Charity DAO Gives the Original DAO a Second Chance

This week Slock.it CTO Christoph Jentzsch announced a new project called the Charity DAO. The idea comes after the team’s disastrous DAOHub experiment, which had a fatal bug allowing an attacker to drain $150 million in Ether. Interestingly enough, Jentzsch wants to take a stab at the autonomous organization concept once again.

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After Original DAO Failure a New Charity DAO Is Rising

Slock.it CTO Christoph Jentzsch surprised everyone when he announced a new DAO creation, collaborating with the Giveth organization. The Charity DAO will give donors control and transparency towards donations by allowing voting towards certain charities. The new DAO effort will be a nonprofit entity that is very similar to the original DAOHub. However, this time Jentzsch says security will be tighter by utilizing the knowledge gained from the last experiment.

Charitable giving throughout the world could be more transparent, and has been widely corrupted by individual agencies in the past. Jentzsch said that with the Charity DAO, the platform can provide decentralized governance with “full transparency and accountability on giving.” The Charity DAO will be strictly nonprofit said Jentzsch, and a set of trusted curators will commit themselves to the project.

“The donors stay in full control of the funds and vote on which projects will get funded, either directly or via a nominated delegate,” Jentzsch explained. “These projects — approved by a set of trusted curators — will commit themselves to a payment schedule laid out in smart contracts (e.g., monthly disbursement with the ability for the charity DAO to halt payments in the case of missed deliverables).”

Fixing Shortcomings and Additional Security Improvements

The original DAOHub project, also maintained by Slock.it members, will go down in cryptocurrency history as a giant mistake. Back in June, an individual or group of hackers managed to find a bug and drain the autonomous organization’s funds. Subsequently, the leading members of the Ethereum Foundation decided to “roll back” the DAO funds via a hard fork. The fork was controversial and led to the birth of the Ethereum Classic chain — or what some consider the “original chain.”

It seems from Jentzsch’s blog post, security improvements will be made to the Charity DAO in comparison to the last project. It will be interesting to see what types of security enhancements will be utilized for the Charity DAO. Jentzsch says the project will work in close collaboration with Giveth, tethering “all of our efforts together” and the teams plan to focus on the governance, workflows, and smart contracts involved with the new DAO.

Open Source, New Slack Channel, and Charity DAO Website

Jentzsch’s post explained the Charity DAO will be fully open source and the team is encouraging programmers to join the effort. Furthermore, Charity DAO creators have formed a “revamped” community Slack group for those who want to contribute feedback. The Charity DAO also has a newly designed website for people to follow. Undoubtedly, many cryptocurrency enthusiasts will be very skeptical towards this project. However, Jentzsch and others believe they have learned from previous mistakes.

“By using tools such as the blockchain, Ethereum, and DAOs, we are able to remove the requirements of putting one’s trust into a centralized, opaque organization — anyone can submit a Proposal for a Cause – after being selected by Curators these become automatically public and Donors can opt to vote on them,” says the Charity DAO’s website.

What do you think about the creation of the Charity DAO? Do you think the developers deserve a second chance? Let us know in the comments below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, and the Slock.it website.

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