Kraken Offers Support for trading The DAO Tokens even as Criticism of the DAO gathers Steam

Only two weeks after the DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) stormed global headlines, digital currency exchange Kraken has started to offer trading pairs for the DAO tokens. The DAO, as the first Decentralized Autonomous Organization based on the Ethereum blockchain, was funded by thousands of investors in May 2016. Its current value is more than $120 million, making it one of the largest currency tokens in the digital realm.

Even as Kraken is offering support for trading in the DAO tokens, critics of the DAO are finding their voice amid the cacophony of support for it. There is continued discussion about the viability of the DAO, and its much-touted capability to become a vehicle of investment in third-party businesses.

The biggest cause of concern for the DAO investors and supporters is the call for a moratorium by prominent developer, Vlad Zamfir; he was also joined by Smartwallet CEO Dino Mark and academic Emin G¸n Sirer in issuing this call. They raised seven strategic issues with the DAO, that could cause even honest investors of the DAO to act contrary to their best interests. To avoid people falling prey to these issues, the authors have proposed a moratorium on investment proposals, so that they could first fix the issues and then allow people to invest in proposals before it. It should be recalled that the DAO is basically an investment fund, and its stakeholders can invest on proposals before them.

However, all this has not stopped Kraken from offering support for trading of the DAO tokens. The DAO tokens carry significant value with more than $120 million of market capitalization. Its stakeholders can now trade their the DAO tokens for seven different currency pairs: bitcoins, ethers, US dollars, Euros, Canadians Dollars, Japanese Yen and British Pound.

Kraken exchange also made a twitter post on 28th May 2016, which said:

“The DAO tokens @The_DAO_Project trading now live on @krakenfx”

Kraken was the first major digital currency exchange to offer support for Ether when it started to trade Ethers in August 2015. It was later followed by other major exchanges such as Coinbase, Bitfinex and Gemini in offering support to Ether.

Kraken has clarified that buyers and sellers of the DAO tokens will not be able to use dark pool and margin trading services.