Realms has been in the business of crypto-governance for nearly as long the blockchain it’s built on – Solana (SOL) – has been around. Its new leaders want to start turning a profit.
The hub for crypto apps’ voting, decision-making and treasury is under new management, an entity called “Realms Today Trust.” It’s a big change for the project built by all-important Solana Labs to give its blockchains’ many startups a place to manage their politics.
“We need to develop profit services, that way we can continue it,” said Dean Pappas, a longtime Realms contributor and one of the four people leading the spinoff company.
Realms’ new “mandate” won’t impact the “public goods” that dozens of Solana-based decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) have come to rely on, continued Pappas. The governance tools that give projects’ communities of token-holders a say in their operations will remain free.
Other new bells and whistles will not. Realms is launching a crypto-advisory service to help DAOs set up their governance structures. An incorporation-advisory line will help them create legal structures and bank accounts. And there will be a credit card through which they can spend down their crypto-treasuries.
All that might help Realms capture some of the $1.5 billion in crypto that DAOs have parked on its infrastructure.
Realms also plans to give away $200,000 in grants to Solana DAOs in support of upstart DAOs. Pappas declined to say where that money was coming from.
Realms isn’t the first piece of the Solana ecosystem to emerge from Solana Labs, the blockchain’s main developer company. Metaplex, the entity underpinning Solana’s non-fungible token (NFT) technology also did, said Matty Taylor, himself a Labs veteran who went on to independently run hackathons for the entire ecosystem.
“The general ethos of Solana Labs is once things get to a certain point, it’s time for it” to become its own standalone thing, Pappas said.
Realms’ new legal entity is owned outright by Solana Labs’ DAO engineer Sebastain Bor, according to U.K. business records from late 2023. The company Realms Today LTD later added Pappas and Jose Neif Jury from BCB Group as directors.
Asked if Bor had to purchase Realms from Labs, Pappas declined to comment.
The Realms team currently has 12 full time employees and plans to grow further. They’re slated to build more frontends for different tokenized governance use-cases, a change from what Pappas called the current website’s “one size fits all” approach.
Changes may also be coming to elements of Solana’s governance standard for SPL tokens. That codebase is open-source and accessible to anyone. Realms plans to fork it – a step toward building something new.