Who Can Spend, and Who Has to Approve

Approvers

Approvers are members who sign transactions from the shared account. To become an Approver, a member needs a wallet linked to their EnDAO account. The wallet is what signs each transaction, and they link it themselves from their account settings.

Once a member has a linked wallet, an Owner can promote them to Approver. The two directions are not symmetrical, and it is worth knowing which is which. Removing an Approver is itself a transaction the current Approvers have to sign. Adding one is not: a single person with permission to manage Approvers can do it on their own, and it is recorded. The new Approver cannot actually sign anything until the shared account's own list of key-holders is brought up to date; until then the permission is only recorded inside EnDAO.

The approval threshold

Your Group sets its own approval threshold, for example 2-of-3: any 2 of the 3 Approvers need to sign before a transaction goes through.

The starting point is half the Approvers, rounded up — 2-of-3, 2-of-4, 3-of-5. The two-Approver case is the one worth pausing on, because it surprises people: two Approvers start at 1-of-2, meaning either one of them can send on their own. That is a deliberate trade. A Group locked out of its own money has no way back, while a spend nobody else agreed to is recoverable and is written into the audit trail. A Group that wants two signatures on everything adds a third Approver and sets 2-of-3.

Once your Group has two or more Approvers, the threshold can't equal the Approver count. A treasury needing every signature can't be repaired if one Approver becomes unreachable. A single-Approver Group is the exception, because 1-of-1 is the only setting available to it. That rule is enforced when the account is first set up; if Approvers leave later your Group can drift into that state anyway, and EnDAO warns rather than stops you.

Treasury freeze

A shared account can be frozen in an emergency. While it is frozen, members can still see balances and history, but no new transaction can be created or executed until it is lifted, and the freeze is recorded along with who applied it and why.

There is no button inside your Group for this today. A freeze is applied by EnDAO, so if your Group needs its account stopped urgently, that means contacting us rather than reaching for a control in Settings. Worth knowing before you need it.

Before you approve

Double-check the recipient.

Verify the first AND last characters of a recipient address before approving. Scammers use similar-looking addresses.

Confirm large or unusual requests through a second channel.

For a large amount, or a request that feels off, confirm it with the requester through a different communication method before signing.

Related guides

• Who Can Do What in Your Group: seeing the Group's balance and transactions is one of the read permissions every member already has by default.
• Getting Money In and Out: the full spending and funding flow.