The DAO development team is back with a new project, Charity DAO, that focuses on philanthropy

The Slock.it team is making a comeback.

Slock.it is the founding team of the infamous Ethereum (forked) investment tool The DAO. Recently, the team published a blog post, in which Slock.it CTO Christoph Jentzsch said that they had reorganized the team and announced a new open source project Charity DAO .

Initially, the DAO project raised a total of 1.5亿美元worth of ether and distributed voting rights to investors by selling tokens. However, a vulnerability in the DAO smart contract was exploited by hackers, causing the project to completely collapse and lose up to 6000万美元in funds.

The opposite of DAO, Charity DAO aims to bring transparency to the charity industry. If all goes well, the project will be used to increase the source of donations in the later stage.

Jentzsch told CoinDesk:

I would like to see the successful operation of a decentralized anonymous organization based on the ETH system, and charity DAO is the best way to achieve this goal in many ways.

DAO is a for-profit application that returns investors with dividends by investing in various projects. Charity DAO, on the other hand, is not a project designed to make profits. In order to prevent high-risk losses similar to DAO, Jentzsch said that he would temporarily limit the amount of funds raised and add a safety code.

But I hope that charity DAO can eventually achieve true decentralization and autonomy.

Slock.it stated in a blog post that the charity DAO project will cooperate with an organization called "Giveth", and donors will have full control over the funds and the right to fund the project.

Although the project is not a Slock.it product, Jentzsch said that most of the original DAO team is still involved in the charity DAO. Jentzsch is the leader of the project, but he still hopes to get more support and participation from outsiders.

Charity DAO operates in a very similar way to The DAO, except that the funds are used in a non-profit manner. Jentzsch wrote:

I hope we can use our knowledge, skills and past experience to build Charity DAO. This project is very professional.

A chance to turn things around?

The Ethereum community was also hurt after an unknown attacker transferred $60 million worth of funds following the collapse of The DAO.

Therefore, the launch of Charity DAO is likely to face significant challenges.

Jentzsch said in introducing the project that “trust in philanthropy is low” and that “philanthropy has a bad public image.” Both of these reasons could be a barrier for victims of the DAO attack to invest in this new project.

One member of the cryptocurrency academic community called on the community to disband the Slock.it team, but was unsuccessful, perhaps because of the company’s motto: fail fast and fail often.

Eventually, ETH developers returned the stolen funds to all DAO investors through a controversial hard fork, which also split the community and gave rise to ETC.

Jentzsch said The DAO was “a humbling memory” for him, a constant reminder of the unknown, adding that the experience may have helped him improve Charity DAO’s code.

I don’t think there is any other smart contract other than the DAO contract that has brought so much experience to people. We can use this knowledge and lessons to develop a better smart contract.