DigixDAO: The First Major DAO Crowdsale — $5.5M Raised in Under 24 Hours (March 29, 2016)

On March 29, 2016, Digix Global launched what became the first major DAO crowdsale on Ethereum. It raised $5.5 million in under 24 hours — at a time when Ethereum's total market cap was around $600 million.

What it was: DigixDAO was a governance token (DGD) for a project aiming to tokenize physical gold bars on Ethereum. The crowdsale contract was deployed at block 1,239,208 and compiled with Solidity v0.3.0.

Why it mattered: - It was the first DAO-style crowdsale to raise serious money on Ethereum - It proved that decentralized fundraising could work at scale, months before The DAO - The speed of the raise ($5.5M in <24h) shocked even the Ethereum community - It directly inspired the wave of ICOs that followed in 2017

Independent verification: Developer Piper Merriam independently verified the contract code before the sale, establishing one of the earliest examples of third-party smart contract auditing.

The original community discussion happened right here on r/ethereum, with this thread documenting the reaction in real-time.

Contract: 0xf0160428a8552ac9bb7e050d90eeade4ddd52843

Full writeup with sources: EthereumHistory.com

This was just 7 months before The DAO — and in many ways, it was the proof of concept that made The DAO feel possible. We're documenting these pre-2017 contracts before the context disappears.