New DAO launches after $ 230 million in funding, including Peter Thiel and Alan Howard

BitDAO, a new decentralized autonomous organization, will launch after a $ 230 million financing round led by billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

BitDAO announced the launch of the DAO on Tuesday along with the completion of a private sale by the first partners led by Thiel, Pantera Capital, Dragonfly Capital and Founders Fund.

Other investors include the multi-billion dollar hedge fund manager Alan Howard, the Spartan Group liquidity platform, Jump Capital, Fenbushi and Kain Warwick from the DeFi protocol Synthetix, among more than 20 players in the decentralized financial industry.

Bybit, one of the world’s largest crypto derivatives exchanges, was an original main proponent of BitDAO and promised to regularly contribute to the new DAO when it is launched. The company has made a specific commitment to bring 2.5 basis points of its futures trading volume into the BitDAO treasury, which is projected to generate over $ 1 billion annually based on interest rates running this year, the DAO said.

BitDAO’s regularly contributed treasury is used to provide liquidity and promote new protocols such as decentralized exchanges, credit protocols and aggregation protocols.

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According to the announcement, BitDAO also plans to support blockchain projects through grants and support existing and emerging projects through token swaps.

A BitDAO spokesperson told Cointelegraph that the DAO will hire both permanent and project-based teams, including consultants from Spartan and Dragonfly and developers from Sushiswap.

The DeFi industry has seen a significant decline in the past few months due to a massive sell-off in the crypto market. According to the DeFi data provider DefiLlama, the market peaked in mid-May with a Total Value Locked (TVL) of around 158 billion US dollars. At the time of writing, DeFi TVL stands at $ 128 billion.