DAO core concepts

The DAO is an investment vehicle governed by a program, directed by investors' votes, to seek out and fund proposals. It is implemented as a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain.

Creation

The DAO is the first Ethereum blockchain DAO ever created. Its creation period ended on 28 May 09:00 GMT and is, as of today Jun 04 2016, the highest ever crowdfunded project in the world.

Its address on the Ethereum blockchain is 0xbb9bc244d798123fde783fcc1c72d3bb8c189413. Visiting the link will show you a balance of 11,727,782.774716786 Ether, roughly Million $162.

The DAO is a for-profit DAO that will diligently use the ETH currency under its control to create value and provide benefits to its members while collaborating and improving the decentralized ecosystem as a whole.

Central to the DAO system is the concept of decentralized autonomous entities.They can be corporations, companies or applications. Unfortunately, no one even knows what all of these individual terms mean, and there is a lack of coherent terminology.

In this sense, The DAO is something entirely new. It’s something between a traditional corporation, a VC fund and a Kickstarter — only entirely decentralized, democratic and existing only in code.

Smart contracts

A smart contract is a mechanism involving digital assets and two or more parties, where some or all of the parties put assets in and assets are automatically redistributed among those parties according to a formula based on certain data that is not known at the time the contract is initiated.

Token

In exchange for supporting The DAO financially (in the form of Ether), backers get DAO tokens, which they can then use to vote on the direction of the organization. They can use their tokens to vote on big governance issues (akin to traditional shareholders) but also on minute details of how The DAO spends its resources. In this way, token holders have total control over The DAO’s assets and its actions.

DAO tokens do not represent or constitute an equity ownership stake, share, or equivalent in ANY public or private company, corporation, or other entity in any jurisdiction; DAO tokens are only for use in connection with The DAO under the terms of The DAO’s smart contract code and do not entitle any holder of DAO tokens to any additional rights with respect to any other corporation, company, or entity in any jurisdiction.

DAO token trading

Trading starts on May 28th.

The DAO token statistics

Etherscan website lets you find useful information about the DAO token, like its address, supply number, value in Ether, transaction numbers or holder number.

The website will list too all the proposals and votes once the mechanism starts to be active.

Decentralized applications

Curators

Contractors

Proposals

People with projects they’d like to build for The DAO can submit ideas in the form of a proposal written in plain English accompanied by smart contract code. The code automatically executes payments so long as certain agreed-upon conditions are met. Because this is all built on top of Ethereum, which allows for robust smart contracts, this can all be done autonomously.

Split

This feature allow DAO Token Holders to leave The DAO at anytime and retrieve their ETH not already assigned to proposals.