In 2016, The DAO launched. For many who were in the space back then, The DAO marked a cataclysmic shift for the future of (eventually all forms of) capital allocation and formation. A single pool of capital to rule them all. An intelligent engine, to fund innovation, from now until oblivion. But this vision never came to be. Far from it, it fizzled away before it began.

Since then, capital formation has continued to be one of the most successful use cases of blockchain. Despite all the fraud, rugs and poor execution, in 2017-2018, ICOs raised over $20B, and brought to the world projects like Gnosis, Synthetix and Chainlink. In 2021 and 2022, 10K NFT drops helped hundreds of projects raise huge sums of money ($16B in Q3 2021 alone!). At their respective peaks, capital formation from both ICOs and NFT sales were magnitudes larger than the amount of funding deployed by venture capitalists - giving us a hint of what permissionless capital formation could eventually look like.

But despite these efforts, today, mainly due to regulatory challenges, things have regressed back to the way it was before crypto: siloed, opaque, and centered around large capital gatekeepers.

But all is not lost.

Over the last year, Venture Club has been diligently building tools that enable compliant and “ICO-like” capital formation in order to reignite the original vision of The DAO, and shift capital formation firmly into web3.

Our aim is to allow ideas and capital to connect more easily, globally, and compliantly. We imagine a world where any app wanting to issue securities can easily do so, without friction, as easily as dropping an NFT is today. We imagine a world where Gary Gensler and Elizabeth Warren are happier people, because code is literally law. We imagine a world where global assets are liquid and composable, a world where ideas and markets move more quickly, where information is public and incentivized, and where those with knowledge and skill reign supreme.

Venture Club is building the funding engine for the knowledge era to accelerate the pace of innovation in all shapes and sizes, from venture to impact, in a permissionless way, from now until oblivion.

We are happy to announce we are finally live on Mainnet. For the time being, we are gated, but happy to add anyone who wants to play around.

Stay tuned!