The DAO (Đ) was a digital decentralized autonomous organization, and a form of investor-directed venture capital fund. It launched in April 2016 after a crowdfunding campaign. By September 2016, it was delisted and had, in effect, become defunct.The DAO had an objective to provide a new decentralized business model for organizing both commercial and non-profit enterprises. It was instantiated on the Ethereum blockchain, and had no conventional management structure or board of directors. The code of the DAO is open-source.The DAO was crowdfunded via a token sale in May 2016, and it was one of the largest crowdfunding campaigns in history.In June 2016, users exploited a vulnerability in The DAO code to enable them to siphon off one-third of The DAO's funds to a subsidiary account. On 20 July 2016 01:20:40 PM +UTC at Block 1920000, the Ethereum community decided to hard-fork the Ethereum blockchain to restore virtually all funds to the original contract. This was controversial, and led to a fork in Ethereum, where the original unforked blockchain was maintained as Ethereum Classic, thus breaking Ethereum into two separate active blockchains, each with its own cryptocurrency.The official The DAO ticker is “DAO” and trades under that name on all the exchanges where it has been listed. The designation “THEDAO” is for CryptoCompare.com only.
