DAO Hack 10 Years Later: 75,000 ETH Staked as $130M Security Fund

About 75,000 recovered ether has been staked as a permanent security endowment roughly ten years after The DAO hack and Ethereum’s 2016 hard fork. At current prices the staked ETH is valued at about $130 million. The endowment will use staking yield to fund security research, developer tools and incident response.

On June 17, 2016, an attacker exploited a reentrancy bug in The DAO’s splitDAO function and drained about 3.6 million ETH from the project. The exploit left a 28-day withdrawal delay in a “child DAO,” and a group of developers moved remaining vulnerable funds into safer contracts. On July 20, 2016, at block 1,920,000, the network executed a hard fork that reversed the theft on the upgraded chain; the original chain continued as Ethereum Classic with the hack remaining on its record.

Soon after the attack, a commitment was made that any rescued ETH left unclaimed by January 2017 would support Ethereum security work. That promise remained unused until a researcher flagged the post and Griff Green, The DAO’s former community manager, announced The DAO Fund in January 2026. The fund placed about 70,500 ETH from an ExtraBalance contract and roughly 4,600 ETH from The DAO curator multisig into staking contracts, totaling the roughly 75,000 ETH now held as an endowment.

Seven curators oversee the endowment, among them Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and former MetaMask security lead Taylor Monahan. The fund coordinates with the Ethereum Foundation’s Trillion Dollar Security initiative. Fund yield will finance grants for security research, tooling and incident response work.

The DAO Fund ran its first allocation, the Ethereum Security QF Round, from April 23 to May 14. The round awarded more than $1 million in ETH to 134 projects selected from over 250 applicants. Market maker Wintermute contributed $200,000 to the matching pool. When the fund was announced in January, the staked 75,000 ETH was worth more than $220 million; with ETH near $1,750, the stake is now valued closer to $130 million. Projected annual yield from staking is estimated at several million dollars to support grants and programs.

Ido Ben-Natan, chief executive of wallet-security firm Blockaid, described the phrase ‘code is law' as ‘not wholly tenable' and noted that limiting the fund to dormant, already-recovered assets keeps it from reopening transactions settled in 2016. Marcin Kazmierczak, co-founder of oracle provider RedStone, said a permanent, self-funding pool replaces one-off fundraising but moves trust to a small group of curators and a grants process. He pointed out that recent large losses in crypto have often resulted from operational failures-stolen keys, social engineering and compromised signing interfaces-rather than the smart-contract bug that caused The DAO exploit. Chainalysis reported that crypto lost $3.4 billion to hacks in 2025, including a $1.5 billion breach at Bybit in February 2025.

The 2016 exploit is credited with accelerating the adoption of smart-contract audits and formal verification. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s 2017 DAO report concluded that DAO tokens could qualify as securities, a finding that has influenced later enforcement. The 2016 hard fork remains a defining event in Ethereum’s history.