Christoph Jentzsch wrote the first lines of code for what would eventually become The DAO in the summer of 2015, he says, on a plane trip from the US to Germany.
The software, originally intended as a crowdfunding contract, evolved into the first large-scale ethereum-based project, quickly raising $150m worth of ether from investors to be distributed to other projects on the platform. However, the meteoric rise was met with an equal and opposite fall, as a still-anonymous hacker or hackers exploited a vulnerability in the code and confiscated tens of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency (estimates suggest around $60m at the time of the event).
That value now sits in what are called child DAOs, or 'Dark DAOs', where funds remain frozen to this day, under the control of unknown entities. At issue, is that on 27th July, per the rules of The DAO's original contract, this will change, and the perpetrator or perpetrators of the theft will be able to withdraw the drained funds.
Complicating matters is that unlike traditional corporations Jetzsch’s open-source codebase was written on the ethereum blockchain and free for anyone to use. No one has ever publicly claimed responsibility for the launch of this particular DAO that has come to be known simply as "The DAO", and no single person or group exists with the explicit authority or mandate to rectify the situation.
This means the task of cleaning up the mess has fallen largely to altruistic community members. Initially, two solutions were considered, though this has become more complex in recent weeks.
A soft fork that would have resulted in the blacklisting of the Dark DAO was discarded last month after a vulnerability was exposed. Still on the table is a hard fork that would roll back the blockchain and restart the distributed ledger with the funds in question in a new smart contract.
This new contract is being designed so it can’t do anything except let the original cryptocurrency owners withdraw their funds.
But any changes to the organization's code must be agreed upon by consensus from the members. This means addressing the nearly $60m worth of drained ether is not only a matter of financial urgency for the 23,000 addresses who bought voting rights, but an exercise in problem solving in a totally new technology's experimental form of governance.
More:
http://www.coindesk.com/author-daos-original-code-minimize-regulatory-backlash/
