DeFi Alliance Goes Full DAO After Raising $50 Million

Web3 accelerator DeFi Alliance announced today that it will move forward as Alliance DAO. The move comes at a time when decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) have shown the ability to raise large sums of money in a short amount of time for various causes.

Alliance DAO says that over 300 contributors have joined and have raised $50 million in initial contributions. The DAO says the reason for the change is that its goal of growing Web3 to one billion users will take a more considerable effort than what DeFi Alliance alone could do.

A DAO is an online group that uses smart contracts to manage member participation, funding, voting, and more. Last November, ConstitutionDAO arguably took DAOs mainstream, rising to prominence when it raised $45 million in a bid to purchase an original copy of the U.S. Constitution.

DAOs can form for various purposes. And the members of Alliance DAO are joining forces in an effort to better incubate crypto startups.

"We will be building the infrastructure for an ecosystem that encourages the best Web3 founders to receive accelerator services and then remain as mentors to later founders," Dane Lund, the DAO's head architect told Decrypt. "We also aim to attract other DAO Contributors (builders, subject matter experts, and service providers) to join to provide support for Web3 founders."

"By creating a DAO, we are able to distribute the work of supporting founders even further and permit contributors to have a more direct stake in the outcome of their efforts, which incentivizes high-quality contribution," Lund said.

The news of the DAO forming was met with applause from project leaders and crypto VCs. "Our team @CoinSharesCo is proud to join @alliancedao," tweeted CoinShares Chief Strategy Officer Meltem Demirors.

Calling itself a digital startup nation in a blog post announcing the launch of the DAO, Alliance DAO says DAOs sit at the intersection of the trends that create the perfect storm for them to rise, including being primarily digital and transnational.

Initially launched in April 2020 by Imran Khan and Qiao Wang as the Chicago DeFi Alliance, the organization has included in its accelerator program 0x, dYdX, Kyber Network, IDEX, Olympus DAO, Sushiswap, and Synthetix.

In the coming months, Alliance DAO says it will release documentation to explain how the DAO will operate, its governance structure, and its services.