BitDAO Crypto Organisation Launches With $230 Funding From Peter Thiel, Alan Howard And Others

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called BitDAO was launched after closing a $230 million private sale from major investors and companies from the cryptocurrency space.

What Happened: According to an announcement shared with Benzinga on Wednesday, BitDAO received contributions from major Singapore-based crypto derivatives exchange Bybit, billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel and billionaire hedge fund manager Alan Howard.

Other contributors include liquidity platform Spartan Group, Pantera Capital, Dragonfly Capital, Founders Fund, Jump Capital, Fenbushi Capital, and founder of decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Synthetix Kain Warwick.

ByBit pledged a contribution of 2.5 basis points of its futures contracts’ trading volume to the BitDAO treasury, expected to generate over $1 billion per year based on this year's run rates.

Those funds will be used to develop new DeFi protocols by providing funding, R&D, and liquidity.

What It Means: BitDAO will support blockchain initiatives through grants and giving support to existing and emerging projects through token swaps.

The organization will also employ hundreds of specialists for research and development centers that will work on the technical challenges faced in the space.

Read also: What is a DAO? 

The DAO's treasury will purportedly be "one of the largest pools of assets controlled by a DAO."

What Else: A DAO is an organization that is not controlled by a central entity but instead is mostly automated through smart contracts on the blockchain and is usually controlled by a community of tokenholders with on-chain voting rights.

Smart contracts are programs that run on a blockchain that cannot be tampered with and often regulate access to a pool of funds, for instance, only allowing them to be spent when holders of a specific token vote in favor.