On November 24, 2015, James Levy received 40,000 ether from the Ethereum Foundation.
Worth roughly $35,000 at the time (and nearly $35 million today), the grant was an award for Levy's efforts to create an early smart contracting tool, and one of many meant to encourage work on what was then another nascent cryptocurrency in a sea of alternatives.
But three weeks later, the grant was gone, drained from his wallet in what might be the largest hack of a single wallet in the history of the ethereum platform.
The result of a weak passphrase, Levy has been silent on the matter ever since. But now, in order to fund a new venture called TapTrust, Levy is appealing to the hacker to return the funds, and failing that, he's turning to the community to implement what would entail a system-wide software upgrade, or hard fork, to do so.
https://www.coindesk.com/35-million-refund-developer-appeals-ethereum-hard-fork-hack-reversal/
