“…they haven’t come up with anything but procrastination and excuses instead of the accounts book, which, as we suspect, they had smeared with bacon and fed to the dogs.” This 1622 complaint by Dutch East India Company (VOC) shareholders could easily be a tweet about a DeFi project in 2026. The past week has reinforced in my mind the importance of constantly pushing for better quality accounting within DeFi projects. This is in part because it’s HARD. Even those who understand the importance of transparent and consistent accounting can struggle to do so. Going back to the VOC, the Netherlands was at the forefront of accounting literacy in the 1600s. The first prince (albeit a republican one from the House of Orange) to learn double-entry bookkeeping was Dutch. It was also the first state to organize its financial records in the same manner as merchants. And even then, the VOC - that mightiest of premodern capitalist enterprises and the first limited liability stock company - did not keep a proper central ledger. Seventy years after its creation, it was still struggling with such basics as accounting for liabilities and not just assets. In DeFi terms, the VOC had only tracked treasury assets, without tracking debts, unpaid wages, and complex concepts like contingent liabilities. Founded in 1602, the VOC would fit right in with the DAO landscape today. It was run by 17 prominent shareholders, with additional oversight by the 50 largest shareholders. Not so different from a typical DAO. And just like a typical DAO, promises of dividends to shareholders were constantly delayed, corruption and self-dealing was a constant problem, and the solution - regular audits and public books available for inspection - was always pushed away because of vague mutterings about secrecy being vital to the company. Management would promise higher dividends (which never arrived) in exchange for no snooping around in the accounts books to see who had sold themselves indigo or cinnamon at below-market prices or contracted with themselves to provide services at above-market rates. Lack of accounting - or even worse, wrong accounting - is one of the last major impediments to making DeFi projects investable. Someone responded to my lament about wrong accounting in a recent report with the following: “There is no right or wrong yet in methodology - just opinion.” I found this simultaneously sad and frustrating. It is 404 years since the shareholders of the Dutch East India Company accused management of destroying the accounts books to hide them. Four centuries later, DeFi has not even advanced to the point where standards are high enough that the ledgers need to be destroyed - you can just make up numbers and it’s accepted. Despite being a critic of many aspects of Spark, I’ll end with holding them up as an example on how to put together basic financial reports that convey accurate numbers, explain generally how they were arrived at, and provide commentary on what influenced them. They should continue to evolve, but they meet the basic needs for transparency, and serve as a good starting point for other projects. I’ll leave links to their last two quarterly reports in the next tweet for reference.