80% of XAO DAO’s XRP Treasury Set for Firelight Deployment

XAO DAO co-founder Santiago Velez announced that proposal 66 had passed, authorizing the decentralized autonomous organization to deploy 80% of its $XRP treasury into Firelight, a DeFi protocol focused on decentralized insurance and yield.

The decision would put a large share of the DAO’s $XRP holdings to work in a strategy intended to generate returns for members while contributing capital to protection services for decentralized finance.

XAO DAO Vote Approves $XRP Deployment to Firelight

In his announcement, Velez described the proposal as, to his knowledge, the first time a DAO had deployed treasury funds into a multichain DeFi strategy combining decentralized insurance with yield generation.

He thanked co-manager Fabio Marzella, Flare Networks co-founder Hugo Philion, and the Flare team for developing the Flare Smart Accounts technology, as well as Firelight for the opportunity.

The plan connects $XRP with Firelight through Flare Smart Accounts, which provide a route for $XRP holders to use DeFi applications. In an October 6 post, Flare described Firelight as a way to put $XRP behind a protection layer for DeFi with a single XRPL signature.

Firelight posted the same day that anyone deploying $XRP through the feature should connect a supported XRPL wallet and choose to mint and deposit FXRP into the Firelight vault, adding: “So bullish on this.”

Meanwhile, $XRP itself was changing hands at $1.34 at the time of writing, having barely shifted in 24 hours but dropping nearly 4% of its value in the last seven days and over 11% across one month. It is also more than 44% lower than where it was a year ago, with the current price a 63% dip from its $3.65 all-time high attained in July 2025.

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Governance Changes Aim to Broaden Community Participation

The treasury vote follows a wider push to improve how XAO DAO members take part in decisions. In an October 22 update, the organization announced that several proposals had passed in recent weeks and introduced a community forum.

Marzella also outlined updates to the governance app, including proposal management, discussion tools, $XRP and RLUSD donation tracking, support for several languages and searchable records.

As CryptoPotato reported in August, XAO DAO was preparing governance changes that included wallet delegation, revised quorum rules and community mini-grants. Delegation would let members assign their voting power to others, while changes to quorum rules were intended to address inactive wallets that could obstruct proposals.

The broader concern was how to turn community participation and funding into lasting activity across the $XRP Ledger ecosystem. That question also arose after XRPL infrastructure team Gen3 announced on August 12 that it would wind down its retail products Aigent.run and AxiomProtocol, citing weak demand and rising infrastructure costs.