The DAO

The DAO (stylized Đ) was a digital decentralized autonomous organization and a form of investor-directed venture capital fund. It launched in April 2016 after a crowdfunding campaign via a token sale and it became one of the largest crowdfunding campaigns in history. The DAO had an objective to provide a new decentralized business model for organizing both commercial and non-profit enterprises. It was instantiated on the Ethereum blockchain and had no conventional management structure or board of directors. The code of the DAO is open-source.

In June 2016, users exploited a vulnerability in The DAO code to enable them to siphon off one-third of The DAO's funds to a subsidiary account. The Ethereum community controversially decided to hard-fork the Ethereum blockchain restore virtually all funds to the original contract. This split the Ethereum blockchain into two branches, each with its own cryptocurrency, where the original unforked blockchain continued as Ethereum Classic. By September 2016, the value token of The DAO, known by the moniker DAO, was delisted from major cryptocurrency exchanges (such as Poloniex and Kraken) and had, in effect, become defunct.