The DAO

The DAO was a decentralized autonomous organization and a form of investor-directed venture capital fund. Its aim was to use the ETH it controlled to support projects that would provide a return on investment or benefit to the DAO and its members, as well as benefit the decentralized ecosystem as a whole. On April 30, 2016, The DAO launched one of the largest crowdfunding campaigns in history, raising over $150 million from more than 11,000 enthusiastic members. On June 17, 2016, a hacker found a loophole in the coding that allowed them to drain funds from The DAO. In the attack, 3.6 million ETH were stolen, the equivalent of $70 million at the time. The Ethereum community controversially decided to hard-fork the Ethereum blockchain to restore approximately all funds to the original contract, which split the Ethereum blockchain into two branches, each with its own cryptocurrency, where the original unforked blockchain continued as Ethereum Classic.