Steem DAO

The Steem DAO is the on-chain funding mechanism behind the Steem Proposal System (SPS), introduced by Hardfork 21 in August 2019. It consists of a treasury account, @steem.dao, and a set of proposals — funding requests stored on the blockchain, voted on by stakeholders with their stake, and paid out daily in SBD from the treasury.

Proposals are how the chain funds development and infrastructure work: anyone can create one, stake decides how much support it has, and the treasury pays whichever proposals the stakeholders rank high enough.

How it works

• Creation — a create_proposal operation stores a proposal on chain. A proposal has a creator, a receiver account (who gets the payouts), a start and end date, a daily pay denominated in SBD, and a subject with a permlink pointing at the discussion post that describes it.
• Voting — accounts vote for (or on) proposals with an update_proposal_votes operation. Voting power is stake-weighted, like witness voting: each proposal accumulates a total_votes figure in VESTS.
• Daily funding — each day, active proposals are ranked by total_votes and funded in rank order until the day's proposal budget is exhausted. Proposals ranked beyond the budget receive nothing that day.
• The Return Proposal — proposal id 0 ("Return Proposal" by @gtg) is a standing convention. It carries an enormous daily_pay and is kept voted-up so it drains whatever is left of the day's budget back into the treasury. In practice it acts as the spending ceiling: votes moved between the Return Proposal and working proposals decide how much the DAO actually spends each day.
• Removal — a proposal's creator can remove it with a remove_proposal operation while it is ongoing; votes can be added or revoked at any time.

Treasury

The treasury is the @steem.dao account. It holds the unspent budget — a share of daily inflation plus whatever the Return Proposal returns — and grows over time when stakeholders vote to spend less than accrues. Current treasury balance: about 2.59 million SBD (November 2026).

Query it live:

curl -sS -X POST https://api.steemit.com \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"condenser_api.get_accounts","params":[["steem.dao"]],"id":1}'

Querying proposals

Fetch specific proposals by id:

curl -sS -X POST https://api.steemit.com \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"condenser_api.find_proposals","params":[[0,1,2]],"id":1}'

Each proposal object carries proposal_id, creator, receiver, start_date, end_date, daily_pay, subject, permlink, and total_votes. The full list, sorted and filtered by status, is available through list_proposals; the individual votes behind total_votes are listed by list_proposal_votes.

Lifecycle

A proposal becomes active at its start_date, stays funded while it remains active and ranks within the daily budget, and turns expired at its end_date. The earliest proposals date from the system's launch on August 27, 2019 — proposal id 0, the Return Proposal, is still ongoing with an end date of December 31, 2029.

API reference

API	Purpose
condenser_api.find_proposals	Fetch proposals by id
condenser_api.list_proposals	List proposals, sorted and filtered by status
condenser_api.list_proposal_votes	List the votes behind total_votes
database_api.find_proposals	Plugin-native variant
database_api.list_proposals	Plugin-native variant
database_api.list_proposal_votes	Plugin-native variant

Creating, voting on, and removing proposals (create_proposal, update_proposal_votes, remove_proposal) are broadcast operations — they need a signed transaction, so they belong to the broadcasting workflows of the client libraries rather than plain RPC calls.