$3.1 Million for Six Months? Venus Labs Must Stop Treating the XVS Treasury as Its Private Bank Account
I strongly oppose this proposed $3.1 million retrospective reimbursement for H1 2026 in its current form.
Venus Labs appears to believe it can submit an unexplained bill, attach a polished graphic, divide the amount into six vague categories, and expect XVS holders to blindly authorize another multimillion-dollar withdrawal from their treasury.
That is not decentralized governance. That is not financial accountability. That is a private organization treating the XVS treasury as an unlimited corporate expense account while expecting token holders to pay every invoice, absorb every failure and ask no meaningful questions.
The proposal provides the following breakdown:
| Category |
Amount |
| Software & Server |
$650,000 |
| Legal & Audit |
$620,000 |
| Labor |
$610,000 |
| Marketing & Partnership |
$520,000 |
| Risk Management & AI |
$350,000 |
| Administrative |
$350,000 |
| Total |
$3,100,000 |
The math may be correct, but a pie chart is not an audit.
There are no invoices, no vendor list, no payment records, no wallet reconciliation, no headcount, no compensation bands, no campaign-level accounting and no adequate explanation for why Venus operating costs have suddenly exploded.
1. The operating burn has more than doubled
Previous development and operating requests were approximately:
| Reimbursement period |
Amount |
Approximate monthly burn |
| H1 2024 |
$1.49M |
$248,333 |
| H2 2024 |
$1.70M |
$283,333 |
| H1 2025 |
$1.40M |
$233,333 |
| H1 2026 |
$3.10M |
$516,667 |
This new request represents:
- A 121% increase over H1 2025.
- An 82% increase over H2 2024.
- A 108% increase over H1 2024.
Venus Labs is now asking XVS holders to accept an operating burn of more than half a million dollars every month.
Where is the corresponding doubling of development output, protocol revenue, market share, TVL, users or XVS utility?
Previous periods included major multichain expansion, omnichain governance, bridges, Prime deployments, oracle infrastructure and dozens of new markets. Yet those periods reportedly cost materially less:
Venus Labs cannot simply double the burn rate and expect the community to accept it without an exhaustive explanation.
2. Venus Labs broke its explicit commitment to governance
In February 2026, Venus Labs responded to community concerns by explicitly promising to:
- Submit the H2 2025 operating and development request by the end of March.
- Submit quarterly funding requests beginning with Q1 2026.
- Provide clearer categorical breakdowns.
- Improve operational-spending transparency and reporting.
Those commitments can be read here:
What happened to those promises?
Instead of separate, timely and reviewable Q1 and Q2 reports, the community is once again being presented with a massive six-month retrospective bill after the money was allegedly spent.
Venus Labs promised quarterly accountability and then ignored its own commitment at the very next opportunity.
Governance cannot exercise meaningful control if Labs spends first, provides a vague summary months later and assumes reimbursement is automatic.
3. Where is the missing H2 2025 accounting?
Venus Labs also promised to submit the H2 2025 operating and development funding request by the end of March.
I cannot identify a properly reconciled H2 2025 reimbursement in the published governance archive.
The visible sequence therefore appears to be:
- H1 2025: reimbursed.
- H2 2025: unexplained or missing.
- H1 2026: $3.1 million now requested.
Before governance considers H1 2026, Venus Labs must explain:
- What happened to the H2 2025 expenses?
- Were any H2 2025 liabilities rolled into this $3.1 million request?
- Does the current request contain delayed invoices from previous periods?
- Did another entity assume or pay H2 2025 costs?
- Why was the promised March reporting deadline ignored?
A reimbursement cannot be properly evaluated when the underlying accounting periods are incomplete or potentially mixed.
4. Possible double charging for risk management
The current request includes:
Risk Management & AI — $350,000
However, governance already approved separate payments to Allez Labs for H1 2026:
- $35,000 for the first month of Q1, reportedly settled off-chain.
- $70,000 from the treasury for the remainder of Q1.
- $105,000 from the treasury for Q2.
That represents $210,000 of approved H1 risk-management costs, including at least $175,000 separately directed from the treasury.
Relevant proposals:
Venus Labs must disclose:
- Is any Allez Labs payment included in the new $350,000 category?
- If not, who received the $350,000?
- Which portion relates to risk management and which portion relates to “AI”?
- What AI products, systems or services were delivered?
- What are the corresponding contracts, invoices and proof of payment?
- Why would Labs be reimbursed for a provider already paid directly through governance?
Until those questions are answered, this category carries an obvious risk of duplicated expenses.
5. Possible overlap with separately funded marketing campaigns
The current request includes:
Marketing & Partnership — $520,000
During H1 2026, Labs separately self approved substantial campaign funding, including:
- $450,000 for Venus X launch incentives.
- $25,000 for the Binance Wallet × Flux campaign.
Relevant proposals:
The Venus X allocation may technically be classified as user incentives rather than a Venus Labs operating expense. Nevertheless, “Marketing & Partnership” is so broad that governance cannot determine whether any campaign-related expenses are being charged twice.
For every campaign and partnership, Venus Labs should disclose:
| Required information |
Details |
| Campaign or partner |
Name |
| Total cost |
Full budget |
| Treasury contribution |
Amount already funded |
| Partner contribution |
Amount funded externally |
| Venus Labs contribution |
Amount paid by Labs |
| Current reimbursement |
Amount included in the $520K |
| Remaining balance |
Unspent funds |
| Results |
TVL, users, revenue or other KPIs |
Without this reconciliation, the $520,000 is an unsupported number. Not accountable DAO spending.
6. $620,000 for “Legal & Audit” with no itemization
Venus Labs wants XVS holders to reimburse:
Legal & Audit : $620,000
That is more than $100,000 per month and exceeds the entire reported labor cost for most individual operational functions.
Who are the law firms? Who are the auditors? What contracts were audited? How many audit weeks were purchased? Which invoices have already been paid? Which wallet paid them?
During H1 2026, public Venus materials referenced multiple security engagements, including CertiK and HashDit audits relating to the EBrake Executor. The THE incident also resulted in patching, investigation and additional security work.
The community must receive, at minimum:
- Vendor names.
- Engagement dates.
- Contract or repository audited.
- Scope of work.
- Invoice amounts.
- Payment dates.
- Paying wallets.
- Audit reports or deliverables.
- Confirmation that no payment was already made through another VIP.
This is especially important because the THE incident post-mortem acknowledged that the donation bypass had previously been identified but dismissed:
Are XVS holders now being billed hundreds of thousands of dollars to investigate and remediate a known vulnerability that should never have been dismissed?
If so, Venus Labs must say so clearly.
7. Why do “Software & Server” costs exceed labor?
The largest category in the entire proposal is:
Software & Server : $650,000
This is a software protocol, yet infrastructure and software supposedly cost more than all reported labor.
That is highly unusual and demands detailed documentation.
Venus Labs must provide:
- Cloud-provider invoices.
- Server and hosting expenses.
- RPC-provider expenses.
- Oracle-related expenses.
- Indexing and analytics expenses.
- Monitoring and security-platform expenses.
- SaaS subscriptions.
- Storage and backup expenses.
- Costs allocated to each chain (Now being dismantled)
- Costs allocated to Venus X, Flux and other individual products.
- Any discounts, credits or partner subsidies.
- Any annual commitments extending beyond H1 2026.
“Software & Server” is not an acceptable accounting description for $650,000 of XVS-holder money.
At current rates, Labs is claiming to have spent approximately $108,333 every month on software and servers. The community deserves to see exactly how that is possible.
8. Labor remains completely opaque
The proposal requests:
Labor : $610,000
But it provides no meaningful information about:
- Number of employees.
- Number of contractors.
- Full-time-equivalent headcount.
- Roles and departments.
- Compensation bands.
- Bonuses.
- Related-party compensation.
- Deliverables attributable to each function.
- Which legal entity employed or contracted each contributor.
These are the same transparency issues raised by community members in February. Venus Labs acknowledged those concerns and promised better reporting.
A responsible submission would include something similar to:
| Function |
FTEs/contractors |
H1 cost |
Principal deliverables |
| Smart-contract development |
— |
— |
— |
| Front-end development |
— |
— |
— |
| DevOps and infrastructure |
— |
— |
— |
| Product management |
— |
— |
— |
| Governance operations |
— |
— |
— |
| Business development |
— |
— |
— |
| Executive management |
— |
— |
— |
The community does not need every individual’s private salary. It does, however, need sufficient information to determine whether $610,000 is reasonable and whether any compensation is duplicated under administrative, marketing or other categories.
9. “Administrative : $350,000” is a blank cheque
The request includes:
Administrative : $350,000
What exactly does that mean?
Does it include:
- Executive compensation?
- Management fees?
- Accounting and bookkeeping?
- Offices?
- Travel?
- Entertainment?
- Recruitment?
- Insurance?
- Corporate structuring?
- Taxes?
- Bonuses?
- Legal-entity expenses?
- Related-party payments?
At $350,000 over six months, Venus Labs is claiming approximately $58,333 every month in unspecified administrative expenses.
That is not a category. It is a black box.
No DAO should approve that amount without a detailed general ledger and supporting documents.
10. The $1.4 million recipient-wallet transfer must be reconciled
In February 2026, governance transferred $1.4 million USDC to the Venus Recipient wallet.
Venus Labs subsequently explained that this represented H1 2025 historical expenses. Even if that means the accounting periods do not formally overlap, the actual transfer occurred during H1 2026.
The current reimbursement must therefore include a complete reconciliation showing:
- Recipient-wallet opening balance on January 1, 2026.
- The $1.4 million inflow.
- Every material outflow.
- Any transfers to affiliated or related wallets.
- Closing balance on June 30, 2026.
- Any money remaining unspent.
- Proof that historical reimbursements and H1 2026 expenses were kept separate.
Without this reconciliation, governance cannot determine whether Venus Labs used funds already held in the recipient wallet to pay current expenses and is now seeking reimbursement for those same expenses again.
11. Outcomes do not justify a silent doubling of expenditure
During the period for which Venus Labs is requesting $3.1 million, Venus suffered the THE market incident, resulting in substantial bad debt and emergency remediation, covered from the multimillion dollars Venus Risk Fund…
The protocol also continued closing or offboarding markets and chains, while XVS holders saw utility and governance power increasingly consolidated or removed. Labs even set XVS Collateral factor to 0 without any warning, effectively locking-out over 10,000 suppliers out of their borrowing capabilities.
At the same time, Venus Labs now wants more than twice the H1 2025 reimbursement.
Venus Labs cannot demand credit for every successful deployment while treating every failure, exploit, audit, emergency patch and strategic reversal as another bill for XVS holders, especially when those are paid for by the Risk Fund and not the treasury.
If Labs wants the community to reimburse $3.1 million, it must connect each expense to measurable outcomes:
- Revenue generated.
- TVL added.
- Users acquired.
- Markets launched.
- Security improvements.
- Development milestones.
- Product adoption.
- XVS utility created.
- Cost savings achieved.
- Partner contributions secured.
Otherwise, XVS holders are simply financing an expanding private operating structure without budgets, controls or accountability.
Minimum requirements before this proposal proceeds
This proposal should be withdrawn or postponed until Venus Labs publishes:
- A transaction-level expense ledger for H1 2026.
- Vendor names and engagement scopes.
- Copies or suitably redacted versions of all material invoices.
- Proof of payment and paying-wallet addresses.
- Full reconciliation of the Venus Recipient wallet.
- Headcount, departmental allocation and compensation bands.
- Campaign-by-campaign marketing reconciliation.
- Separation of risk-management and AI expenses.
- Reconciliation against every separately funded H1 2026 VIP.
- Disclosure of related-party transactions.
- Confirmation of whether any H2 2025 expenses are included.
- An explanation for the 121% increase over H1 2025.
- Actual-versus-budget reporting and measurable KPIs.
- A written certification that none of the requested expenses has previously been reimbursed or funded by governance.
Conclusion
The XVS treasury belongs to XVS holders. It does not belong to Venus Labs.
Venus Labs is a service provider to a governance-controlled protocol. It is not entitled to spend whatever it wants, whenever it wants, and then present tokenholders with a multimillion-dollar retrospective invoice.
For the past year, the community has been asked to trust vague descriptions such as “development,” “maintenance,” “support,” “legal,” “marketing,” “administrative” and “operational expenses.”
That era must end.
A polished graphic containing six vague categories does not justify taking $3.1 million from the treasury.
Until Venus Labs provides auditable evidence, eliminates every possibility of double charging, explains the missing accounting periods and honors its own transparency commitments, I urge every delegate and XVS holder to vote:
AGAINST
Stop treating the treasury as a private bank account.
Stop asking XVS holders to blindly reimburse unaudited expenses.
Stop demanding trust where Venus Labs has repeatedly refused to provide transparency and failed it’s comitments to XVS and XVS Holders.
Not one additional dollar should leave the XVS treasury until the community receives the complete accounting it was promised…
full of buzzwords with no real foundation.