Some key Ethereum members, including co-founder Vitalik Buterin, are reviving one of the network’s oldest and most symbolic chapters: The DAO (decentralized autonomous organization).
More than 70,500 ether that have sat untouched since the 2016 DAO hack — long considered Ethereum’s defining existential crisis — will be redeployed into a roughly $220 million Ethereum security initiative, Unchained reported.
According to the report, $13.5 million will be allocated to security grants distributed through DAO-style mechanisms including quadratic funding, retroactive public goods funding, ranked-choice RFPs and other governance processes under a new entity, The DAO Fund.
The remaining 69,420 ETH will be staked to generate an endowment for Ethereum security efforts. The investment is expected to yield roughly $8 million annually at current rates.
The 2016 DAO hack
The DAO was an experiment in decentralized governance built on the Ethereum blockchain. It was designed as a fully autonomous vehicle where token holders could vote on proposals and allocate capital without traditional intermediaries, an idea that captured widespread excitement and drew one of the largest crowdsales in crypto history
But within months, a flaw in The DAO’s smart contract code allowed an attacker to drain $60 million worth of ether at the time, in what became one of blockchain’s earliest and most high-profile exploits. The breach sparked a bitter community debate over how to respond, ultimately leading to a contentious splitting of the network, known in blockchain parlance as a hard fork.
The hard fork also split the community, with those who rejected the rollback thus continued on the original chain, now known as Ethereum Classic, while the mainline chain carried on as today’s Ethereum.
The incident not only shaped Ethereum’s early governance and security norms but became a cautionary touchstone for smart contract audits, decentralized governance design and crypto’s philosophical debates over immutability versus intervention — themes that still resonate in the space today.
Fast forward to today, the move marks a symbolic and practical return to DAO-based coordination nearly a decade after the original experiment fractured the community and led to Ethereum’s historic hard fork.
“TheDAO is back,” the project wrote on X. “A decade later, we’re opening a new chapter”
