The DAO, a decentralised blockchain investment fund, has hit a $100 million mark midway through a crowdsale campaign which can end up as the most successful crowdfunding project of all times.

The crowdsale started 28 April and will last until 28 May with DAO tokens being sold for ether cryptocurrency. In a few opening days of the sale, the platform collected from investors $15 million and has been gaining momentum since then. As of today, the total amount attracted is 10.7 million ETH, which equals nearly $109 million.

The total number of DAO tokens created during the crowdsale has reached 1069.9 million at the today’s exchange rate of 100 DAO tokens to 1.1 ether. According to the sale scheme, from 14 May the price of tokens is increased by 0.05 ETH daily.

The DAO platform was developed by German company Slock.it and aims to finance Ethereum-based projects at an early stage of development. The fund is focused on startups related to the sharing economy, Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications and other blockchain-oriented projects that, as the company puts it, can be beneficial both to members of the organisation and to the decentralised ecosystem as a whole.

The organisation features decentralised automated governance based on the Ethereum blockchain platform. It lacks such regular governing positions as CEO or board of directors, all management being done directly by DAO token holders. They control the fund’s activity by voting to approve or decline investment proposals. Voting power is proportional to the amount of tokens held. Profit raised is distributed among the participants in accordance with simple rules approved by all members of the platform.

Despite its claim to be a totally decentralised system, DAO has a special group of experts called “curators” whose task is the prevention of malicious actions. These curators elected by DAO token holders are in charge of verifying if every contract published in the Ethereum blockchain matches the source code of the contractor. Curators also confirm that offers come from identified and verified sources.

Currently, the team of DAO curators includes 11 members, most of them members of Ethereum Foundation. Among them is Vitalik Buterin, the inventor of Ethereum and founder of the Ethereum Foundation, Gavin Wood, former CTO and co-founder of Ethereum, Alex Van de Sande, chief designer at Ethereum Foundation and others.

Svetlana Nosova