Some key members of Ethereum, including co-founder Vitalik Buterin, are reviving one of the network’s oldest and most symbolic chapters: the DAO.
More than 70,500 ethers that have remained intact since the 2016 DAO hack, long considered Ethereum’s defining existential crisis, will be relocated to a roughly $220 million Ethereum security initiative, Unchained reported.
According to the report, $13.5 million will be allocated to security grants distributed through DAO-style mechanisms, including quadratic funding, retroactive public asset funding, ranked-choice RFPs, and other governance processes under a new entity, the DAO Fund.
The remaining 69,420 ETH will be staked to generate an endowment for Ethereum security efforts. The investment is expected to yield approximately $8 million annually at the current rate.
The move marks a symbolic and practical return to DAO-based coordination nearly a decade after the original experiment fractured the community and led to Ethereum’s historic hard fork.
“TheDAO is back,” the project wrote in X. “A decade later, we open a new chapter.”
