June 16, 2021
BitDAO, one of the world’s largest decentralized autonomous organizations, has completed a $230 million private sale from initial partners led by Peter Thiel, Founders Fund, Pantera Capital and Dragonfly Capital, according to a statement.
Other participants in the project include Alan Howard, Jump Capital, Spartan Group, Fenbushi and Kain Warwick of Synthetix, among a total of more than 20 institutions and DeFi projects.
With this round of financing, BitDAO aims to promote and propel the mass adoption of open finance and decentralized tokenized economy. As an initial proponent of BitDAO, 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 $1.0 billion per year. Bybit’s recurring contributions to BitDAO will scale with Bybit business growth and overall crypto industry growth, the statement said.
BitDAO is putting its full support behind DeFi and will allocate significant financial and talent resources to drive DeFi growth, specifically, funding, R&D and liquidity. BitDAO aims to support blockchain technologies through grants (à la Gitcoin), and support existing and emerging projects through token swaps.
According to the statement, BitDAO affiliated R&D centers aim to employ hundreds of talents to help engineer innovations and tackle technical challenges faced by the sector. BitDAO treasury, with recurring contributions, will be one of the largest pools of assets controlled by a DAO. These assets can be used to provide liquidity to partners, and bootstrap new protocols such as decentralized exchanges (DEX), lending and synthetics protocols.
In collaboration with DeFi and CeFi partners around the globe, BitDAO seeks to propel the growth of the overall ecosystem, instead of any single proprietary chain. BitDAO will work with change-makers to help drive the decentralized tokenized economy and shape the future of finance for the benefit of all its participants, it said.
