This needs to be confirmed, but on the live event they said the loss was due to strict requirements around proper storage of the document which the seller didn’t feel the DAO had satisfied. EDIT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29277129#29277637

This was an interesting ordeal. One comment on Twitter suggested we may have seen the start of a new phenomenon, “money swarms” [1], in which groups of Internet people can raise really large sums quickly for some goal. Bit of chaos energy to be sure.

FWIW I think at least some of the people involved in this feel a very genuine connection to what they were doing. People who get excited about DAOs right now differ a bit from the earlier extreme-libertarian crypto; they’re into the idea of active participation in government rather than no government at all. It’s not much different than the 2010 conversations that Occupy folks were having on Reddit, when that seemed like a big novelty.

1. https://twitter.com/co_eq/status/1459987329511145477?s=21