Slock.it DAO token IOUs to go on sale Thursday, according to William Piquard, business developer at Gatecoin Limited, a Hong Kong based regulated financial institution for blockchain assets.
The much anticipated DAO, which aims to fund the creation of smart locks as well as an Ethereum computer with more than 4,000 members flocking to their Slack channel, has not itself yet been released.
On Wednesday 27 April, Piquard stated :
“[T]he Decentralized Autonomous Organization may not be created tomorrow, but Gatecoin users will be able to buy DAO token IOUs from tomorrow to the DAO creation date. Once the DAO is created, those IOUs will be automatically converted into actual DAO tokens.”
The IOUs will be sold at a rate of one Ether for 100 IOU tokens, according to Aurélien Menant, founder and CEO of Gatecoin, and won’t be tradable until the end of the actual DAO’s creation process. Menant further stated in reply to a number of our questions that “each IOU will be collateralised in ETH and those ETH will be sent to the DAO at launch.” The actual DAO tokens are also set at one Ether per 100 Slock.it DAO tokens for the first 14 days, according to DaoHub, gradually rising thereafter, ending with a conversion rate of 100 DAO tokens for 1.5 ether for the last 4 days during a period of 28 days.
In more general public statements on Slock.it’s slack channel, Menant stated that Gatecoin “won’t take any fee on the DAOETH pair” and that Gatecoin’s goal was “to raise [as much] money [as] possible for the DAO and have those people trading on our platform.”
The move has been seen as controversial, especially as apparently it was misreported earlier today that the Slock.it DAO tokens themselves will go on sale tomorrow. Stephan Tual, the founder of slock.it, emphasizing “the DAO is decentralized and we do not control it. We are just building a framework anyone can use” stated in reply to our questions that:
“[D]aohub.org (the largest community and the most likely to have a working DAO that follows our Standard DAO model to the letter), as far as we can tell, [has] not instantiated the DAO nor has it set a date for the instantiation of the DAO” before adding that “[t]he DAO will instantiate when it damn pleases, not when an Exchange decides it will. Welcome to true decentralization, middlemen not welcome.”
Promising application of Ethereum
Slock.it is seen as the most promising application of Ethereum’s blockchain and may be the first practical application of the very new concept – Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. Through the use of Ethereum’s blockchain, the DAO aims to create smart locks which can be opened or closed via smart contracts thus allowing for a sharing economy. The DAO further aims to fund the production of an Ethereum computer which seems to be similar to 21.inc’s Bitcoin computer.
The owners of the actual DAO tokens will be able to vote on how the funds raised during the DAO token creation will be spent as well as being rewarded through the slock smart contract fees or fees on transactions carried on the Ethereum computer.
Disclaimer: Although the author has taken steps to verify the facts and statements above, no guarantee whatever is given as to their accuracy and no extensive verification as to authenticity or legitimacy has been taken. None of the above constitutes financial advice or endorsement of any of the mentioned companies or organizations. Readers rely on the above statements at their sole risk and discretion.