Many protocols have a "parent company" that owns most of the value and a foundation that pretends to be decentralized. Usual is structured differently. This article explains the clear separation between Usual Labs (the service provider) and Usual DAO (the owner).
The clear separation
Usual DAO | Usual Labs | |
What it is | The community of USUAL / USUALx holders | A French company founded in 2022 |
What it owns | 100% of protocol assets (UIP-15, Dec 2025) | Its own equity, its own IP, its own brand — nothing of the protocol |
What it decides | All protocol parameters, treasury allocation, strategy | Day-to-day operations within the mandate set by the DAO |
How it is paid | N/A — owns the platform | Service fees paid by the DAO under a contract |
How it is held accountable | Via UIPs and voting | Via the service agreement and DAO oversight |
The logic
The reasoning behind this split is simple: building and running a DeFi bank takes full-time engineers, compliance work, institutional relationships, and operational discipline. A DAO cannot write Solidity at 3 AM to patch a vulnerability. But a DAO can own the platform and decide how it evolves.
Usual's answer: let a specialized company (Labs) do the work, but separate that work from ownership. Labs is paid for services. The community owns the result.
What Usual Labs does
Engineering — writes and maintains the smart contracts, front-end, back-end, monitoring, and security tooling
Operations — manages on-chain keys, incident response, audits, deployments
Institutional work — relationships with custodians, tokenizers, exchanges, and regulators
Product design — proposes new products to the DAO, designs the specifications, implements what the DAO approves
Communications — blog, documentation, support, community channels
Everything Usual Labs does is subject to DAO review. Major product decisions go through UIPs.
What Usual Labs does NOT do
Own protocol assets — all reserves, treasury, and contracts are owned by the DAO
Retain protocol revenue — 100% of revenue flows through the Distribution contract to the community
Override governance — a DAO vote is final; Labs cannot veto or delay it
Move DAO funds — requires a DAO vote
Change protocol parameters unilaterally — requires a DAO vote
Earn a private margin on user deposits — no hidden fee layer
Why "service provider" and not "foundation"
Many DeFi protocols use a "foundation" structure where a non-profit entity holds tokens, votes in governance, and coordinates development. This creates a tension: the foundation claims to serve the community, but in practice it controls a large share of voting power and can act as a de facto owner.
Usual's choice is cleaner: Labs is a company, not a foundation. Its role is explicitly commercial — it delivers services under a contract and is paid for them. The community is the owner, full stop. No pretense of neutrality, no hidden voting power, no foundation intermediary.
How the DAO holds Labs accountable
Several mechanisms:
The service contract — defines what Labs is paid for, what it must deliver, and how performance is measured
Open-source code — all contracts and front-end code are open for public review
Audits — regular third-party audits track the security and correctness of what Labs builds
Public reporting — Labs reports on progress, incidents, and metrics to the community
Replaceability — the DAO can vote to replace Labs with another service provider. The protocol is not dependent on any single company to operate.
What this means for you as a user
You are not a customer of Usual Labs. You are a co-owner of Usual the platform. Labs works for you, not the other way around.
Practical implications:
Your rights as a holder are defined by the DAO contracts, not by a terms-of-service agreement with a company
Your deposits are not liabilities on Labs' balance sheet — they are backed by assets owned by the DAO
If Labs misbehaves or underperforms, the community can vote to replace it without disrupting the protocol
Where to verify
UIP-15 — the governance proposal that formalized DAO ownership (December 2025)
Service agreement — published on the governance forum for community review
Contract inspection — on-chain verification that protocol contracts are controlled by the DAO multisig and governance module
Audit reports — available on the docs site
Note: "DAO-owned, Labs-operated" is an unusual but deliberate structure. It avoids the pitfalls of both pure-DAO governance (which lacks execution capacity) and foundation-controlled protocols (which often drift into shareholder behavior).
Technical note (for DeFi users): On-chain, this separation is visible in the contract ownership: upgradeable parameters are controlled by a DAO-controlled multisig or governance module. Labs does not hold independent upgrade keys. The service agreement lives off-chain as a commercial contract, but its existence and scope are documented in DAO governance records. See gov.usual.money for the full record.
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