The DAO Workshop
ASTRATUM shared its early expertise with cryptocurrencies, blockchain and ethereum and DAO, giving in July 2016 in Berlin a hands-on introduction into the DAO and investing via cryptocurrencies and tokens.
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Our DAO workshop “Code your Next Investment Proposal” was held by David Roon, who gave a hands-on introduction to the world of theDAO, ethereum and Solidity, the programming language for smart contracts.
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David and Sven at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2015. Both were the only two Europeans, participating at the MIT's Computational Law department program “From Napkin to Prototype,” limited to 25 participants.
Aim of this program was to learn hands-on, how to turn an idea for a project with ethereum and smart contracts into a prototype. The program was assisted and framed by Consensys, Brooklyn and enriched by many outspoken blockchain experts from tech and legal.
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The goal of our workshop was to enable interested persons to experience ethereum and the blockchain, so they can better understand what this is all about. We had approximately 80 people joining the workshop, from developers to investors and representatives of large enterprises.You were able to participate as a member of this new DAO and engage in discussions about the technology or you could get your hands dirty and write your first draft for an investment proposal to expose to the community and their new funds. Or simply learn a lot about DAO’s and discuss the current state of the project.
We wanted to bridge the gap between the early blockchain eco-system and the international investment community. Remember, this was before token sales became the favored fund raising method. It was still early days for ethereum. We were into ethereum since 2014 and had been playing around with ethereum since 2015. We wanted to reach out to other founders and developers, but also other stakeholders of the community. And specifically in Berlin, #BerlinBlockchainCapital, where the culture of decentralization, privacy and disruption is hard-coded in the DNA of Berlin Kreuzberg.
theDAO, created by Slock.it, was the first DAO ever and popularized token sales, raising 150 mio. USD in few weeks. The DAO, properly named “theDAO”, had been one of the largest crowdfunded projects ever. It demonstrated the potential of ethereum and token sales, aka ICO’s. Download theDAO whitepaper here.
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DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. More on the currently underrated DAO’s, DAC’s, DA’s in this post, where Vitalik Buterin introduces and explains these different concepts. theDAO collected within few weeks 12 mio ether. Worth back in time around impressive 165 mio. USD, it represents today several billion USD. It was hacked during this process, with an exploit of the smart contracts. This led to the hard fork of ethereum, giving birth to the ethereum classic blockchain.