Blockchains Acquires Development Firm Behind ‘The DAO’ Project

United States-based blockchain incubator and investment firm Blockchains, LLC, has acquired the German Ethereum dev team slock.it, according to a press release on June 3.

Slock.it’s team is reportedly around three dozen large, and is known for its creation of the now-defunct decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) project “The DAO.” Co-founders and brothers Christoph and Simon Jentzsch will reportedly join Blockchains as VP of technology and director of blockchain development, respectively.

During the first few months of the acquisition, the newly-linked organizations will reportedly ship a line of open-source tools for Ethereum developers. As per the organizations’ acquisition agreement, teams will reportedly work together on existing projects, such as Blockchains’ digital asset custody product and slock.it’s “Incubed,” which purports to connect Internet of Things (IoT) devices with the Ethereum blockchain. The organizations will continue to stay in their separate offices inside the U.S. and Germany.

In 2018 slock.it deployed ‘The DAO,’ which was a decentralized property-sharing application similar to Airbnb following a $150 million crowdfunding. However, The DAO’s code contained flaws which hackers exploited to funnel $50 million in ether (ETH) from the project.  

The subsequent fallout from the hack undermined confidence in both the Ethereum network as a hosting platform and the concept of DAO’s in general.

As previously reported on Cointelegraph, the Ethereum Foundation announced a re-release of its website in May, aimed at promoting the development and dissemination of community resources.

As per their official blog post, the website is intended to curate community-created content for developers as its core documentation, not to replace them with official write-ups:

“Ethereum.org’s purpose is to be a portal to those resources, not a substitute for them. Ethereum.org will prioritize linking to content created by the community, as opposed to hosting native content on every topic. Through community contributions, the website will evolve over time to always surface the best relevant material about Ethereum.”