The DAO absorbs 14% of all ETH and briefly proves the concept of on-chain venture capital

APR 30 2016 · 12:00

Video: 'The DAO' Hack of 2016 | 1 Minute Crypto | Limitations of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations Date: 2016-04-30 · Type: ethereum · Tags: dao, crowdfunding, governance, slock.it, ethereum, 2016 The largest crowdfunding event in history at the time; a collective intelligence that held together for forty-eight days The DAO — written largely by Christoph Jentzsch of Slock.it, launched April 30 2016 — was the first attempt to operationalize the 'decentralized autonomous organization' concept at scale. Any ETH holder could deposit tokens during the creation period (April 30 – May 28), receive proportional DAO tokens, and thereafter vote on which projects to fund. By close, ~12.7 million ETH had been deposited — roughly 14% of circulating supply, worth $150 million. The previous record for crowdfunding of any kind was Pebble's $20 million Kickstarter. Nothing required a term sheet, a board, or a wire transfer. The mechanism was elegant and the ambition was serious: not a token sale but a programmable capital-allocation layer, Ethereum's first proof that the account-model could do something a mere payments chain could not. The DAO's premise implicitly framed the Ethereum chain as a substrate for replacing institutional intermediaries — not just in finance, but in governance. That framing has echoed through every subsequent DAO wave, from 2020 DeFi governance tokens to the UN pilot DAOs of 2025. The boldest thing about The DAO wasn't the fundraise. It was the claim, which went largely unchallenged for those forty-eight days, that a smart contract could substitute for the discretionary judgment of a partner meeting. The hack that followed did not disprove the claim — it merely demonstrated that the specific contract had a catastrophic bug. The idea survived; the instance did not. Facts • Launch: April 30 2016; creation period closed May 28 2016 • Raised: ~12.7M ETH (~$150M at the time, ~$250M at peak ETH price that month) • ~11,000 participants in the creation period • Code written by Christoph and Simon Jentzsch of Slock.it • The DAO represented ~14% of all ETH in circulation at close • Largest crowdfunding event of any kind in history at the time Primary Documents • The DAO whitepaper (Christoph Jentzsch / Slock.it) — https://download.slock.it/public/DAO/WhitePaper.pdf • The DAO contract on Etherscan — https://etherscan.io/address/0xbb9bc244d798123fde783fcc1c72d3bb8c189413