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 has sat untouched since the 2016 DAO hack — long considered Ethereum’s defining existential crisis — will be redeployed to a roughly $220 million Ethereum security initiative, Unchained reported.
According to the report, $13.5 million will be allocated for security grants distributed through DAO-like mechanisms, including square 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’s security efforts. The investment is expected to yield about $8 million annually at current exchange rates.
The DAO hack from 2016
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 attracted 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 split 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 continuing on the original chain, now known as Ethereum Classic, while the main chain continued as today’s Ethereum.
The incident not only shaped Ethereum’s early governance and security norms, but became a cautionary touchstone for smart contract auditing, decentralized governance design, and crypto’s philosophical debates about 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 split the community and led to Ethereum’s historic hard fork.
“TheDAO is back,” wrote the project on X. “A decade later, we open a new chapter”
