About 75,000 Ether tied to a 2016 hack will be staked to fund Ethereum security, officials said this week, converting to roughly $220 million in value. The move revives a promise made after the hack to use any unclaimed funds for smart-contract security.
Pseudonymous researcher Fade rediscovered the decade-old pledge and publicized it on X, where he said he proposed the funds’ reuse (wrote).
The original hard fork returned stolen funds to owners, but some amounts went into a wallet for edge cases, held by a small group of custodians. A near-contemporaneous explanation of that arrangement appears in a blog post published shortly after the hack (Ed. note: the post pledged unclaimed funds to a security nonprofit after January 31, 2017).
Griff Green announced the relaunch as the TheDAO Security Fund and published details in a new post (wrote). “TheDAO Security Fund will activate more than 75,000 ETH (over $220M) to strengthen Ethereum’s security,” he wrote.
The plan calls for most Ether to remain claimable but to be staked, with staking yield financing grants. The effort will be guided partly by the Trillion Dollar Security priorities, and will involve community voting and a leadership team including Vitalik Buterin and Taylor Monahan.
