Ethereum will redeploy about 75,000 Ether worth roughly $220 million from unclaimed DAO-era contracts into a long-term security endowment to fund audits, tooling and incident response.
The initiative formalises a plan set by early curators to use leftover funds from the 2016 DAO collapse to strengthen Ethereum’s defences, with most of the assets to be staked and distributed via community grants.
“The DAO really kick-started the security industry in Ethereum,”
Said Griff Green, co-founder of Giveth, adding that before the hack “there was no audit industry”.
Green said the new DAO Security Fund, stylised as TheDAO, will source about 70,500 ETH from the DAO’s ExtraBalance contract and roughly 4,600 ETH from a curator-controlled multisignature wallet.
Around 69,420 ETH will be staked to form a perpetual endowment while a smaller liquid portion will be held to address any remaining claims tied to edge-case contracts from the original DAO unwind.
Governance will rely on community-driven mechanisms such as quadratic and retroactive funding with independent operators running grant rounds rather than direct core developer control.
The original DAO failure, which led to Ethereum’s hard fork and the creation of Ethereum Classic, remains one of the network’s most consequential crises, with the new curator board including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, MetaMask researcher Taylor Monahan and ENS co-founder Alex Van der Sande.
At the time of reporting, Ethereum price was $2,811.46.