The DAO (organization)
 |
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| Decentralized autonomous organization | |
| Industry | software venture capital fund |
| Founded | 2016 |
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Area served
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World (stateless) |
|
Key people
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Stephan Tual, Simon Jentzsch, Christoph Jentzsch |
| Total assets | ETH 11.5 million |
| Owners | +18 000 stakeholders |
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Number of employees
|
0 (automated) |
| Website | daohub |
| Written in | Solidity |
|---|---|
| License | GNU LGPL v3+ |
The DAO was a digital decentralized autonomous organization and a form of investor-directed venture capital fund.
The DAO had an objective to provide a new decentralized business model for organizing both commercial and non-profit enterprises. It was instantiated on the Ethereum blockchain, and had no conventional management structure or board of directors. The code of the DAO is open-source.
The DAO was stateless, and not tied to any particular nation state. As a result, many questions of how government regulators would deal with a stateless fund were yet to be dealt with.
The DAO was crowdfunded via a token sale in May 2016. It set the record for the largest crowdfunding campaign in history.
In June 2016, hackers exploited a vulnerability in the DAO code to enable them to siphon off one third of The DAO's funds to a subsidiary account. On the 20th July 2016, the Ethereum community decided to hard-fork the Ethereum blockchain to restore virtually all funds to the original contract. This was controversial, and led to a fork in Ethereum, where the original unforked blockchain was maintained as Ethereum Classic, thus breaking Ethereum into two separate active cryptocurrencies.
The computer code behind the organization was written by Christoph Jentzsch, and released publicly on GitHub. Simon Jentzsch, Christoph Jentzsch's brother, is also involved in the venture.
The DAO was launched on 30 April 2016, with a website and a 28-day crowdsale to fund the organization. The token sale had raised more than US$34 million by 10 May 2016, and more than US$50 million-worth of Ether (ETH)—the digital value token of the Ethereum network—by 12 May, and over US$100 million by 15 May 2016. The fund's Ether value as of 21 May 2016[update] was more than US$150 million, from more than 11,000 investors. The largest investor in the DAO so far holds less than 4% stake.
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