'The DAO is back!’: Ethereum dev Griff Green to use unclaimed hack funds for new security fund

“The DAO is back!” longtime Ethereum developer Griff Green, who helped found The DAO, of infamous notoriety, said on Thursday. 

According to Green, funds that were initially sequestered to help refund “edge case” victims of the infamous 2016 hack of The DAO will now be redeployed “to support Ethereum security.” 

“We’re launching The DAO security fund,” Griff said in an interview with journalist Laura Shin, who wrote a book uncovering secrets about the infamous exploit of The DAO. “Basically, there’s a lot of money sitting in random contracts that were supposed to be returned to people affected by the hack.”

But about 20% of those funds — initially $6 million, now worth “somewhere around $200 million” — were never claimed, according to Green. Together with the Ethereum Foundation, the new security fund will help support the increasingly important Ethereum security sector. 

In particular, the new effort, called TheDAO Security Fund, will use about 70,500 ETH from an ExtraBalance Withdrawal contract and about 4,600 ETH worth of ether and DAO tokens from TheDAO’s Curator Multisig, "which has no clear claimants," according to a blog on Thursday. The funds will be staked, with the revenue used to fund operations. 

“The DAO is back … and that may scare some people, but this time it shouldn’t be so scary,” Green said, noting, somewhat ironically, that The DAO helped “kickstart the security industry in Ethereum.”

Green noted the new security fund is part of the Ethereum Foundation's wider "Trillion Dollar Security initiative." Allocations from the new fund will use "bottom-up mechanisms, such as quadratic funding, retroactive funding, RFP rank-choice voting," while the Ethereum Foundation’s Grants Management team will provide the eligibility requirements for each round.

In addition to spearheading initial ETH recovery efforts following The DAO hack and the crisis response, Green is the co-founder of Giveth, the Commons Stack, and DAppNode. Giveth will also play a role in allocating the security budget.

TheDAO Security Fund named Vitalik Buterin, MetaMask's Taylor Monahan, ZisK's Jordi Baylina, SEAL 911's pcaversaccio, and other prominent Ethereum security experts as curators.

The DAO hack

Launched as a crowdfunded venture capital fund that raised about $150 million worth of ETH, The DAO was hacked within weeks, leading to discussions about whether to rollback the chain to recover funds. 

The Ethereum community voted to fork the chain, leading to the main Ethereum chain today and Ethereum Classic, which was meant to represent the ideological view that “code is law.”

Green noted the event also led to increases in smart contract security, but that safety remains the “biggest problem of today." 

“There are so many phishing attacks and wallet drainings, I feel like we’ve been stuck in a rut for the last six years, not improving security for laypeople,” Green said.

This is a breaking story and may be updated.