Some key members of Ethereum, 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 ethers that have remained 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 for security grants distributed through DAO-like mechanisms, including quadratic financing, retroactive public goods financing, prime tenders, 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 bring in about $8 million a year at current rates.
The DAO hack 2016
The DAO was a decentralized governance experiment 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 generated widespread enthusiasm 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 oldest and most high-profile exploits. The breach sparked fierce community debate over how to respond, ultimately leading to a controversial network split, known in blockchain parlance as a hard fork.
The hard fork also divided the community, with those who rejected the rollback 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 standards, but also became a 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,” writes the project on X. “A decade later, we open a new chapter”
