NMDP 15: DAO Teams Budget Request Proposal (August 2026 to July 2027)

[BraveNewDeFi]

NMDP 15: DAO Teams Budget Request Proposal (August 2026 to July 2027)

12-month funding request: 1,108,875 USDC + 6,930.00 wNXM
Funding period: 1 August 2026 to 31 July 2027
RFC review period: 11 June–25 June 2026 [Complete]
NMDP review period: 26 June–5 July 2026
NMDP Snapshot voting period: 6 July–9 July 2026 (Vote is Live)

Overview

In the last year, the active DAO teams—Operations Lead (formerly Community), Research and Development (R&D), Marketing, and Product and Risk—have worked on behalf of members and focused on the priorities outlined in the NMDP 11: DAO Teams Budget Request Proposal (Aug 2025 to July 2026) forum post.

Now that this annual funding period is coming to an end, the DAO team leads have outlined the proposed teams, their current priorities, and the DAO teams’ 12-month budget request in this proposal.

Mission and Values

Nexus Mutual is on a mission to provide onchain protection against crypto risks and beyond. Since 2019, the Mutual has sold more than 13,000 covers and protected over $6.9B worth of crypto assets against onchain and offchain risks.

DAO team contributors work to ensure the long-term sustainability of the Mutual. To achieve this shared mission, the teams’ actions reflect the Mutual’s core values.

Trustworthiness. The Mutual pays claims. Members have already voted to approve over $18 million to those who lost funds. Reserves are owned by members, and risks are managed to ensure there is always enough money for claims, so members can be confident in their cover.

Egalitarianism. Nexus Mutual is a mutual, which means it is owned and governed by its members—and almost anyone can become a member. The Mutual believes that everyone should be able to find the cover they need and anyone else should be able to provide that cover.

Integrity. Nexus Mutual was founded to help protect anyone against a wide variety of risks. That has been the guiding vision since day one. Honest participation in the Mutual’s governance is rewarded. Members will always own the Mutual’s assets, review the validity of claim requests, and vote on claim outcomes.

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Funding Renewal for Existing DAO Teams (August 2026 to July 2027)

Product & Risk Team

Purpose

The Product & Risk team is responsible for developing and improving cover products to drive sales, enter new markets, and provide members with exceptional protection against critical onchain and offchain risks. The team also supports both new and existing syndicates and distributors building on top of the protocol. Additionally, the team researches emerging risks and designs comprehensive risk frameworks and pricing models.

Priorities

Over the next year, the Product & Risk team will prioritise projects that centre around improving the member experience, new cover product development, hardening Nexus Mutual’s security, and expanding the team’s internal tooling.

Improving the Member Experience. In the last year, the Frontend team completed a redesign of the Nexus Mutual app, which members have shared positive feedback about. The Product & Risk team will continue working with the Frontend team on two key projects:

1. Upfront proof of loss. For many of the Mutual’s cover products, proof of loss is provided at the time a member files a claim. The current method requires a signature, something that is not easy for Safe signers to provide and limits the Mutual to underwriting cover for EVM-compatible networks. To expand cover offerings to networks like Solana and other non-EVM networks, the team will introduce upfront proof of loss for major cover products like Protocol Cover, Depeg Cover, and others. With upfront proof of loss, a member will provide the wallet addresses they want to be eligible for their coverage. This will be done when someone purchases cover; if they need to update the covered addresses, they can do so after their initial cover purchase up until their cover expires or a claim event occurs. The wallet addresses will be kept private to ensure members’ privacy is upheld. This feature will allow the Mutual to offer cover for popular non-EVM protocols and improve the claim filing experience.

2. Draft claim submissions. Currently, a member has to fill out their claim submission information and submit it directly onchain along with a claim deposit. If they get something wrong, the Claim Committee has to deny their claim and ask them to resubmit. There is unnecessary friction in this process, which will be removed with the introduction of Draft Claims. This feature will allow members to provide all of the relevant information about their loss during the Cool-Down Period (i.e., before claim filing can happen onchain). The Claim Committee will help members calculate their losses and ensure everything is correct before someone files their claim. This also allows the removal of the claim deposit requirement. The Claims Committee can work with members to ensure that the minute claims filing is open, they can submit their claim and receive payment as soon as possible.

The Product & Risk team will work with the Frontend team on other projects on an ad hoc basis as further feedback is received from members. Feedback to improve the product and the member experience is always welcome.

New Product Development. The team has identified gaps in current cover offerings, which it aims to address with two new cover products:

1. OpSec Failure Cover (In Development). Losses due to operational security failure have been growing over the last several years. In 2026, opsec failure is the leading cause of loss. The Product & Risk team has been working with members of the Security Alliance to develop an OpSec Failure Cover product, which teams can purchase if they have undergone an OpSec audit and been certified by the Security Alliance. Working with industry experts to improve operational security in web3 will help bring down losses over time; underwriting cover for teams following best practices ensures that when something goes wrong, they can protect themselves against worst-case scenarios. The team is targeting a launch in Q3 2026 and will share more details closer to launch.

2. AI Agent Cover (Development Pending). The team has seen increasing requests to provide coverage for agentic frameworks and AI agents. Current cover offerings do not extend to these risks, so research on AI-centric coverage will begin shortly, followed by development thereafter. This is an area with significant potential for growth and a risk that requires protection in order for agentic workflows and finance to scale without causing significant losses.

Hardening Nexus Mutual’s Security. In this year’s budget request, funding has been allocated to security initiatives within the Mutual to further harden the protocol’s security. This includes funding for an operational security audit from Opsek, onchain monitoring from Hypernative, and the ongoing partnership with ChainPatrol to flag malicious look-alike domains and sites, malicious social media accounts, and other bad actors impersonating the Mutual or any of its team members. The Product & Risk team is working with the Engineering team and the Advisory Board to further invest in and improve security.

Expanding Internal Risk Tooling. In the last year, the team built various monitoring tools and automations to increase efficiency. The team can now complete several due diligence requests in a day instead of a week. In the next year, the Product & Risk team will further expand its risk tooling to:

• Continually improve due diligence, assessment, and pricing automation processes. The team already started reviewing operational security and third-party infrastructure like bridge configurations and risk in the last year, ahead of other players in the industry. The goal is to capture a wide array of information to make underwriting decisions across all cover products and ensure there are no hidden risk factors unaccounted for in underwriting decisions.
• Expand the loss events database with automations to pull in new loss events and various data points for each loss event twice a week, and update the internal histogram accordingly to ensure pricing factors in the latest loss events and updated loss severity.
• Improve and expand internal and external monitoring tooling. Robust monitoring is already in place, and the team plans to further improve monitoring to allow automated updates to listing Annexes, ensuring every listing is up to date and accurately priced. The team will also add a wider array of alerts to flag code drift for listings, new code and contract deployments requiring reassessment, and more. As new cover products are added, internal risk monitoring will be adapted to ensure no business lines exceed internal risk limits. The end goal is providing the team with as much data as possible to make decisions, improve efficiency to underwrite more deals, and document and track risk as it evolves onchain and offchain.

Retrospective (2025 to 2026)

New Product Development. In the last year, several new products were launched: Non-EVM Protocol Cover for institutional investors; Leveraged Liquidation Cover for funds; Kidnap & Ransom Cover for web3 professionals and high-net-worth individuals; and Vault Cover to support OpenCover’s Covered Vaults launch in April 2026. All of these cover products launched in the last two quarters and, so far, have generated $67,389.68 in premiums collectively. Growing demand has been observed for all of these cover products, and premium earnings are expected to grow in the coming year.

The Fund Portfolio Cover products contributed the largest share of premiums from Q3 2025 to Q2 2026, with $2.23M in premiums from cover sales. The Product & Risk team has improved this product to include a wider range of coverage options (i.e., Custody Cover, Depeg Cover, and Slashing Cover in addition to Protocol Cover). These improvements have increased inbound from other funds in the last year; the Mutual continues to see growth in Fund Portfolio Cover quote requests.

Permissioned Claim Assessment. This project was completed in Q4 2025. Three Advisory Board members (Lee McClelland, Hugh Karp, and Roxana Danila) make up the Claims Committee and are responsible for assessing claims and supporting claimants during loss events. This upgrade has been well received by our members and prospective members.

Revamped Claim Submission Flow. This project was also completed in Q4 2025. The new claims submission flow provides a smoother experience and has been streamlined. The team will continue to make improvements, such as the draft claims feature, and improve UX for members.

Offering Alternative Proof of Loss Mechanism. The team wasn’t able to tackle this project in the last funding year, as other projects took priority. As noted above, they will be shipping this upgrade in Q2/Q3 2026 to expand coverage to non-EVM networks.

Rewriting the Nexus Mutual Documentation. The team wasn’t able to completely overhaul the documentation, as planned. Improvements were made, but the complete rewrite is planned for Q3 2026.

Overall, the Product & Risk team has prioritized pricing requests to support growth in the last yearr. They will continue to tackle projects and adjust priorities, as needed, to ensure they support growth in cover sales along with internal projects.

Ongoing Responsibilities

• Monitoring the Mutual’s ongoing correlation risk across cover products
• Conducting due diligence on and putting new listings and product types onchain
• Developing new cover wording documents with the Foundation Legal team
• Communicating with staking pool managers when new listings are live
• Working with the R&D team to maintain and create new dashboards to track the Mutual’s exposure and risk in the broader DeFi ecosystem
• Handling pricing requests when the Foundation Business Development team has inbound quote requests from new and existing clients

Team

Head of Product & Risk (FT): BraveNewDeFi

Description. BraveNewDeFi holds a full-time position on the Product & Risk team, where he conducts research on new risks and feasibility assessments for new cover products and cover wording development. Brave manages the Product and Cover listing process within the Mutual, reviews new protocols for listings, and completes pricing requests for the Business Development team. He also works with the Legal team to create new cover wording, schedule, and annex documents to support product development and listings. In addition to this work, he reviews correlation levels across active cover and works with the BD team to track cover expiries, so the BD team can perform outreach and source demand for upcoming open capacity. As part of this role, he will work closely with staking pool managers in the Nexus Mutual ecosystem and manage the Community Staking pool. BraveNewDeFi will continue to serve as the point person when claim events occur.

Actuary, Risk Expert: Hugh Karp

Description. Hugh performs many duties within Nexus Mutual. He serves an important role on the Product & Risk team, as he is focused on new product development and identifying edge cases. Hugh works with the Legal team to draft new cover wording documents and conducts outreach with potential cover buyers who are looking for new products or risk experts interested in building syndicates on top of Nexus Mutual.

Operations Lead (formerly Community Team)

Purpose

The Operations Lead supports Nexus Mutual’s growth, content, and operational systems, enabling the broader team to move faster across teams and functions. This role has evolved from its original community mandate and is now working closely with the Foundation Operations team.

Priorities

BD Pipeline. Build sequenced messaging, templates, and tracking to move inbound triage and outreach ops from ad hoc to systematic. The operations function drives the system and documents relationships, while the BD team executes.

Ecosystem Mapping. Integration candidates, large cover buyers, and key relationship nodes currently live in people’s heads. A first version in a shared table, populated with existing knowledge, is the starting point.

DeFi Risk Content. Maintaining the workflow already established with Marketing and Product, producing blog posts and social media content that shares the team’s risk expertise.

Landing Pages. Draft, review, and publish new landing pages, including keeping pages up to date as new products, claims, and risk categories emerge.

Claims History Trust. Explore third-party validation or further measures to turn claims data into a trusted asset for BD conversations.

Help Center Overhaul. Audit recurring pain points surfaced in Slack, identify the most common issues, and fix them.

Remote Culture Initiatives. Design and drive lightweight experiments to improve distributed teamwork.

AI Operations. Assist the shipment of AI-assisted workflows for high-friction tasks, develop usage guides and run hands-on enablement sessions with colleagues, and maintain a catalogue of tools and skills being built by the team on GitHub.

Retrospective (2025 to 2026)

DeFi and Risk Learning Group. Attendance was strong in the first sessions but dropped off as the technical depth increased. The group’s original goal of building shared DeFi risk literacy was better served through a broader format. This became a catalyst for the Onchain Risk Map, an interactive public initiative built with OpenCover that has since reached a significantly wider audience.

Blockchain Risk Working Group. Evolved into the Onchain Risk Map efforts, with focus shifting toward developing and promoting the first edition in collaboration with the OpenCover team.

Industry Group. Currently on hold while the focus shifts to better defining how to support business development and operations through this channel before restarting it.

Governance Reading Group. Discontinued for the time being. Community relationships are maintained.

Content, newsletter, and insight generation. Continued consistently throughout the year and has become a stable, recurring part of the role. Weekly DeFi security insights, quarterly reports, incident reports, and blog contributions are delivered on an ongoing basis.

After pausing some of the community groups, focus shifted toward direct customer support, increasing trust in the Nexus Mutual brand alongside marketing through content initiatives including the Onchain Risk Map, incident reports, and risk-focused blog posts, and improving internal operations to support growth in cover sales. These became the foundation for the Operations Lead role going into the next year.

Ongoing Responsibilities

• Weekly DeFi security insights, incident reports, and unique analysis on onchain risk
• Social media drafts and newsletter contributions
• Landing page maintenance and updates
• Support for blog content and quarterly reporting
• Support for member and user questions

Team

Operations Lead (FT): Sem

Description. Responsible for growth enablement, content systems, knowledge management, and operational coordination across teams. Manages the ecosystem mapping, DeFi risk content program, and landing pages. Supports internal operations and team coordination.

Bio. Sem joined Nexus Mutual as a part-time community contributor following DeFi Summer before moving into a full-time role. Her background spans venture capital, fintech product management, organisational design, and human-computer interaction research, with a growing interest in how emerging tools can help lean teams operate at a larger scale.

R&D Team

Purpose

The Research & Development team tackles complex challenges within the protocol and broader ecosystem. The team’s goal is to address the difficult problems facing Nexus Mutual by developing solutions, applying the required breadth, depth, and rigour to design, financial modelling, and implementation, and coordinating across teams.

Priorities

The main focus of the R&D team over the course of the next year will be to support the Future of Nexus Mutual framework, especially:

Bridging into traditional, regulated insurance markets. Designing, modelling out, and managing implementation of the onchain and offchain systems, processes, and financial frameworks that enable Nexus Mutual to be successful in this space.

RWI Vault. Embedding and improving processes, onboarding new Insurance Partners as the vault grows.

Revamping the onchain staking mechanism to assist in meeting the goals of the framework.

Other priorities:

• Contributing to the wider team’s effort to embed AI workflows across Nexus Mutual, including developing and maintaining R&D’s own agents.
• Evolving the Mutual’s overall and per-pool risk exposure and capital (MCR) modelling to keep pace with initiatives across the Mutual.

Retrospective (2025 to 2026)

The main focus of the R&D team over the past year was the delivery of the Real World Insurance (RWI) Vault initiative, which launched successfully at the end of April 2026. The R&D team’s role spanned:

• Project management across the initiative
• Researching and decision-making on design alongside engineering
• Working with engineering to create and implement technical specifications
• Writing and publishing documentation and support materials
• Producing Vault operations manuals and setting up the associated processes
• Due diligence and integration work for the initial Insurance Partner

Following Tomasz’s departure (he was hired by Dune Analytics), his work was taken over by Rei with the help of the Dune MCP integration. This has worked successfully for both ongoing dashboard maintenance (e.g., improved handling of cover edits) and surfacing new information (e.g., a dashboard for the new RWI Vault).

The team also carried out financial modelling and provided reviews for the first steps towards bridging Nexus Mutual capital into regulated insurance markets.

Ongoing Responsibilities

• Dune Analytics. Maintain Dune dashboards on an ongoing basis and adapt them quickly to any protocol changes. If necessary, create new dashboards to capture new elements of the protocol.
• RWI Vault operations. Fulfil the operational requirements of the Real World Insurance Vault.
• Investment committee. Continue leading the investment committee responsible for generating investment returns on the capital pool, with an objective to create a diversified portfolio of assets that seeks to maximise return, generate long-term growth, and preserve capital by investing within the Mutual’s risk constraints while ensuring sufficient liquidity to meet cover obligations.
• Product support role. Provide input and ad hoc support of new discretionary and regulated products using actuarial, DeFi, and insurance expertise.
• Ad hoc project lead. Provide business-side protocol and mechanism design input, research, financial modelling, and project management for new initiatives as required.

Team

Head of R&D (PT with the DAO alongside Foundation role): Rei

Description. Responsible for leading projects, coordinating contributors, working with DAO and Foundation members to increase participation in research, analytics, protocol design, and product design.

Bio. Has served as Head of R&D since Q1 2023. Began working on Nexus Mutual in May 2018 as the first full-time employee, covering economic design, legal set-up, actuarial modeling, documentation, and early business development. Advisory Board member since February 2020. Previously qualified as a UK actuary, held a variety of back-office and front-office corporate roles in reinsurance and brokerage.

Marketing Team

Purpose

The Marketing team is focused on raising awareness among institutional and accredited investors about Nexus Mutual, educating them on the risks, solutions, and opportunities in the crypto insurance space, and building user trust with the Mutual. The team’s work includes branding and positioning, go-to-market and product marketing, social media, content, events, and more.

Priorities

The main marketing priority is ensuring Nexus Mutual is seen as the most trusted expert in managing crypto risk. This theme is a common thread throughout, from branding to content and events.

Finish brand tweak/expansion. The work to date on refining and focusing the visual brand and messaging has helped position Nexus Mutual as a serious partner for an institutional audience. Given the new and work-in-progress products, there is an opportunity to finish brand updates to align with the full scope of what Nexus Mutual is offering.

Finish website updates. The website refresh has given visitors a more streamlined experience, facilitating more contact requests with the team as well as highlighting relevant information and content. With AI agents proving to be a new part of the discovery process, the team is moving more content to be accessible online, including the full suite of products, the risks covered, and the industries served.

Grow awareness and adoption of new products. Long established as the leader in onchain cover, Nexus Mutual has recently stepped into the real world with Crypto K&R Cover and the RWI Vault. As these are slightly different offerings from onchain cover, each will require its own marketing focus (targeted PR for K&R and targeted, specific events for the RWI Vault).

Retrospective (2025 to 2026)

What’s Been Working

• Brand focus. While everyone should be using onchain cover, not everyone is using it today. By focusing on an audience of serious investors and institutions, the team has been able to connect with new funds and customers.

• Website refresh. The team updated the home page and overall visuals and added new pages, leading to a steady stream of inbound contacts. In the last 12 months, 60+ funds and family offices have reached out through the contact form, with a total of almost 600 inquiries over that timeframe (individuals, protocols, insurance companies, and more).

• Risk content. DeFi has faced an unrelenting stream of hacks and exploits over the past year. Each major hack is an opportunity for Nexus Mutual to display its risk expertise as the team releases detailed incident reports. This content has been a key tool in showcasing the Mutual’s knowledge to existing and potential clients.

• Events. Attending, sponsoring, and hosting events has been one of the main tools in growing awareness of Nexus Mutual and cultivating relationships among the target audience. Nexus Mutual is known for bringing together a high-quality group of institutional and DeFi leaders for its networking events, leading to a total email list of almost 7,000 people.

• AI monitoring. Working closely with operations and community, the Marketing team has implemented new AI tools to help monitor and analyse marketing performance. The team revamped the website SEO, added new pages to drive AEO (SEO for AI agents), and fixed Google Analytics. AI agents also help monitor current events in DeFi security, providing ample topics for content creation.

Lessons Learned

While events have been a significant marketing channel, not all events are created equal. Given the Mutual’s specific niche (institutional DeFi), the team has found that hosting side events is often a better use of the budget instead of sponsoring the main event. The team doubles down on events that attract the target audience and is always exploring new options and ideas.

With hundreds of protocols listed, there is no shortage of potential for partner marketing. As an OG in the space, Nexus Mutual is seen as a leader in onchain risk, and there is significant interest in co-marketing with the Mutual. There is an opportunity to focus more on partner marketing to expose Nexus Mutual to other networks and cement its status as the leader in onchain risk management.

Ongoing Responsibilities

• Branding & positioning. Ongoing refinement of the Nexus Mutual brand through projects like updating the website and tailoring content to different audiences
• Content, social & email. Building strong relationships with our community through relevant content on owned channels such as direct web traffic, social, and email
• Conferences & events. Fostering IRL connections by planning and staffing events around the world
• Paid ads & PR. Using targeted ads and PR to help connect with our ideal customers and partners
• Partner marketing. Supporting our partners through co-marketing and events

Team

Head of Marketing (FT): Phil

Description. Phil is responsible for developing and implementing comprehensive marketing strategies to increase brand awareness, engagement, and generate leads for the Mutual’s B2B and B2B2C products.

Bio. Phil joined Nexus Mutual in July 2024 and has over 10 years of experience ranging from startups to Fortune 1000 companies. Prior to joining Nexus Mutual, he was the Content Communications Lead for Unstoppable Domains, a unicorn in the blockchain space. He got into crypto through NFTs at the end of 2020 and has never looked back.

Total DAO Team Funding Requests

The DAO teams are requesting 12 months of funding, which will be distributed on a quarterly basis from the DAO treasury.

In total, the DAO teams request:

• 1,108,875 USDC
• 6,930.00 wNXM

This funding request represents a 13.1% increase in USDC compared to the previous 12-month cycle, primarily driven by investments in security, increased tooling costs, and modest compensation increases for team members. Additionally, the request includes an 18.86% increase in wNXM compared to the previous cycle. This rise aligns with a broader strategy to improve contributor alignment and incentivise DAO team members to drive growth in cover sales over the coming year.

NMDP Review Period

No substantial comments were received during the RFC stage. This funding proposal is now transitioning to a Nexus Mutual DAO Proposal (NMDP), which is open for comment from 26 June–5 July 2026.

After the review period, this NMDP will go to a Snapshot vote from 6 July–9 July 2026.

No comments were shared during the review period, so this proposal has gone to a Snapshot vote, which will be open for voting from 21:02 UTC on 6 July 2026 until 21:02 UTC on 9 July 2026 on Snapshot: NMDP 15: DAO Teams Budget Request Proposal (August 2026 to July 2027)

The DAO teams look forward to the community’s review and comments.