That’s one of the reasons people criticize the DAO model—and in essence, we’re trying to unify the two,” he added.

Before the proposal was released on Wednesday, Across had been considering the move for months. “It’s this kind of situation: you look at the macro environment, see how undervalued these tokens are, and then look at all the frictions you face when trying to run the business in a more traditional way.”

The proposal gives token holders two options: exchange their ACX tokens for equity in AcrossCo., or exchange them for USDC at a month’s average market price. Users holding large amounts of tokens can exchange their tokens directly for shares, while users holding smaller amounts can exchange them through a fee-free special purpose entity.

Lambur acknowledged that one of the biggest downsides of the proposal is that there are limitations on how many token holders can move their holdings into a potential S corporation via equity. “That’s based on U.S. securities law—we’ve designed it to be as inclusive as possible under the assumptions that are in play.”

“A U.S. C corporation can’t have 5,000 entries on its capitalization table,” so some consolidation is needed, he pointed out. Even so, he remains optimistic that it will work.

Before releasing the Snapshot vote or ballot to the community, the proposal will go through a two-week discussion period.