As we speculated might happen last week, all the Ethereum investors that were sitting on the fence jumped in to the DAO crowd funding drive just ahead of its planned price change today. With over 10.3 million ETH the DAO now holds one in eight of all Ethereum coins in circulation, each worth about $10, for a total of about $105 million.

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With 13 days left to go, the DAO has already fulfilled the expected $100 million worth of cryptocurrency raised. However, the rate of investing is expected to slow down as the price of its tokens is about to change in just over an hour from now (currently 1 ETH is worth 100 DAO tokens).

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Stephan Tual, the founder of Slock.it, commented about the success of crowdsale predicting that the DAO will dominate not just Ethereum but all blockchain innovation within a few short years.

What is the DAO?

DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization equivalent. It can be understood as an entity that exists only in the blockchain – the same way a corporation exists only by law – just with programming code instead of articles of incorporation. It is controlled by its owners directly without central management.

Slock.it created the DAO platform but the investors that breathe life into it with their funds will stay in control of its coffers, vote on its future actions and be rewarded from its revenues. It is considered the first serious application on the Ethereum blockchain on its way to fulfilling the vision of the ‘planetary scale computer’ that can handle everything from secure communication to digital governance and so much more.

The DAO’s Curator signatories include Vitalik Buterin, the inventor of Ethereum, Gavin Wood, the co-­founder of Ethereum, Christian Reitwießner, who implemented Solidity, the Ethereum smart contract language and others.

Investment projects

While its owners can vote to invest in anything they want, the idea seems to be that the DAO will serve as an investment fund for early stage Ethereum ventures. The hope of its creators is that the DAO would be used to support the development of the Ethereum protocol itself eventually, as a for-profit ‘Ethereum Foundation 2.0′.

Slock.it has already submitted its proposal for the creation of the Universal Sharing Framework and the Ethereum Computer to the DAO. It is also believed that more startups, such as the electric vehicle designers Mobotiq that have already revealed their DAO proposal (Ethereum integration to enable fully autonomous, self-renting vehicles), are planning to try and tap into this new source of venture funds.