The DAO - arealive/Viper GitHub Wiki

The DAO was a digital decentralized autonomous organization and a form of investor-directed venture capital fund.

The DAO was stateless, and not tied to any particular nation state...The DAO was crowdfunded via a token sale in May 2016.¹

TechCrunch described The DAO as "a paradigm shift in the very idea of economic organization. ... It offers complete transparency, total shareholder control, unprecedented flexibility, and autonomous governance."²

The DAO was famously hacked on June 17, 2016.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization)

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/16/the-tao-of-the-dao-or-how-the-autonomous-corporation-is-already-here/