Ethereum's Oldest Crisis Reborn as a $220 Million Security Fund

In brief

• Roughly 75,000 ETH left over from unresolved DAO contracts will be redirected into a long-term security endowment.
• The initiative formalizes a plan set by early Ethereum curators to use unclaimed funds for ecosystem defense.
• Governance of the fund will rely on community-driven grant mechanisms rather than core developer oversight.

Assets tied to the 2016 collapse of The DAO are being redeployed as a major crypto security endowment, nearly a decade after a hack that triggered Ethereum’s permanent split. Griff Green, a co-founder of Giveth and one of the original signatories overseeing the recovered DAO funds, said Thursday that he is launching the DAO Security Fund, which plans to deploy about 75,000 ETH, worth roughly $220 million, to bolster Ethereum’s security. Speaking on Laura Shin’s Unchained podcast, Green said the initiative reflects both the damage and the lasting impact of the DAO hack, which he described as a turning point for Ethereum’s security culture. “The DAO really kick-started the security industry in Ethereum,” Green said. “Before the DAO hack, there was no audit industry.”

The move turns one of Ethereum’s earliest and most damaging failures into a long-term source of funding for network security, as unclaimed assets from the DAO collapse, once a symbol of crypto’s immaturity, are repurposed to protect an ecosystem now securing hundreds of billions of dollars in value.  The new fund draws from unclaimed portions of the DAO collapse. While most investors were made whole through a contentious hard fork in 2016, a small share of funds remained locked in so-called edge-case contracts overseen by a group of curators. As Ethereum’s price has risen sharply since then, those leftover holdings are now worth more than the roughly $150 million the DAO originally raised.

Green said the fund will source about 70,500 ETH from the DAO’s ExtraBalance contract and roughly 4,600 ETH from the curator multisignature wallet. Most of the Ethereum, about 69,420, will be staked to form a long-term endowment, with staking rewards supporting security projects. A portion will remain liquid to address any outstanding claims. Funding decisions will be made through community-driven mechanisms, including quadratic and retroactive funding and ranked-choice voting, with independent operators overseeing grant rounds, Green said. While the original organization was known as the DAO, the new initiative is stylized as TheDAO. The 2016 DAO experiment collapsed after a flaw in its smart contracts allowed an attacker to siphon about $60 million in Etherem, prompting the network’s hard fork and the creation of Ethereum Classic. The episode remains one of the network’s most consequential crises. The new board of curators will include Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, MetaMask security researcher Taylor Monahan, and ENS co-founder Alex Van der Sande. “I want to see Ethereum reach a point where people feel it’s safer to store assets on Ethereum than in a bank,” Green said.