Ethereum OGs Bring The DAO back in $220 Million Security Initiative

Ethereum community members on Thursday said they are launching a new fund to use Ether tied to unresolved DAO contracts from 2016 to support Ethereum security.

During a live interview on Unchained, Griff Green, an Ethereum community member and co-founder of Giveth, said more than 70,500 Ether (ETH) will move into a new entity called The DAO Fund. The funds come from unclaimed balances in smart contracts created after the 2016 DAO hack.

At current prices, the ETH is worth about $220 million. The group also confirmed the plan in a post on X shortly after the interview.

The fund will stake about 69,420 ETH to generate yield that will be used, along with roughly 4,600 ETH held in a curator multisignature wallet, to fund Ethereum security work, per a separate blog post by Green. “We will use open, bottom-up mechanisms, such as quadratic funding, retroactive funding, RFP rank-choice voting and more to allocate funding in rounds,” the blog post reads.

The initiative focuses solely on Ethereum security, including wallet safety, smart contract security, incident response, and core protocol work. “Security really needs support,” Green said in the interview. “We’ve seen phishing attacks, wallet draining and user security issues continue without major progress.”

Green further expressed that while he thinks Ethereum is one of the most secure networks, there is still a long way to go before he believes anyone should keep their life savings onchain. When asked what advice he would give to crypto users, he simply stated, “Get a hardware wallet.”

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, is involved in the initiative and will serve as one of the curators, Green confirmed. Other curators include Taylor Monahan from Metamask, Jordi Baylina from ZisK, and Pol Lanski from Dappnode.

The original DAO launched in 2016 and raised about $150 million, roughly 14% of all ETH in circulation at the time. However, hackers exploited the project soon after launch, leading to a hard fork that created Ethereum Classic. After the fork, a curator multisignature wallet handled unresolved claims.