SaberDAO

SaberDAO was a decentralized autonomous organization that governed Saber, once Solana's leading stablecoin-focused automated market maker. The protocol launched in 2021, was abandoned by its founders in 2022 following a scandal, revived by community members in 2023, and officially wound down in September 2025. Its original domain, saberdao.io, has since been taken over by an unrelated third party.

Origins: Saber's Launch and Early Growth

Saber launched in June 2021 as the first stablecoin-specialized DEX on Solana. It was built by Saber Labs, founded by brothers Dylan and Ian Macalinao and registered in the Philippines. The team raised $7.7 million in July 2021, with Race Capital leading the round.

Saber's core innovation was a StableSwap algorithm adapted for assets pegged to the same underlying price. Unlike a standard constant-product AMM, StableSwap concentrates liquidity near the peg, enabling large stablecoin swaps with minimal slippage — comparable to Curve Finance on Ethereum. The protocol supported over 80 trading pairs, primarily USD-pegged stablecoins such as USDC, USDT, and their Wormhole-wrapped equivalents, as well as liquid staking tokens (LSTs) like mSOL and bSOL.

Liquidity providers deposited into pools and earned SBR token rewards through the Quarry mining protocol. The native SBR token also served as a governance instrument: holders could lock SBR for vote-escrowed SBR (veSBR) via the Tribeca DAO framework, gaining weighted voting power over protocol incentive emissions across pools.

Scandal and Abandonment

In late 2022, journalists and on-chain researchers exposed that Dylan and Ian Macalinao had used dozens of pseudonymous personas to build a web of interconnected Solana DeFi projects, inflating reported TVL figures across the ecosystem. The brothers came under US Department of Justice scrutiny, causing them to withdraw from public activity and effectively abandon Saber and its related products.

The fallout included locked user funds in the SUNNY protocol's sunSBR product and a significant loss of user confidence. Saber's TVL collapsed and the protocol sat dormant.

Community Revival as SaberDAO

In August 2023, a group of community contributors launched a formal effort to revive the protocol under a new governance structure called SaberDAO. The DAO published a "Cleanup Phase" roadmap focused on three stated objectives: restoring trust in Solana DeFi, improving practical utility for the SBR token, and transitioning to genuinely decentralized community governance.

By April 2024 — the point at which SaberDAO published its revival retrospective — the organization had established three primary operational coordinators and a seven-member community council. Governance was conducted through on-chain proposals via the Tribeca framework, with 61 active participants having voted on 18 completed proposals.

During this phase SaberDAO also acquired LP Finance, a borrowing protocol, and integrated vota.fi, a voting incentives (bribes) marketplace that allowed external projects to direct SBR gauge emissions toward specific liquidity pools in exchange for payment.

How the Protocol Worked

At its core, Saber's StableSwap invariant kept swap prices stable as long as assets remained near parity. Liquidity providers deposited equal-value token pairs into pools and received LP tokens representing their share. These LP tokens could be staked in Quarry gauges to earn SBR emissions.

Governance followed a vote-escrow model: locking SBR for longer durations produced more veSBR, granting proportionally higher voting weight. Token holders voted through Tribeca to direct which pools received Quarry gauge allocations in each epoch, similar to the Curve Wars dynamic on Ethereum. vota.fi layered a bribe market on top, letting third-party protocols pay veSBR holders to vote for their pools.

The SBR token had a fixed total supply with emissions declining over time. It was not required for basic swaps and carried no fee-revenue entitlement by default; its value proposition rested on governance influence over emissions and any incentives offered through bribe markets.

Wind-Down

On September 17, 2025, SaberDAO announced the protocol was entering a wind-down. SBR emissions through Tribeca were set to zero, new SBR-to-veSBR locking was disabled, and liquidity providers were advised to withdraw funds from all pools. The DAO provided a veSBR redeemer tool allowing locked-token holders to exit their positions for USDC.

Evidence of closure as of July 2026: the saberdao.io domain redirects to an unrelated Vietnamese sports streaming website; the docs subdomain (doc.saberdao.io) returns NXDOMAIN; the saberdao.so landing page remains accessible but is functionally a minimal placeholder. The GitHub organization (github.com/saberdao) retains repositories, with some automated data feeds showing recent timestamps, but no active development on the core protocol.

Fit Within Solana

Saber played a historically significant role in Solana DeFi infrastructure. As the first stablecoin AMM on the network, it provided foundational stablecoin liquidity and helped establish cross-chain wrapped-asset conventions during 2021-2022. Its Tribeca governance framework became a reusable open standard adopted by other Solana DAOs. The post-scandal community revival demonstrated the Solana ecosystem's capacity for decentralized project continuation, even if the effort ultimately concluded in a managed wind-down rather than a sustained resurgence.