Quick take:
- Tekin Salimi has announced a $125 million crypto fund called “dao5”.
- The former Polychain general partner said the fund will invest in L1 blockchain infrastructure projects, NFTs and gaming, among others.
- Salimi also said the fund aims to become a founder-only owned DAO by 2025.
Tekin Salimi has announced a $125 million crypto fund called “dao5”. The fund will focus on investments in Layer-1 (L1) blockchain infrastructure, privacy, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and gaming, among others.
According to Salimi, the fund plans to become a founder-owned decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) by 2025, establishing a novel way to reward its leaders.
The fund will target crypto investment opportunities in the pre-seed and seed stages of development. Besides the GameFi, NFTs and infrastructure, dao5 is also targeting opportunities in decentralised finance (DeFi), and crypto-oriented social platforms.
The fund is looking to revolutionize the way members are rewarded for their contribution by introducing a governance token that will comprise fo the future DAO. its members will receive grants of the governance token in place of direct funding from venture capitalists.
According to the announcement, dao5 also intends to give its employees and advertisers governance tokens.
The fund is using governance tokens in place of direct VC funding to incentivise founder collaboration while diversifying risk exposure. All founders will have exposure to all the projects in the dao5 portfolio, thereby casting a wider net from a large group of thought leaders. The firm says this will bolster long-term success.
Commenting on the ultimate goal of dao5 and the fund’s guiding principles, founder Tekin Salimi said “the goal of dao5 is to explore a new model to bootstrapping a DAO by focusing first on talent and capital acquisition through venture investing, and second on growing the treasury value through leveraging the collective talent of the dao5 community.”
Before launching dao5, Salimi served a 4-year term (ending Feb. 2022) as a general partner at leading venture capital firm Polychain Capital.
A decentralised autonomous organisation is an organisation that uses a crypto-based voting mechanism to govern its operations. DAOs have become more popular in 2022 riding the explosive growth of NFTs and GameFi ventures last year.
Although some critics still question the efficiency in running a company that draws opinion from potentially hundreds of its members through a voting system, the insatiable appetite for decentralised systems continues to push more crypto-focused companies towards the DAO system.
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