Former Polychain partner launches $125 million crypto fund with goal of DAO transition

Tekin Salimi, a former general partner at Polychain Capital, has launched a $125 million crypto investment fund called dao5 that will seek to provide early-stage backing for projects across several sectors in the cryptocurrency space.

Dao5 will commit to pre-seed and seed-stage investments in verticals like privacy tech, decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), and Layer 1 blockchain infrastructure, according to a statement on Wednesday.

Avalanche founder Emin Gün Sirer and Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon will serve on the advisory board. Other members of the board include Moonpay founder Ivan Soto-Wright; Ben Fisch, a computer science professor and founder of Espresso Systems; and CoinShares chief strategy officer Meltem Demirors.

While starting as a crypto fund, Salimi says dao5 will eventually transition to become a fully fledged DAO. As such, whenever dao5 invests in a project, the founders will receive governance tokens of the future dao5 DAO.

According to the announcement, the token grant forms an integral part of the DAO’s long-term plans. The token grant ensures projects that receive investments from dao5 have economic exposure to other startups in the fund’s portfolio, which means dao5 project founders will be incentivized to collaborate for the benefit of the DAO collective. This collaboration aims to serve as a form of risk diversification that also provides value to the projects under the dao5 umbrella.

The dao5 crypto fund will eventually transition to a full DAO around the year 2025. According to the announcement, the three-year transition period is to provide sufficient time to create a robust token and governance model for the DAO.

This tokenomics and governance model will focus on elements designed to improve participation and ensure streamlined incentives, the announcement added.