A new DAO called Krause House wants to buy an NBA team and has raised $1.7 million in ethereum so far

• A new DAO has begun raising money to purchase a professional basketball team.
• The Krause House DAO, named after late Chicago Bulls general manager Jerry Krause, has raised $1.7 million ethereum.

A new DAO wants to buy — not the US Constitution — but a professional basketball team.

The DAO is called Krause House, named after the legendary Chicago Bulls general manager Jerry Krause, $4. Within a week, it's already raised $1.7 million in ethereum. It's a big number, but also far from the price tag on teams like the the Utah Jazz, which sold for $1.6 billion in December 2020, Decrypt said.

A DAO, an acronym that stands for decentralized autonomous organization, $4 who decide to form a group with a common purpose, like creating a social club or crowdfunding to make a purchase. The rules of that group are then established and enforced with an underlying code that runs on the blockchain. The group often even mints its own cryptocurrency.

Just last week, the concept of a DAO shot into the mainstream when one called $4 attempted to buy one of the original copies of the US Constitution. But it was outbid by $4.

That group's rallying cry was WGBTC, short for "we're going to buy the constitution." For Krause House, it's "WAGBAT," meaning "we're all gonna buy a team." The new DAO started its fundraise last week by selling NFTs, aka non-fungible tokens, to act as a type of admission ticket to the group's Discord server and an allotment of KRAUSE tokens, Decrypt said.

On its website, it says it's "a community of hoop fanatics that are just crazy enough to buy an NBA team" but also noted it may not be able to achieve its goal.

In a message to Insider, the DAO said it's on a "very pragmatic path to achieving" its vision and is experimenting with basketball opportunities with the G League (the NBA's developmental league), the NBL (Australia and New Zealand's pro league), and the WNBA, so it has a proven track record when it's eventually able to submit a bid for a team.

"This is not a question of if, it's a question of when," the group told Insider.

On its site, it said NBA franchises shouldn't be limited to billionaires, "but rather a movement of individuals that want to be a part of the greatest professional league in the world."