Blockchains, a United States-based blockchain incubator and investment firm has acquired the German Ethereum dev team slock.it .
Slock.it’s team is around three dozen large, and is known for its creation of the now-defunct decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) project “The DAO.” Co-founders and brothers Christoph and Simon Jentzsch will reportedly join Blockchains as VP of technology and director of blockchain development, respectively.
During the first few months of the acquisition, the organizations will reportedly ship a line of open-source tools for Ethereum developers.
According to the organizations’ acquisition agreement, teams will reportedly work together on existing projects, such as Blockchains’ digital asset custody product and slock.it’s “Incubed,” which purports to connect Internet of Things (IoT) devices with the Ethereum blockchain. The organizations will however still stay in their separate offices inside the U.S. and Germany.
In 2018 slock.it deployed ‘The DAO,’ which was a decentralized property-sharing application similar to Airbnb following a $150 million crowdfunding. The DAO’s code however contained flaws which hackers exploited to funnel $50 million in ether from the project.
This undermined the confidence in both the Ethereum network as a hosting platform and the concept of DAO’s in general.