New DAO launches after $230M funding round including Peter Thiel, Alan Howard

BitDAO, a new decentralized autonomous organization, is launching after a $230 million funding round led by billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

BitDAO announced its DAO launch on Tuesday in conjunction with completing a private sale from initial partners led by Thiel, Pantera Capital, Dragonfly Capital and Founders Fund.

Other investors included billionaire hedge fund manager Alan Howard, Spartan Group, Jump Capital, Fenbushi and Kain Warwick of DeFi protocol Synthetix, among a total of more than 20 players in the decentralized finance industry.

Bybit, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency derivatives exchanges, is a major initial proponent of BitDAO, pledging recurring contributions to the new DAO at launch. The company specifically pledged a contribution of 2.5 basis points of its futures contracts’ trading volume to the BitDAO treasury, which is expected to generate over $1 billion per year based on this year's run rates, the DAO said.

BitDAO’s recurring contributions-powered treasury will be used to provide liquidity as well as to drive new protocols such as decentralized exchanges, lending and synthetics protocols. 

Related: DeFi exchange dYdX raises $65M in Series C fundraiser

According to the announcement, BitDAO also plans to support blockchain projects through grants, and aid existing and emerging projects through token swaps. 

A spokesperson for BitDAO told Cointelegraph that the DAO will hire both permanent and project-based teams, including advisers from Spartan and Dragonfly, and developers from Sushiswap.

The DeFi industry has seen a notable decline in recent months due to a major sell-off on the cryptocurrency markets. According to DeFi data provider DefiLlama, the market topped in mid-May at a total value locked (TVL) of around $158 billion. At the time of writing, DeFi TVL amounts to $128 billion.