Realms

Realms is Solana's most widely used DAO governance platform. Built on the open-source SPL Governance program, it provides the infrastructure for organizations to run fully on-chain governance — proposals, voting, treasury control, and automated execution — without requiring custom smart contract development. The platform hosts over 4,000 organizations and over $500 million in governed assets across the Solana ecosystem.

Core Mechanism

Realms is a frontend and coordination layer built on top of SPL Governance (v3.1.0, released December 2022), a shared Solana program deployed at address GovER5Lthms3bLBqWub97yVrMmEogzX7xNjdXpPPCVZw. The program is modular and DAO-type-agnostic, meaning it can govern any kind of on-chain asset or action.

Every Realms DAO is organized around three core data structures:

Realm — the top-level container representing the DAO. A realm is configured with two distinct voting populations: a community token (typically the protocol's governance or utility token, held broadly) and a council token (held by a smaller set of trusted stewards or team members). These two bodies can independently propose, vote, and veto actions depending on how the realm is configured.

Governance — a configuration unit within a realm that sets voting parameters for a particular program, treasury, or account. Each governance defines proposal creation thresholds, voting durations, approval quorums, and veto permissions. Multiple governances can exist within one realm, allowing granular control over different protocol components.

Proposal — a community submission containing one or more executable instructions. Proposals move through defined lifecycle states: Draft, Voting, Succeeded or Defeated, and Completed. When a proposal succeeds, the attached transaction instructions are executed on-chain directly, with no intermediary.

Treasury and Financial Management

Each governance is paired with a native treasury — a DAO-controlled wallet that holds SOL or SPL tokens. Approved proposals can authorize transfers, contract calls, or any other on-chain action from this wallet. Realms has expanded its treasury tooling to support real-time streaming payments, token vesting schedules, and lockup controls, enabling DAOs to manage payroll and contributor incentives on-chain.

The platform surfaces a real-time balance sheet visible to all stakeholders, showing assets and liabilities across treasury accounts. Spending decisions require proposal approval before execution, creating an auditable on-chain record of all financial movements.

Plugin Architecture

SPL Governance uses an open plugin system for extending voter weight calculations. The primary plugin in use is the Voter Stake Registry (VSR), which allows DAOs to weight voting power by token lockup duration — longer lockups produce greater voting influence, creating alignment incentives for long-term participants.

Additional integrations include Civic Pass for identity verification of proposal creators and voters, Dialect for real-time governance notifications, and support for Solana Token Extensions for DAOs using the newer token standard.

No-Code DAO Creation

Realms offers a no-code creation flow at realms.today, allowing anyone to launch a DAO by configuring a realm, choosing governance tokens, and setting voting parameters through a web interface. DAOs can set minimum token thresholds for proposal creation — from 1 to 1 million tokens — establish custom branding, and link to custom domain names.

Ecosystem Reach

Realms powers governance for some of Solana's most significant protocols. Jito, Marinade, Pyth, Metaplex, and Orca all use Realms for their governance operations. Marinade DAO, which manages over $1 billion in liquid staking TVL, runs its governance entirely through Realms. The platform reports 30-plus protocol integrations and has served as the default governance choice for new Solana DeFi and DAO projects since the original SPL Governance program launched.

Realms also operates the Realms Ecosystem DAO (R.E.D.), a meta-DAO aimed at funding public goods development within the Solana governance space. R.E.D. received backing from Jito, Marinade, Pyth, and Metaplex at launch, accompanied by a $200,000 grant program for Solana DAOs.

Team and Background

SPL Governance was originally developed and maintained by Solana Labs. In late 2024 the project formalized its independence: Realms Today LTD was incorporated in the UK, with Sebastian Bor — a former Solana Labs DAO engineer who built and maintained SPL Governance — as the sole owner of the new legal entity. Dean Pappas, a longtime Realms contributor, joined as director alongside Jose Neif Jury from BCB Group. At the time of the announcement the team employed 12 full-time staff.

The core governance tooling remains free and open-source. To sustain operations, the organization has introduced paid services alongside the free platform, including governance advisory, organizational incorporation guidance, and treasury spending infrastructure.

Solana Ecosystem Fit

Realms occupies the infrastructure layer of Solana's DAO ecosystem. Because SPL Governance is a shared on-chain program, any protocol that wants auditable, permissionless, token-weighted governance on Solana can deploy with Realms without building its own voting contracts. This shared-program model means security improvements and new features benefit all DAOs on the platform simultaneously. The open-source codebase is maintained at github.com/Mythic-Project/solana-program-library, following a fork from the archived Solana Labs repository, ensuring continued independent development.