TheDAO Is Back | Griff Green - Giveth, Unicorneth, TheDAO

All right, guys. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. We had a slight change with MC's. I'm Lionel Williams.

I'll be your MC here today. I would like to introduce a unicorn. No, literally a He's the co-founder of Unicorn ETH. His name is Griff Green. I'd like to give it up for you guys.

[applause] This is my horn right here. Uh yeah, I I not only did I co-ound Unicorn back in the day, I also did this thing called the DAO. And the DAO is a classic story of something that could only happen in crypto. Uh we were the largest crowdfund ever. Uh at that point in time, we raised $150 million and really proved the concept of capital formation in Ethereum.

And then we were very famously hacked pretty quickly. Uh we but in that hack, in a story, something that could only happen in crypto, we're able to recover all the funds, give everyone the money back, and somehow everyone involved actually made money, even the hacker. [sighs] And now things get even crazier. The DAO security fund is is being born and we have $150 million still. I don't know.

The the DAO is just a crazy story. Now, the way this happened, and let's just do a quick recap for people that may not have been hanging out in 2016. The Dow raised $150 million, but at the time that was 14% of all Ether in existence. So, this was 12 million Ether because Ether was only $12.50.

Then, the hard fork rescued the hack, right? Um, but the way the hard fork worked is that people who had Dowo tokens, they could get one Ether for every 100 DO tokens. But this only represented about 97% of the money that was put into the DAO. The other 3% was distributed by a team that I led. I I basically led the entire recovery effort for the DAO.

I mean the hard fork, I only coordinated a little bit with Ethereum Foundation. Let the let the nerds cook, you know, but for the for recovering the funds for that 3%. I managed that whole process and I also managed the process for the white hack group which rescued the other 70% that the hacker didn't steal. And when the hard fork happened, a parallel dimension opened up where the hack still happened and they called that chain Ether Classic. And so we had 10% of all Ether Classic and the hacker had 4% of all Ether Classic.

And so we recovered that ETC and sent it out back to people and that's how everyone made money. So fast forward 10 years, about 99.3% of the ether from the hard fork was claimed by Dowo token holders. The other.7% is like mostly people who lost their keys or people that are hodling DAO hoping for numismatic value.

Uh the other uh the other main recovery system was the curator multistake. We were able to distribute about 80% of those funds to the rightful owners and the White Hack Group distributed about 85% of those funds to people on ETC. Now, this $150 million, it's actually the Dow has way over $300 million in its current like contracts, but this 150 is coming from these edge case funds. This 6% of Ether that the Dow had. Why are we contributing to uh smart to security?

Well, that was always the intention when me and the other five volunteers that stepped up to manage the edge case recovery system like solutions. Uh we put it in a blog post, hey, after January 31st, 2017, the unclaimed ether will be sent to a non not for-profit entity to support smart contract security. Uh we never did that. So it it was it was a strong huddle though, right? A like good investment and and the reason it came about now is uh sort of out of necessity.

Uh first PC from Seal 911, co-founder of Seal 911. And if if you don't know Steel 911, if you ever get hacked, find the Seal 911 bot, talk to them. They'll talk you down and protect you. This is like probably the biggest public good Ethereum has to offer. It's like anyone who gets hacked, sealed 911 is is the 911 to call.

Uh well, he was talking to Fade from Wintermute and said, "Hey man, we need money." And Fed is like, "Dude, I saw $20 million in this multisig and uh maybe it was supposed to be donated to Ethereum Security, but never happened." Uh I think it's Griffs. You should talk to him. It's obviously not mine, but uh so then PC messages me.

I'm at Burning Man and I don't usually answer my phone, but dude, when the founder of Seal 911 calls you, you know, you're kind of scared shitless, so you you respond. Luckily, I wasn't hacked, which is what I thought. Um, and he he was like, "Hey, what do you think about this?" I was like, "We'll talk when I get out of the dust." Uh, and I started talking to other curators, the other five volunteers that were managing these funds.

And, uh, we were debating it because it's kind of it's kind of nice not to do anything, right? like just let people claim it and it's fine. I mean, I I want to support smart contract security, but it's a little scary. We didn't have a legal entity. We didn't have any of that stuff.

You know, 2016 was different times. And then the balancer hack happened. And all of a sudden, like AI supporting black hats and hacking old code, like the contracts that were holding at the time in August and and you know, Ether was like twice the price it is now. We were managing over $300 million in contracts that were written when Solidity was like a couple months old. Like there were definitely bugs.

We just didn't know what they were, but they're probably bugs. Uh and then uh not to mention we had six keys that were public for 10 years. And this is before MetaMask, okay? There were JSON files on our computers. It was super sketch.

and we needed to do something cuz doing nothing was actually a huge risk and we didn't have [laughter] a professional solution for managing $300 million worth of crypto. So what we did is we were like ah staking we can stake the ether earn rewards from staking and actually use that to professionally protect these systems the the funds and we'll have so much left over that we can actually create a security fund and that's how the Dow security fund was born. Uh what is security? Well it's all this stuff. There's a lot more than smart contract security that we need to support in this ecosystem.

So much money goes into audits, but what what supports wallet UX? What what helps threat monitoring? You know, we need to we need there's a lot that comes into security. Luckily though, we have a lot of money. Uh so it's pretty awesome.

Like we have the in the Dow curator multisig the 20 million that fade found like that was uh that that we have to start our fund, right? And we also have the big portion of funds actually comes from the extra balance withdrawal contract. These are this is uh withdrawals that we're keeping open. We're keeping all the withdrawals open. But this is the big pot.

This is people who paid extra during the Dow token sale. Uh they paid more than one ETH for 100 DO tokens. And so uh actually Nick Johnson tokenized those claims back in the day. And then he uh and then we have this withdraw contract that people can claim and they can still claim today. Uh those those claims are open and they're going to be open forever.

But to protect those funds, we removed most of them, all but 1300 Ether and started staking them. And that's where we're going to get most of the funds to fund Ethereum security. And of course, we're not alone in this. The Ethereum Foundation is our partners in crime like all the time. We're going to we're going to support work with them uh to actually support Ethereum Foundation to support uh Ethereum security.

And we're already working with them. Actually, in the same week, we both gave a huge donation to Seal uh those heroes that I just mentioned that are constantly helping people who are hacked and fished. They don't have a great funding stream because they're helping people who get hacked. You know, like you don't usually tip after you've been hacked. So, uh, we're we're providing the funding, but the heroes are on there in the front line.

And this is really the way I see how Ethereum security gets funds. There's executors out there, probably in this audience that are supporting in opsec and threat monitoring and all the cool things that we need to secure Ethereum. And then there's Ethereum Foundation and the Dow Security Fund um, funding these projects. But we're funding it in very different ways. So the Ethereum Foundation is kind of top down funding.

They pick the big bets. They have all the research and and they make their calls. We're trying to fund things from the bottom up. We're doing it the DAO way. You know, we're holding true to our name.

So we're going to work with the ecosystem to really figure out how do we fund these things? And there's a couple levels to that. The first level is of course the curators. So these are the people that we added to the curator multisig. They're pretty cool.

[laughter]

They're pretty good. Pretty good people. Uh, Vitalic, Taylor, Jordy, PC, ABSA, me and Lansky. We all have our specialties, but there's not I I could spend 20 minutes just talking about how what rock stars these guys are. [snorts] Um, but in the end, this is how funding will happen with the Dow Security Fund.

We'll have an application for round operators. These are people that are are building Dowo tooling. Think like a futurearchy project or deep funding or uh, you know, quadratic funding. someone who uh implements these kind of tools, they're going to apply and say this is how our tool works. And then those seven rock stars that I had on the on the screen before, they're going to decide the scope of the round like is it postquantum research or is it white hats uh you know they will decide the scope uh the budget how much money we're going to spend and which round operator we're going to use for that round.

We'll probably do rounds quarterly. uh the EF is going to work with us to do eligibility criteria and then the round operators will you know set up the round, market it, bring in people that apply you know there's going to be like the round operators apply but then the round operators have projects apply and uh the real crux of any kind of decentralized distribution is in the eligibility criteria. As long as we're good with eligibility criteria, wherever the money goes, it's going to good places, right? So this is another place where we really want support from the ecosystem, you know, experts, security partners. Uh we need help applying the eligibility criteria to make sure we only have good actors in the round.

And uh GTH is going to support in everything else. Gith is basically doing the round operations uh or sorry the operations for the DAO security fund and supporting to keep like a a solid thread around each round operator. And then of course we actually run the round. So uh running the round you know in in Dow style distributions there's voters there's people who like our goal is to stay above dumbar number above 150 stakeholders giving input into each decision and to do that I'm announcing something today uh it's security badges so this is for the top 200 Ethereum security researchers we're going to distribute 200 NFTts one person one vote you know not any of the crazy like you know monetary Dow stuff where you have a token that goes up and down. This NFT is not for trading.

It's allows us to get the experts the brains the big brains that know what we need in the security space to actually participate and decide where do these funds go. There's other benefits to having this NFT like if you happen to be a white hat and you hack a project with that coin just rescue the money. I mean, uh, well, hey, I got my NFT. Like, everyone will know you're a good guy. It'll be a cool NFT, and I wouldn't be surprised if people put this on their LinkedIn.

It's kind of cool to be labeled one of the top Ethereum security researchers. [snorts] So, that's uh that's what's happening. This is the Dow Security Fund and this is really a bottom up effort. That means I want to talk to you. I want to know what do we need to do in security?

Like, how do we make Ethereum better than the banks? You know, I got in here 10 years ago and I thought we were going to by now we would have something that we could offer to people that is better than a bank account. And and I think the big problem we have is it's just not safe enough. Everyone in here knows someone who is fished or hacked or lost money in one way, bought some stupid shitcoin that was a scam, right? Like I don't know very many people who have problems with their bank accounts.

If if we fix security, we can make Ethereum the financial backbone of society, maybe even the civil society backbone, the the infrastructure that we use for everything. And that's the goal of the Dow Security Fund. So, thank you guys so much for listening to my rant. [applause]