The recently created decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) BitDAO says it has raised over USD 230m from a private sale funding round.
In a press release shared with FortuneZ, the DeFi group stated that it had received support from the likes of Peter Thiel, the Founders Fund, Pantera Capital and Dragonfly Capital. The Bybit exchange – the DAO’s first contributor – has also “pledged recurring contributions to BitDAO,” and a “total of more than 20 institutions and DeFi projects” took part in the round.
Also, per the announcement, Bybit has pledged a contribution of 2.5bps of its futures contracts trading volume to the BitDAO treasury, which at January-May 2021 run rate is expected to be more than USD 1bn per year.
A spokesperson for BitDAO told FortuneZ that the DAO will use the funds to “hire both permanent and project-based teams,” adding that “advisers from the Spartan Group and Dragonfly,” as well as “developers from [the decentralized exchange] Sushiswap and the Bybit team” had become the “framers” and “current stewards.”
BitDAO added that the funds were raised by selling their governance tokens (BITtokens) to investors, which would provide them with influence over the DAO.
“BitDAO-affiliated R&D centers” are now looking to hire “hundreds of talents” to boost innovation and tackle “technical challenges faced by the sector,” using the funding injection to power their efforts.
When asked about its roadmap, the spokesperson responded that it “aims to support blockchain technologies through grants and support existing and emerging projects through token swaps.”
“Through token swaps, BitDAO and other projects can become mutual owners of one another and allow for the sharing of resources (funding, R&D and liquidity). The embracive design of BitDAO thus promotes and propels cross-pollination within the sector,” the spokesperson said, adding that the investors would be able to cash out via “speculation on the value of BITtoken prices,” which “will be judged by the treasury size, token swap deals and the R&D the DAO produces.”
The DAO affirmed its wish to “use its significant financial and talent resources to improve innovation, collaboration and growth across the DeFi space.”
And it added that among the other “participants in the project” were the Elwood owner and crypto backer Alan Howard, Jump Capital, the aforementioned Spartan, Fenbushi and Kain Warwick, the founder of Synthetix.
The BitDAO treasury, the organization added, would be topped up with “recurring contributions,” to form “one of the largest pools of assets controlled by a DAO.”
These assets, it noted, “can be used to provide liquidity to partners, and bootstrap new protocols such as decentralized exchanges, lending and synthetics protocols.”
(Photo : LinkedIn)
