Mandating a 2-Year Financial Audit : Demand for Product R&D and Payroll Transparency

Proposals
1

Hi everyone,
Following the recent Q3 2026 update Lido Earn DAO Treasury Allocation — Q3 2026, it is now clear that Lido Earn is a complete operational failure that has failed to generate any profit over its 7–8 months of existence.
While the report attempts to hide behind “Forex gains” due to the market increase in ETH price, the hard truth is that the product is running at a heavy net loss. The EarnETH vault alone lost 124.73 ETH, completely wiping out the minor $65k generated by the stablecoin vault.

This raises a massive red flag regarding how DAO capital is being utilized.

As LDO holders and ecosystem participants, we will no longer tolerate our treasury being drained into underperforming experiments without clear accountability. I am formally demanding that the Core Team and Finance Workgroup deliver a comprehensive, itemized financial report for the period of 2024–2026.
We demand immediate and absolute transparency on the following:

1. Exact Development & Incubation Costs (R&D)

We want to see the exact ledger of every dollar, LDO, and ETH spent on the research, development, deployment, and smart contract audits for:
• Lido Earn
• stVaults
• Wisp
We need to compare these upfront costs against the actual protocol fees these products have generated to prove whether they have any real ROI, or if they are simply burning DAO resources.

  1. Payroll, Compensation, and Operational Overhead

• A full, anonymized breakdown of all contributor salaries, bonuses, and contractor fees funded by the Treasury over the last 24 months.
• Exact figures spent on legal, administration, and marketing overhead for these specific sub-products.

  1. Mandating an Independent Web3 Financial Audit

• 14-Day Deadline: The core team has exactly 14 days from the passing of this post to deliver this data or a binding, concrete timeline for its publication.

• External Enforcement: If the internal team is unable or unwilling to provide a complete and detailed financial report within this timeframe, this proposal strictly mandates the DAO to bypass internal channels. In this event, launch a Snapshot vote to authorize the funding and immediate hiring of an independent, professional Web3 accounting and auditing firm (such as Convoy Finance, Llama, or Fox Audit). These external Web3 specialists will be contracted via the Snapshot mandate to perform an independent financial review and audit of the Lido Treasury’s historical on-chain and off-chain expenditures.

6 Likes
NEST: tying the buyback threshold to the approved budget
Funding and Mandating an Independent Web3 Financial Audit & R&D Expenditures
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I fully support this proposal.

2 Likes
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I full support this proposalas well.

3 Likes
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Thanks

Waiting for core team response

2 Likes
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Overall, the Foundations can pass the audit if tokenholders support it. The main question is what the audit aims to achieve and what actions would follow its findings.

Suppose the audit confirms everything is above board. What is the next step? An audit provides assurance about past financial reporting and spending but does not address strategy, product performance, or future capital allocation. A two-year audit is also poorly suited to assessing the ROI of new products. Earn launched at the start of the year, and WISP has only been live for a few months. Both are too new to meaningfully assess long-term returns.

There are also practical considerations:

  • Operational effort: A first-time audit requires significant preparation, including defining scope, mapping entities, preparing documentation, and coordinating with auditors over several months. This would divert resources from product development and operations.

  • Cost: An audit is costly. Before mandating one, the DAO should understand its scope and expected cost in order not to spend the funds in the treasury for unnecessary and costly exercises.

Much of the requested financial information is already public. The GOOSE-2025 & EGGs-2025 Final Report and GOOSE-2026 & EGGs-2026 H1 Report cover revenue, expenses, and treasury positions for 2025 and H1 2026, respectively.

It’s also worth noting that a similar proposal went to a Snapshot vote just last month. The result was 1.3k LDO in favor and 29.4M against.

If you’re unhappy with how Foundations is run, that’s a legitimate position. There are two easier, cheaper, and more effective ways to act on it if a majority of DAO voters agree:

  1. Tighter GOOSE/EGG boundaries for the Foundations: scope, budget, and success criteria are set there. The next GOOSE cycle (2027 goals) starts at the end of November. This is the venue to argue for a tighter budget or different product scope and put it to a vote.

  2. Change the directors of the Foundations. This requires a credible replacement and a transition plan to avoid disrupting operations and must be done in accordance with the bylaws of each Foundation.

Existing governance mechanisms offer more direct ways to address these concerns.

1 Like
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Thank you for the detailed response. However, your arguments present a classic false dichotomy: choosing between corporate bureaucracy or doing nothing. Let’s address the core fallacies in your position:

1. The “Too New to Assess” Fallacy (Earn & WISP)
You claim Earn and WISP are too new for a two-year audit. But the audit isn’t requested to evaluate long-term ROI—it is requested to assess immediate accountability. EarnETH has already lost 124.73 ETH in Q3 alone, fully wiping out the modest stablecoin gains. Tokenholders have a right to know exactly how much treasury capital was spent on building and marketing a product that is currently burning our core asset (ETH).

2. The “It’s Too Costly and Time-Consuming” Argument
Saying that an audit will “divert resources from product development” is a shield often used to avoid scrutiny. If the DAO has tens of millions to allocate to unproven sub-products, it definitely has the budget to audit where that money goes. Furthermore, well-known Web3 accounting firms (like Convoy or Llama) have standardized processes for major DAOs. We are not asking to stop development; we are asking for standard financial hygiene.

3. Public Reports vs. Granular Transparency
The GOOSE and EGGs reports you referenced provide high-level, macro data. They do not provide the granular itemization we need: detailed R&D spending per sub-product, contractor fees, and payroll structures. High-level summaries are great for PR, but insufficient when products are losing capital.

4.The Path Forward

You mentioned that a similar proposal failed last month (1.3k LDO vs 29.4M against). I am well aware of that proposal. However, it failed because it lacked solid financial arguments and contained clauses that contradicted the core principles of the DAO and each other. The financial realities of Q3 have changed the context entirely, and this proposal is built on concrete data, not contradictions.

To answer your question directly: What is the next step if the audit is clean?

The next step is Capital Optimization. If everything is above board, excellent. It means the DAO finally gets a trusted financial baseline to make data-driven decisions during the GOOSE-2027 cycle. Right now, we cannot properly evaluate capital allocation because we only see high-level macro summaries

*Specific details on the audit’s cost and logistics will be officially outlined in our upcoming proposal once the 14-day deadline announced here expires.

** Furthermore, looking closely at the previous proposal, it is clear that delegates were not fundamentally opposed to a financial audit itself. At the very least, it adds another vital layer of transparency to the project—a goal that everyone in this ecosystem supposedly strives for. I fail to see any issue with conducting a comprehensive audit once every two years to clearly demonstrate to users and investors that everything is clean and above board. Don’t you agree?

2 Likes
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The full proposal will be published on October 27, 2026.

Thank you for your attention.

1 Like
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I hope the proposals put forward by the DAO are considered clearly and based on the actual situation, rather than giving a proposal with no choice. After the buyback mechanism went live, it has never been triggered — that is a typical example. Among all protocols in the market, LDO is the only one that has launched a buyback and has never bought back. Why wasn’t it treated fairly and rigorously? Apart from making everyone feel that they are not serious about their own protocol, this brings no benefit at all.

1 Like