Now that the world's most successful crowdfunding ever has completely fallen apart, the question becomes how viable DAO structures can be. Even though The DAO has failed miserably, the concept is still very much alive. Lessons have been learned, albeit they were rather expensive ones for some people.

The DAO Is Done For But The Concept Is Not

It has become apparent The DAO – which is the world's largest crowdfunding campaign to date – is pretty much done for. Not only did assailants manage to abuse the code several times, but there is also a negative aftermath to deal with. Coinmarketcap has removed DAO tokens from their listings, and Poloniex advises users to exchange DAO for Ethereum.

There are a lot of valuable lessons to be learned from this US$150m screw-up, though. First of all, the crowdfunding campaign was a big success, but the creators also allowed investors to pull their funds back out if they had second thoughts. Some of them did, whereas others kept the faith in the concept.

Now that users can exchange their DAO tokens for Ethereum once again, most people will have lost little to no funds. It is sad to see this big future for cryptocurrency projects fail in the end, but the DAO concept is still very much alive today. Hopefully, we will not see another mega project such as The DAO V2 run by the same Slock.it team, though.

Granted, the failed project puts a spin on how useful a decentralized autonomous organization can be. Many people seem to forget this innovative technology is way ahead of its time, and there will be many kinks that need to be worked out along the way. That doesn't mean the entire concept is dead in the water all of a sudden, though, as a decentralized autonomous organization is still a viable future.

The biggest gripe people have right now is the Slock.it team themselves. Not only did they raise US$150m for a project they knew as flawed from day one, they are also tightly related to the Robin Hood Group. These self-professed white-hat hackers have been involved in retrieving Ethereum funds stolen from the DAO, as well as the ETC funds obtained in the process. However, they tried to dump the Ethereum Classic coins a few days ago, and were caught red-handed. These people have very little to no honest intentions, that much is certain.

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