On June 27, the scandal involving the founder of Celestia selling coins to prepare for a prolonged battle temporarily subsided, and another project was exposed for scandal. Ogle, the founder of Glue, publicly accused the cross-chain bridge protocol Across team of manipulating DAO votes and misappropriating up to $23 million in funds. This accusation not only sparked widespread attention from the community but also brought the transparency and security issues of the DAO governance mechanism back into the spotlight.

What exactly is the Across protocol? How does the project team manipulate votes to achieve the purpose of misappropriating funds?

The former UMA team is starting a new venture.

Across is a cross-chain bridge protocol designed to achieve seamless asset transfers between different blockchains through efficient cross-chain interoperability. As early as the end of 2022, it received $10 million in funding from investors including Hack VC, and in March 2025, Across Protocol announced it raised $41 million in a round of token sales, led by Paradigm, with participation from Bain Capital Crypto, Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital, and angel investor Sina Habinian, featuring a quite impressive lineup of investors.

Its founder John Shutt previously served as a senior engineer at UMA, while another co-founder Hart Lambur is also a founder of both UMA and Risk Labs. Risk Labs is the development organization behind the once-famous synthetic asset protocol UMA.

Since the middle of 2023, its token ACX has risen from a low of $0.05 to around $1.8, an increase of nearly 36 times. However, since the end of last year, under the negative influence of the overall market, ACX has experienced a rapid decline and is currently down to around $0.14, having fallen more than 10 times in just six months.

The governance model of Across relies on a DAO, allowing users holding governance tokens to participate in proposal voting to determine the allocation of funds and the direction of development for the protocol. However, the decentralized nature of DAO governance often faces challenges of “centralized control” in practice, which is at the core of Ogle’s accusations.

Manipulating votes and misappropriating funds

Ogle detailed the accusations against the Across team in a lengthy article. He claims that the Across team manipulated DAO voting through opaque means, circumventing the normal governance processes of the community, and transferred $23 million to unknown accounts. Here are several key points of Ogle’s accusations:

Voting Manipulation: Ogle pointed out that the Across team dominated the voting results of DAO proposals by leveraging their massive governance token holdings. The team concentrated votes through multiple associated wallets, creating a false appearance of community support, which actually goes against the original intention of DAO decentralization. This behavior is similar to the “governance attacks” seen in previous projects like Compound DAO and Jupiter DAO.

Misappropriation of funds: Ogle further accused the Across team of manipulating the proposals to transfer $23 million of DAO funds to accounts not under community supervision. He questioned the whereabouts of these funds, stating that there are no public audit records or transparent explanations of their use, suggesting a rug pull misappropriation.

Lack of transparency: Ogle also criticized the Across team for a lack of public communication during the governance process. For example, the content of proposals was not fully disclosed, the voting process did not provide real-time on-chain data, making it difficult for community members to verify the legitimacy of the results. He called for Across to disclose the flow of funds and to undergo independent third-party audits.

In addition, Ogle also specifically analyzed the detailed process. In October 2023, Kevin Chan, the head of the cross-chain protocol project, submitted a public proposal to the DAO, proposing to transfer 100 million ACX tokens (currently worth about 15 million USD) from the DAO to Risk Labs—the private for-profit company of the cross-chain protocol founder.

On-chain analysis shows that this proposal was actually secretly pushed by Kevin and his team. Although Kevin submitted the funding proposal using his public address “KevinChan.Lens”, he secretly cast a large number of “yes” votes through another wallet “maxodds.eth”. Several members of the Risk Labs team seem to have collectively voted in favor of this massive grant. Another team member, Reinis FRP, also voted “yes” on the proposal using millions of ACX tokens from multiple secret wallets. The second largest voting wallet in the entire proposal (accounting for nearly 14% of the total votes) was initially funded by Hart Lambur.

Less than a year later, after the first vote produced no consequences, the team returned to request more funding. This time, they asked the DAO for a “retrospective grant” of 50 million ACX, approximately 7.5 million USD. Similarly, Kevin’s secret wallet bore most of the voting work: “maxodds.eth” and a new wallet it funded contributed 44% of the “yes” votes.

Ogle expressed dissatisfaction when commenting on this behavior, stating, “In any other industry—whether it be publicly traded companies, non-profit organizations, government agencies, or any other institutions—there are strict rules prohibiting so-called ‘self-dealing’, as well as other regulations on how we should act to prevent other breaches of duty.”

Some community members support his view, believing that the current state of DAO governance is concerning; others question Ogle’s motives, suspecting that his accusations are aimed at promoting Glue’s competitive strategy.

Across co-founder Hart Lambur issued a statement denying the allegations made by the Glue founder regarding fund misappropriation and vote manipulation. In response to the accusation of “illegally withdrawing $23 million for personal gain,” Hart stated that Risk Labs is a nonprofit foundation governed by Cayman law, and that the funds are used for protocol development. He also mentioned that his annual salary is only $100,000 and that he has not received any token rewards. The use of funds is in line with DAO practices and has facilitated the development of Across v3 and v4.

In response to the accusation of “governance process being manipulated by internal personnel,” Hart stated that team members are free to vote with the tokens they purchased themselves, Kevin’s wallet (maxodds.eth) is public, and Reinis’s vote is also legitimate, with the proposal passing without any opposing votes, making the process transparent.

The chronic issues of DAO governance are hard to cure.

The allegations against Ogle are not isolated incidents, but a reflection of the long-standing issues within DAO governance. DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), as an innovative product of blockchain technology, aims to achieve decentralized decision-making through smart contracts and token voting.

However, in practice, DAO governance often deviates from the ideal, exposing the following issues:

• [ ] Centralization of Power: Although DAOs aim for decentralization, the unequal distribution of tokens often leads to a few “whales” controlling voting results. For example, members of Jupiter DAO have complained that the team manipulates governance by holding a large number of tokens, undermining the voice of the community. Similarly, the “Golden Boys” incident in Compound DAO also exposed how a few token holders exploited a proposal to misappropriate $24 million.
• [ ] Insufficient Voting Transparency: Many DAOs lack on-chain verifiable transparency in their voting processes, making it difficult for community members to track the actual voting behavior of tokens. Research shows that current DAO governance protocols generally fail to ensure the long-term privacy of ballots, and voting records may even be made public after voting ends, increasing the risks of manipulation and coercion.
• [ ] Security Risks of Funds: DAO treasuries typically hold large amounts of funds, making them targets for hackers and internal attackers. The 2016 The DAO hack is a classic case where attackers exploited a smart contract vulnerability to steal $50 million worth of Ethereum, forcing the Ethereum community to perform a hard fork. In recent years, similar flash loan attacks like those on Beanstalk DAO have also shown that governance vulnerabilities can lead to the treasury funds being instantly drained.
• [ ] Legal and Responsibility Ambiguities: The decentralized nature of DAOs makes their legal status ambiguous, and members may face unexpected legal liabilities. For example, in the 2023 Sarcuni v. bZx DAO case, a U.S. court ruled that DAO members could be considered general partners and be jointly liable for losses under the agreement. This raises alarms about the legitimacy and compliance of DAOs.

Based on the current conundrum of DAOs, Ogle pessimistically believes that “almost all DAOs in the cryptocurrency space are outright scams, or at least facades. I think the insider threats that cryptocurrency investors face are far greater than the threats from outsiders (such as hackers).”

Summary

In the face of the challenges of DAO governance, the industry needs to seek improvements from three aspects: technology, mechanism, and culture. On the technical level, more secure smart contracts and voting protocols can be developed. For example, the use of zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technology can protect voting privacy while maintaining on-chain verifiability; multi-signature and time-lock mechanisms can reduce the risk of treasury funds being stolen. On the mechanism level, token distribution and voting weight design can be optimized to avoid “whale” dominance. For instance, introducing quadratic voting or reputation systems can give more voice to active community members. Additionally, mandating independent audits for proposals and funding flows can enhance transparency.

Ogle’s accusations against Across serve as a wake-up call for the blockchain governance ecosystem. As an ideal vehicle for decentralization, DAOs carry the community’s expectations for fairness and transparency, yet their development still faces numerous challenges. The industry should take this incident as an opportunity to accelerate the iteration and improvement of governance mechanisms.

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