From 2016 hack to $150M Endowment: the DAO’s second act focuses on Ethereum security

In the summer of 2016, the Decentralized Autonomous Organization, known as the DAO, became the defining crisis of Ethereum’s early years. A smart contract exploit siphoned millions of dollars’ worth of ether ($ETH) from that initial project, and the community’s response — a contentious hard fork to recover those funds, splintered the original chain from the current one, leaving the old chain behind, known as Ethereum Classic.

The DAO was once the largest crowdfunding effort in crypto’s history, but faded into a cautionary tale of governance, security, and the limits of “code is law.”

Now, nearly a decade later, that story has taken an unexpected turn. What was lost, or rather, left untouched, is being repurposed as a ~$150 million (at today’s prices) security endowment for the Ethereum ecosystem.

The endowment, known now as the DAO Security Fund, will stake some of the 75,000 dormant ether ($ETH) and deploy the yield through community-driven funding rounds to support Ethereum security research, tooling and rapid-response efforts, while keeping claims open for any remaining eligible token holders.

At the center of this story is Griff Green, one of the original DAO curators and a veteran of Ethereum decentralized governance.

“When the DAO hack happened [in 2016], obviously, I jumped into action and basically led everything but the hard fork,” Green said of assembling the white hat group that rescued funds on the original Ethereum chain. “We hacked all these hackers. It was straight up DAO wars”.

That effort, alongside others, helped salvage funds that might otherwise have been lost forever.

At the time, the hard fork restored roughly 97% of the DAO’s funds to token holders, but left a small fraction, roughly 3%, in limbo. These “edge case” funds came from quirks of the original smart contracts: people who paid more than expected, those who burned tokens to form sub-DAOs, and other anomalies that didn’t cleanly map back.

Over time, that leftover balance, once only worth a few million, ballooned into something far more significant due to ether’s [$ETH] appreciation. “The value of the funds we control has grown dramatically… well over 75,000 $ETH,” a blog post for the new DAO fund states.

Green and his fellow curators have spent the last decade quietly helping people recover funds and managing these residual balances. But as he tells it, the landscape has shifted. “Six volunteers were securing $300 million with decade keys. It didn’t make sense,” he told CoinDesk in an interview. “With all these AI hacks and stuff, we just got kind of scared.” Their old security model simply is no longer fit to guard nine-figure sums, Green shared.

Rather than let these funds sit idle in perpetuity, the team has decided to stake the $ETH and use the yield to fund Ethereum security initiatives, honor claims indefinitely, and professionalize governance and key management. “We can stake these funds, keep claims open forever, and use the staking rewards to fund Ethereum security projects,” Green explained.

The fund will distribute capital through decentralized mechanisms such as quadratic funding, retroactive public goods funding, and ranked-choice voting for proposals.

‘Financial backbone of the world’

For Green, the revival is also personal.

The DAO hack was Ethereum’s first existential test, exposing how experimental the ecosystem still was. Nearly a decade later, he argues, the industry remains vulnerable in different ways.

“MetaMask, hot wallet keys, just any kind of private keys on your daily driver computer is probably the main fuel for a whole cyber crime industry,” Green said. “The fact that we have hot keys with billions of dollars sitting on like 10,000 laptops spread out throughout the world has an industry of cybercrime.”

The persistence of hacks, phishing schemes and smart contract exploits frustrates him. “Not only amazes me, it disappoints me and frustrates me,” he said, describing the state of Ethereum security today.

That urgency is shaping how the new fund will operate. Unlike the Ethereum Foundation’s more top-down grantmaking process, the DAO Security Fund is designed as a bottom-up experiment, allowing participants in the DAO to decide how to distribute funds. Round operators will apply to distribute funds, security experts will help set eligibility standards, and staking rewards will provide a renewable pool of capital.

If Ethereum is to become what many believe it is, the core infrastructure for global finance, Green says security must come first.

“Ethereum is at the cusp of being the financial backbone of the world, if it fixes security,” he said.

The DAO Security Fund, in Green’s view, is therefore both a continuation of unfinished work and a forward-looking vehicle for safeguarding Ethereum as it scales.

Read more: Ethereum OGs revive the DAO with $220 million security fund, Unchained reports