A Venture Fund with plenty of virtual capital, but no capitalist

Olivier Stern, a 31-year-old French socialist with an appetite for risk, recently invested a third of his life savings — 10,000 euros, about $11,000 — in a cryptocurrency start-up that has no legal standing and runs head-on into regulatory obstacles, yet might very well upend the mysterious world of virtual investing.

The start-up, a sort of venture capital fund that calls itself the Decentralized Autonomous Organization, has essentially come out of nowhere in the last month and attracted about $152 million, at last count, from investors around the world like Mr. Stern — making it the most successful crowdfunded venture ever, by a significant margin.

The venture, like so many things…

Read the full article written by Nathaniel Popper on The New York Times

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