Griff (TheDAO & Giveth) - TheDAO: 2026

Can you guys hear me okay? There it is. So, crazy thing. The DAO is back.

[applause]

I honestly can't believe how much action is happening in the DAO in 2026. It's so much that I have to just zoom through this thing. In 2016, the DAO raised $150 million. It actually proved the idea of capital formation in Ethereum. After that, ICOs became huge and and really the first major use case of Ethereum was born.

99% of that money has been claimed by hacked victim by the victims of the hack. And somehow we have $300 million left in DAO contracts. Okay, let's get into this. Why is that the case? So, as I said, the DAO raised $150 million in 2016 and actually ETH was pretty cheap, $12.

50 about. And this was 14% of the entire market cap of Ethereum. 14% of all ETH was in were in DAO contracts. We were famously hacked. I'll just go back.

So, we were famously hacked. A hacker came in stole $50 million out of the contracts. And I mean, this was early days Ethereum. Solidity was literally 8 months old. And there were bugs, lots of bugs in the DAO contract as we later found.

And to solve the problem, we initiated a hard fork. So, the Ethereum like community decided to make an irregular state transition that took all the money that was in the DAO. Because let me back up. The DAO was not like a normal hack where people can just take the money and send it to exchanges. The way the DAO hack worked was that all the ETH was locked for 35 days.

It couldn't be moved out of DAO contracts. So, we had 35 days to hard fork the network and rescue all the money. And it did. It took the hard fork took all the ETH in all the DAO contracts and put it in a special contract that allowed DAO token holders to claim it. The thing is DAO token holders only represented 97% of the claims.

There was another 3% that actually were called edge case funds. And I I basically led the cleanup effort from every angle. After the DAO hacker stole $50 million, I led a team to steal the other $100 million, right? I also led the team that managed that last 3%. This was the DAO curator multi-sig.

So, we wrote new contracts that solved the problem for the people who didn't have DAO token holders, but still needed to claim their ETH. I also led another team that really made the DAO hack, let's say, special. When the DAO hack hard fork happened, it was somewhat controversial. It was This was before, you know, Bitcoin Cash. This was the first hack of its kind.

And or the first hard fork of its kind. A very controversial hard fork where some people said, "Actually, the DAO hacker should keep his money." And there was effectively a rip in the space-time continuum of Ethereum where a parallel universe was created where people who didn't like the hard fork, they could run the old Ethereum clients and create another blockchain where the DAO hacker still had their money. And as another DAO hacker, my team, the white hat group, we also had 100 Well, about 10% of all ETC in existence. And so we rescued that money on the ETC chain, gave that back to all the DAO token holders, and then the DAO hack got to make history, a feat that I don't believe has still happened to this day where I think it's the only hack ever where everyone made money.

[laughter]

The DAO hacker had millions of dollars on ETC. DAO token holders got all their ETH back and also free ETC. And even the Ethereum Foundation, which didn't participate in the DAO in any direct way, they got airdropped a bunch of ETC. They were able to live off ETC for over a year not selling ETH. It was this crazy thing where like it was actually a really good thing for Ethereum that the DAO got hacked.

And 99.3% of the money that was rescued and is sitting in the hard fork contract has been distributed to DAO token holders. I think the rest, that 0.7%, that's about 80,000 ETH. That's mostly held by people who probably lost their keys or or people who are hoddling the DAO tokens for numismatic value one day.

Uh the DAO curator multi-sig, all these random edge cases, about 80% of that was claimed. So, that's almost about the same amount that's still in the hard fork contract. This is 75,000 ETH that's left unclaimed. And then the white hat group, about 85% of that is claimed. There's still about eight I think it's around I don't know what the price of ETC is, but it's somewhere around 10 to $15 million.

And all of these things are still claimable. If you OGs in the room may have participated in the DAO DAO crowd sale back in the day, like check it out. Maybe you have a lot of money to claim. Cuz this is $300 million now, all this money added together. And something new, something special in 2026 is happening.

We are actually taking the funds that are in these edge case contracts, staking them, leaving claims open, and using the revenue from staking to fund Ethereum security. And this is the DAO security fund. Why security? Well, number one, this was the original intention. Actually, when we created the DAO curator multi-sig and and got everybody together, it was like, "Dude, are we going to have to do this forever?"

And was like, "No, we're going to make a deadline. If you don't claim your funds by January 31st, 2017, then we're going to donate the rest to smart contract security." We just never did. And actually, we left claims open forever. Giveth has been helping people claim money this entire time, right?

People have DM'd me all the time. I helped someone rescue like $800,000 less than a year ago. So, the claims stayed open. We were all full of hot air. We just kept claims open forever, but that was to light a fire under people's asses, I guess.

Uh and why did this happen now? Well, PC from Seal 911, he was talking to Fade from Wintermute who's who was eight when the DAO was hacked, by the way. Um he somehow came across the blog post and told PC, "Hey, maybe Seal 911 could get funds from this $20 million sitting in the curator multi-sig. You know, they said they were going to donate it to Ethereum security. Try them out."

So, PC messages me. I was at Burning Man and I try not to respond to people in crypto while I'm at the burn. I lead a Burning Man camp. It's a lot of work. But when PC messages you, if you know who he is, you drop everything.

[laughter]

This is probably not good news. I don't think Ethereum security researchers understand the power of their voice or their DMs. I mean, I was scared. I thought Giveth was hacked or something bad had happened, but actually, it was just this. So, I told him, "$20 million, are you kidding me?

There's so much money over here in these other contracts. This is This has the potential to be huge." So, when I got out of the dust, I reached out to all the OG curators and they were almost impossible to get. I mean, I DM'd them on every social media you could imagine. And I couldn't find them.

But eventually, I got a hold of them and we started talking about this idea. Hey, do we want to support Seal 911? What do we do? And then Balancer got hacked. And that kind of put us in a moment because we had contracts that were written in 2016.

And we had token contracts and this old multi-sig that no one uses, is AI going to hack this? Are Is our Are our funds actually secure? It was At the time in October, just the edge case funds cuz ETH was double the price it is now. It was like $300 million. And we were managing it with a three of six multi-sig of volunteers.

So, uh maybe even our keys, they've been exposed publicly for 10 years. How do we know that we're not one wrench attack away from something seriously happening? So, we The option of doing nothing was out the door. We had to do something. And so, what we came up to it with it with Vitalik and a lot of the security guys was to stake the funds, keep claims open, but all the funds that are kind of in these at risk contracts, let's stake them and actually earn revenue from staking to fund the the actual more professional security monitoring and in tooling that you should have for $300 million as well as have a lot left over to fund the Ethereum security space.

What is Ethereum security? There's a lot. It's not just smart contract audits. In fact, audits are almost last on my list cuz a lot of funding goes to them. There's wallet UX, key management, there's infrastructure and my threat detection, incident response standards, L2 bridge security, core protocol security, AI agent security.

I mean, there's so many things that aren't even on this list that we are excited to support. And we're doing this not in a vacuum. We're very lucky to be working with the trillion-dollar security project in the Ethereum Foundation. They have incredible research. They know what the biggest needs are and we're working hand in hand with Frederick Hester and the whole crew.

Uh and to kind of explain like our role in this, uh we just both happen to fund Seal uh at the same time. So, Seal has a few initiatives and and they're really the heroes. Like Ethereum Foundation and the Dow Security Fund, we're not here to be the heroes. We're here to fund the heroes, to support the heroes. And Seal is probably the the obvious uh number one actor in this space.

They uh and in fact, if you are ever fished, if your Telegram gets taken over, I mean, I it's amazing how many people don't know about this service. Uh if if you have any issues, you need to DM @seal_911_bot on Telegram. For anything. If you know a vulnerability, uh if if your WhatsApp gets gets hacked, it doesn't matter. Just DM them.

They have all the connections. They're literally 911 for Ethereum. And so, our first action was actually to support them with a a direct grants. And the same week, so did the Ethereum Foundation. Uh but Ethereum Foundation does things generally top down.

They have this great research. They know what they need to fund from their perspective and they're doing incredible work. So, to fill in the gaps, the Dow Security Fund wants to do it bottom up. We're going to do it the Dow way. We're actually going to get lots of stakeholders from the industry, uh security experts, and the community itself.

We're going to try to get you guys to decide where our money goes. And we have a lot of money. So, it's going to be fun. Uh the Dow Curators, who we added to add extra security, uh they're it's basically a who's who of Ethereum security. I mean, this is the rockstars.

The biggest players in the space are leading this initiative. And the way it'll all work, so round operators, uh people who who are doing Dow tooling, they'll actually apply to distribute funding to security projects. And we are opening round operators We're opening applications for round operators right now. So, if you have a Dow tool that you are building, today is the day you can actually start to apply. Uh we want to work with you to distribute funds to Ethereum security projects.

Uh I'll show this QR code at the end again, but um these applications are going to be open for a long time. There's no rush here, but uh the the way it'll work is if you are creating a Dow tool that is either using really cool AI or has the ability to take in stakeholders of over 200 people to make a decision of funding distribution, you can work with us to fund Ethereum security projects. The Dow Curators, those amazing seven rockstars, right? These guys. Uh they're going to be the ones who actually decide which round operator we choose.

They also choose the scope of the round, like for instance, our first round is going to be broadly scoped Ethereum. Uh and the budget for the round. Like how much money are we going to spend? Uh then we actually work with the EF Grants Management team. This is uh Forest, Fede, and YJ.

We're mostly working with YJ in the EF to create the eligibility criteria. This is really critical. Who gets in the round and who gets off out of the round. This is one of the most important decisions and we're very excited to work with the EF on that. The round operators, of course, manage the round.

They market the round. They They create applications, whatever is needed. Uh and then the ecosystem, we want to work with you guys to actually figure out the edge cases. Maybe some people are tough applications, you know, like, oh, should we add them or not? Uh so, we're going to lean on ecosystem partners and if you are a security researcher or someone in a company in the space and you want to help us figure out who's eligible, who's not, please reach out because this is this is really tough work.

Uh and Giveth will coordinate everything for the round operators to make their life easy. You know, we're kind of the ones who are there every day uh and we will know what to do and we'll be the backstop for the round operators. Once the round is ready and everything's going, that's when external stakeholders decide uh who gets what money. So, they'll use the Dow tool that the round operator uh created. Okay.

So, I have so much to go into because that was just the backdrop. That was like, "Whoa, this is what the Dow is trying to do." I probably lost half of you already cuz it is kind of complicated. Um but we're already really active. There's so much going on and I don't have a timer here, so we'll see how over I go.

Um but first, we actually hacked the Dow again. Um hopefully it's the last time. Uh but Giveth actually led the hack. Uh I've been holding Dow tokens for a while just in case. And uh so, before we launched, we actually deployed some contracts that would create the split Dow, perform the hack, but we wanted to do it bef- we wanted to get a lot of work done before we launched so that we could hack safely.

Then we upgraded the contracts. We cleaned my Dow tokens. There's so many bugs in the Dow that you have to deal with. This is why the Ether that was in the Dow, there's about 50 Ether left in the Dow, it hasn't been hacked this whole time uh because there's so many bugs in that contract. It's very confusing to figure out.

Um and also, there's hardly any Dow tokens available. So, we had to do some crazy engineering. Major shout-out to Sem Breistles, uh who's been doing smart contracts for Giveth for a long time. And of course, Jordi Baylina. Uh he Those two and I kind of made this all happen and we were able to rescue 57.

83 for some reason you're one of the people who sent Ether to the Dow, hey, reach out.

[laughter]

We'll give it back. Everything is claimable. All these funds are claimable. Probably the coolest experiment that we started though is Eth security badges.

[sighs]

If you or anyone you know is just a rockstar Ethereum security expert and they don't have to be an auditor or white hat. If they are making Ethereum safer with their work, they should really look into applying to become an Eth security badge holder. Uh we have accepted 40 badge holders so far. All the rockstars. The list is incredible.

Uh and we're going to accept another 160. Uh 60 more next week. 100 on April 19th, Bicycle Day.

[laughter]

Um and it's really cool to be a badge holder. I think it's going to be a huge reputation. It's going to be something you can put on your LinkedIn even. Uh you'll get token-gated access to a Telegram room and really the most influence on deciding how our funds are spent. We're working with the Bonfida's AI team to do this really cool AI almost reflexive governance mechanism to accept the accept people.

Uh but I don't have time to get into that, but check out the Bonfida's AI crew. They are rockstars and their AI Dow tooling is very interesting. And the first round, and this is probably the biggest thing for action for everyone in the room, is uh this Ethereum security round. So, applications are open. We announced last week.

We are giving away over $1 million. This is the largest quadratic funding round that has ever happened. This is huge matching pool so that if you donate if you want to support a project with $5, you'll probably be directing hundreds of dollars of funds to that project. It's like donations equal voting in QF. And uh what's really cool though is it's open now and it's broadly scoped.

If you are doing anything in Ethereum security, uh if you have anything that is of a public benefit, put it in the round. And for us, this QF round is not about funding. I mean, of course, that's like our second KPI, funding the right projects. But the first the reason we're doing this round is because we want to see the projects uh get discovered. A lot of people have asked me, "What are you even going to fund in Ethereum security?

Isn't it just auditors? Don't they have money?" It's like there are so many open-source tools, so many newsletters, so so many interesting out things out there that you can use to make your project safer and we don't know about it. This round is going to bring it all into the light and so excited to see how many people are now using new tools to make Ethereum safer after this round. What else do we have planned?

Well, depending on the price of ether,

[laughter]

we're going to probably run around two more rounds this year. It'll be you know, probably in late summer, another one in in in the winter. And uh and maybe if ether goes to the moon, you know, we'll be running more rounds, but we got to let the rewards, you know, the staking rewards build up. And our main focus for 2026 is building out the community. The Ethereum security community has a huge opportunity in my opinion.

We are all working in our own projects trying to secure the things that matter to us. But we're spending so much money on securing our projects. And I think that we could actually, if we coordinate effectively, we can save a lot of money and have more impact by working together. So, we have the E security badges. This brings expertise into our space.

There's going to be other projects to bring the industry groups together, uh do round tables and things like this to just get people talking to each other and figuring out what projects we can co-fund together to make Ethereum safer and actually reduce the spend on security in this industry. And we will not be paying for your audits.

[laughter]

Everyone I mean, half the time it's a joke, half the time it's not though. People keep asking me, "Hey, will you pay for our audits?" It's like, no. We're we're funding things in rounds. So, we're not going to do any solo grants.

We're not the solution to your funding issues. Uh but we will be doing huge rounds and those rounds will be the solutions, maybe a solution to your funding issues. Okay. So many calls to action. First, if you're a round operator, this is the first time Oh, that one.

This is the first time you actually have a chance to apply. We probably won't do any rounds until late summer. So, don't expect a whole lot of comms here. You got some time to apply, like maybe till June. Uh the QF round though, that's got a deadline on April 15th.

So, make sure if you're building security tooling that you've applied by April 15th so that you can get in on day one of that round. It's going to be huge and the round will be open on the 21st, April 21st, and will go for 3 weeks. And then E security badges, you want to apply for that as soon as possible. We're doing We're accepting 60 more people next week. So, if you don't apply by Monday, you're probably not going to get in that next batch.

And uh the last batch the will be 100 people uh accept I think the deadline for that is April 17th. So, apply by April 17th or who knows when we're going to uh accept more people after that. Thank you guys so much. I know that we can do uh I mean, Ethereum is the most secure blockchain in the world, but it needs to be better. We need to make it safer than the banks.

We have the technology to actually make Ethereum safer than banks. We just got to execute and coordinate. And I'm so excited for the Dow Security Fund to lead that charge. Thank you.

[applause] [music]