What is The DAO?

The DAO was a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that launched in 2016 on the Ethereum blockchain. The DAO was designed to be an investor-directed cryptocurrency venture capital fund, but after raising $150 million USD worth of ether (ETH) through an initial token sale, the project was hacked, resulting in the loss of millions of dollars worth of ETH. This hack is notable in the crypto space as it led to a schism within the Ethereum community that resulted in a hard fork of the Ethereum network that created two separate blockchains, Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC).