Brief History of DAOs
A DAO is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization, an organization governed by its members according to the laws of the code on the blockchain. DAOs are the evolution of organizations based on consensus forced by law. In the early days of Ethereum, DAO’s were widely recognized as a major use case for smart contract technology. In early 2016, the first DAO smart contract, called The DAO, was created and deployed on Ethereum. The DAO raised more than 12M Ether to invest in the Ethereum ecosystem through decentralized mechanisms of proposals and voting. Shortly thereafter, anonymous individuals siphoned off a large portion of the funds from the DAO smart contract reserves. This led to a controversial centralized hard fork of Ethereum to roll back the blockchain, something antithetical to the principles of decentralization. Needless to say, for a while after this incident, DAO’s were not a popular use case in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Over time, however, several DAO infrastructure projects have been quietly and steadily working to create robust, audited and secure platforms for the creation and operations of DAO’s. Several forms of DAOs are starting to be experimented with and we are already seeing the benefits; some of these include: short entity creation time, programmable operations, and defined governance. During the DeFi boom, we witnessed a resurgence of DAOs being used to govern asset reserves of profit generating protocols, resulting in the ubiquitous governance token.
Rise of the Venture DAOs
Right now we are seeing the resurgence of Venture DAOs, or DAOs that intend to invest in the Ethereum (or general blockchain) ecosystem. These DAOs have been able to offer several advantages to early stage projects over VC’s, because they are governed by enthusiasts and community peers. Investors and investment seekers may benefit from the flexible terms DAOs are offering. A Venture DAO can also leverage the multidisciplinary talent and experience of its members to offer support to startups in a wide variety of areas, including community building, software development, product development, graphic design and much more. As of today there are only a handful of Venture DAOs in the Ethereum ecosystem. We believe that similar to the way that DeFi today disrupts the financial industry, Venture DAO’s will soon disrupt the Venture Capital industry.
Introducing AngelDAO
We believe that the inevitability of Web 3 ensures the value of distributed systems. With that, we are focused on offering support to projects driving global adoption and technological innovation for distributed systems. We have a data driven research process that we use to identify opportunities, while still maintaining a collaborative effort between DAO members to form consensus on decisions. Our team is native in the blockchain space, with experience in crypto assets, software development, product development, marketing and community organization.
Our DAO is deployed on the Aragon platform. We use a non-transferable token to represent membership. Decisions are made based on one-member-one-vote governance. Our DAO technology is fully upgradeable, designed to adapt to create new features for our members and our community.
Learn More
To learn more about AngelDAO, follow us on Twitter @AngelDAOorg and visit our site AngelDAO.org
