Vitalik Buterin sat down with the Epicenter podcast to discuss The DAO. The conversation centered on what was an investment fund with no barriers to entry. Investors contributed over $100 million wort
Vitalik Buterin sat down with the Epicenter podcast to discuss The DAO. The conversation centered on what was an investment fund with no barriers to entry. Investors contributed over $100 million worth of ether during The DAO's initial coin offering. A vulnerability in the smart contract code allowed a hacker to drain the funds. Ethereum's developers executed a hard fork that reversed the theft and restored ether to token holders. The fork split the network. Users who opposed it maintained the original blockchain, now known as Ethereum Classic.
When asked if the incident damaged Ethereum, Buterin said it had not. "First of all, I think Ethereum is definitely fine," he told the hosts. "Outside of a fairly kind of small group of people that are like really strongly into the sort of purity [or] morality of you know — if it's stained once then it's gone forever — even people who disagreed with the decision, many of them are kind of fine with it. I think over time they're starting to see that Ethereum governance is stabilizing more and more and that the project is continuing to move forward."
The purists remained with Ethereum Classic. Bitcoin's community also rejected the fork, and the split gave skeptics of Ethereum an alternate chain to support.
The hard fork forced a reckoning around smart contract security. "Whether it's better languages, whether it's better development environments, whether it's formal verification, it really was this kind of big, huge sign to the academic community that basically said, 'Look. This problem is real, and there's money at stake. And this is a place where you can contribute with the knowledge that you've been figuring out over the last thirty years — right here, right now,'" Buterin said. Universities began treating smart contract security as a core research concern.
The PR damage weighed on Buterin's mind more than the technical outcome. "The fact that our major crisis happened at a time when the community was well-coordinated enough to basically undo about 85 percent of the theft is actually a really lucky and amazing thing," he said. "Realistically, that's not an opportunity that we're likely to have quite so easily in the future."
That recovery depended on Ethereum's position at the time. A larger network with more diverse participants would have blocked consensus on the fork. For now, the incident read as a startup navigating growing pains. Bitcoin's established base never could have moved so fast.
