Ten years ago, a hacker exploited a reentrancy vulnerability in The DAO and walked away with roughly 3.6 million ETH. That single event fractured the Ethereum blockchain in two, spawned an entire smart contract security industry, and became the cautionary tale every crypto developer learns on day one.
Now the project is back, reborn as TheDAO Security Fund, with approximately 75,000 ETH, valued at around $220 million, being put to work protecting the very network it once nearly broke.
From wreckage to endowment
The original DAO launched in April 2016 as one of the most ambitious experiments in decentralized governance. Then, on June 17, 2016, an attacker exploited a reentrancy bug, a flaw that let the contract be called recursively before updating its balance, and drained roughly $50 million to $70 million worth of ETH.
What followed was one of the most contentious decisions in blockchain history. The Ethereum community voted to hard fork the chain and reverse the theft, effectively rolling back the ledger. Those who rejected the fork continued on the original chain, which became Ethereum Classic.
