Decentralised investment fund DAO has attracted $14.6 million during the first days of crowdsale. Investors pay in Ether tokens. The platform allows every participant to control and manage the fund.

The total number of DAO tokens created during the first four days of the crowdsale has reached 155.75 million. The exchange rate is 100 DAO tokens to 1 ether. The crowdsale will last until 28 May. According to the DAO website, the exchange rate of DAO tokens will be changed after 10 days.

DAO is an investment fund which aims to finance Ethereum-based projects at an early stage of development. 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 tokens 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 from the fund’s activities is distributed among the participants in accordance with simple rules approved by all members of the decentralised platform.

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 DAO platform was developed by German startup Slock.it specialising in Ethereum-based applications. Slock.it allows customers to rent, sell or transfer their property without having to rely on intermediaries.

“We’ve developed the protocol and made it available to the world. Now it’s up to the world what it does with it,” said Stephan Tual, Founder and Chief Operating Officer at Slock.it.

Despite its claim to be a totally decentralised platform, 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.

Elena Platonova