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- [00:00]
A
I feel like crypto safety could use a huge boost and I'm excited to, you know, coordinate a major effort around that. I really want to see the Dallas Security Fund help Ethereum come to the place where people feel that it's safer to store assets on Ethereum than in a bank.
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B
Hi everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no HO resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Thanks thanks for joining this live stream. Before we get started, a quick reminder. Nothing here on Unchained is investment advice. This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and my guest and I may hold assets discussed on the show. For more disclosures, visit Unchained Crypto.com.
- [00:46]
C
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B
Today's guest is Griff Green, co founder at Giveth and the DAO Security Fund. Welcome, Griff.
- [02:19]
A
Hey, thanks for having me, Laura.
- [02:21]
B
So you and I know each other quite well. You were a prominent character in my book because you are one of the main people involved in the DAO and which is the attempted decentralized venture fund in 2016 that initially raised $150 million but then got hacked, thus creating Ethereum's first existential crisis. And that led to Ethereum's first contentious hard fork and the creation of Ethereum Classic. But today you have a big, dare I say huge announcement that we are revealing exclusively here. On Unchained. And it involves the DAO that. Sorry, it involves the funds that remained from the dao, plus Vitalik as well. So tell us your news.
- [03:05]
A
Yeah, I mean, the DAO is back and that might scare some people, but this time it shouldn't be so scary. In fact, you know, I would, I think it'd be an easy argument to make that the DAO really kickstarted the security industry in Ethereum. You know, after the DAO hack. Before the DAO hack, there was not an audit industry. After, there were a lot of smart contract audits, a lot of firms looking to support the smart contract audit industry. And so it almost makes sense that the DAO is now really going to be focused on security. So we're launching the Dao Security Fund. Basically there's a lot of, surprisingly, there's a lot of money kind of just sitting in random contracts that were supposed to, that were tried to be returned to people who were, who were affected by the hack. And this is excluding the main withdrawal contract that the hard fork made. So the hard fork took all the ether that was in the dao and gave it back to DAO token holders. Except the claims weren't that simple. And there was a multisig that I joined that was enshrined by the hard fork and to cover the edge cases. And those edge cases amounted to about $6 million at the time. And most of that money has been claimed, over 80% of it. But now the leftovers are actually worth somewhere around $200 million. And we are going to use those leftovers to secure the funds. We're going to stake them, and then we're going to use the revenue to actually support Ethereum security.
- [04:50]
B
Yeah. So in a moment we're going to get into all these details about this new fund, but I'm just so curious to hear some reflections from you because it's been a decade since you helped build the dao. You then spent a few months as a white hack helping to rescue funds for people. And that job kind of like completely took over your life for a few months. And it basically was this unpaid thing you were kind of doing 247 for people who were kind of upset with you and also not necessarily always grateful. And I just wondered, when you reflect on that period in your life and you look at how now these remaining funds in the DAO are being turned into this Ethereum security fund, how do you feel?
- [05:41]
A
I mean, it's a definitely a full circle moment and I'm very grateful for that time. And to be put in such a. Interesting position. It was, you know, it was a very exciting, exciting time. And while it wasn't easy and a lot of people were mad at me for, you know, helping launch the DAO and doing, you know, we, you know, collecting so much ETH and then having to be hacked, there was obviously, you know, a lot of people were affected by that negatively. Especially if you sold your DAO tokens.
- [06:14]
B
Yeah. And also there was some controversy. Yeah. About the way you guys were sort of planning on doing it. Which. Yeah. But because there was this moment where you thought you were going to sell. Yeah. The Etc and give them back eth. And so there was some controversy about.
- [06:31]
A
The way the White hat group. Oh, 100%. And you know, when I look back, I was, I'm actually, and even to this day, I'm always really grateful for the people that challenge us to make it better, even if they don't always bring it up a nice way. You know, I think if you're open minded to advice and, you know, the influence of other people and you. And you take it as constructive and you end up with a better outcome and you know, with what you're mentioning, like as part of the White Hat group, we rescued a bunch of ETC on the Ether Classic chain and gave it back to everybody. Which is really an interesting thing because the whole hard fork created this weird DAO hack situation where everyone got their assets back, everyone got their Ether back and then a new asset was created that everyone got back to and even the hacker had the new asset. Etc. So I think the DAO hack is like the only hack where everyone got their money back and everyone made money on top of it, which is kind of crazy to me. But as long as you didn't sell your DAO tokens, you were. You ended up pretty good from the DAO hack. But. But yeah, you know, we made mistakes along the way, a lot of them. And. But luckily none of the mistakes that we made were so critical that they couldn't really be undone or fixed. And even for instance, what you're seeing with the Ether Classic, we were holding the Ether Classic, but at the time we didn't know if Ether Classic would exist the next week. So we thought it would be a good idea to sell it into Ether because that was the asset people put in and all that. And so that's what we started doing. But then Poloniex and Kraken froze our accounts and we ended up going back on that. But some of it we did convert. And what's really funny is that when we sold it back into Etc. We got more etc than we started with. So we made money like selling some etc and then buying it back and we gave the extra to everybody. So, you know, that's what I mean. Like, sometimes things don't work out the way you think they will, but they, at least in my life, I feel like I'm very blessed. They've always worked out better than I could have expected.
- [08:55]
B
Yeah. And so I'm sorry, I interrupted you. So I was asking you, like, how does it feel to be turning that whole incident into something that generates this $200 million fund for Ethereum security?
- [09:09]
A
You know, in many ways it feels necessary. Like, I know that's not maybe the best feeling to answer your question. Like, I'm grateful to be in a position where I can make this happen. But also the way, you know, in 2016, 2017, there was a big security push and a lot of things got fixed with smart contracts. And I would say even though we're seeing some more recent hacks and we can talk about that soon, that that was actually a major piece of information that made this fund happened. Security. Some of the security things in Ethereum and in crypto in general really need support. Wallet ux. You know, like, there's. There's just so many phishing attacks and, and so many wallet draining and things are. I don't know, I feel like we've been kind of stuck in a rut for the last six years even, but not making major progress on improving security for the normal layperson to feel comfortable putting their life savings into. Into the crypto assets. And so I feel like, you know, the Dao was a really pivotal moment for Daos for smart contracts, for security in Ethereum and Ethereum itself. And whole idea of this technology is coordination technology. And now I'm really excited to bring it into a new space where we can focus on the biggest problems of today, which is really safety. I don't feel like. I feel like crypto safety could use a huge boost, and I'm excited to coordinate a major effort around that.
- [10:40]
B
And so earlier you talked about how when the DAO debacle got resolved, that everybody kind of made, you know, actually even more money potentially. So how is it that there is money that remains in the DAO that you can use for these security initiatives? Like, where does the money that you have come from and explain what the different buckets are that are available? Sure.
- [11:07]
A
So when the hard fork happened, maybe I'll even go back A little further. So the way the dao was designed, a little tidbit. It wasn't supposed to be called the Dao, that was a placeholder name. The dao was supposed to be the name of the dao was supposed to change after the dao got its legs under itself. We were going to vote to change the name of the Dao, right? That was a placeholder name. We got stuck with it. One of many mistakes along the journey. But some of the other names were Genesis Dao, Mother Dao, you know, because the way the dao worked is that anyone who was in the dao could actually spawn off a sub dao. Like we call them a child dao using the actual function that was used to hack the dao, the split dao, right? So it formed hundreds of of daos after it. And when the hard fork happened, it took the eth out of every contract associated with the dao and there were hundreds. So it took all that eth and it put it in one place and it said Dao tokens can claim 0.01 ETH for every DAO token, right? A hundred Dao tokens can claim one Ether. And also, if there's any Ethereum, if there's too much ether in this contract, for the amount of Dao tokens that are out there, the Dao Curator Multisig, which I joined to manage this process, can pull that money out of the main withdrawal contract and figure out what to do with it. Because it's somebody's money, right? And so that was our mission post hard fork. And that was about 3% of the funds during, at the time. So about 3% of the money was edge case funds. And of that 3%, the two biggest buckets were people who had child daos, right? They, they had split from the Dao and they whatever. That was like 120,000 eth at the time. And now there's only about 2 ether left unclaimed. So that was pretty good because all those people who split from the Dao, they're pretty technical. They even, almost all of them even got their money off of etc, which is no easy feat. The tooling around Ether Classic is not the best. So that was a very successful recovery effort of 120,000 ETH. And then the other big bucket was extra balance. And so during the token sale for the Dao, the Dao creation event, as we called it, during the second half of the sale, the price slowly increased, so people paid more than 1 ETH for 100 DAO tokens. Tokens until the point where they paid 1.5 ETH for 100 DAO tokens. And all that excess we called the extra balance. And it was even during the Dao times, it was in its own contract, and that was about 344,000 eth. So of that eth, about a little under like 79.97% has been claimed. And that is by far the largest bucket. This 20% of 344,000 eth. Whatever, it's about 70,000 eth. That's unclaimed, and that is by far the largest bucket. And so then there's all these other small buckets. So people who sent ETH to the DAO in a variety of ways, maybe they were trying to hack the DAO and they paid a proposal, or they paid a proposal deposit for something, or they sent ether to a reward contract. The DAO hacker actually sent a bunch of ether to the reward contract that we were able. That is part of this ether. There's a. There's just a bunch of random things that people could have done. A lot of people, actually, probably the biggest, next, next biggest bucket, it's about 3900e worth, are people who sent DAO tokens to the DAO contract itself. And this is sort of common. Not as common as it used to be, but it's sort of common. It used to be very common where people would copy and paste the token address and then send the money they want to send to that token address as a mistake. And so that's this other. Well, it's like 390,000 DAO tokens. And we helped lots of people recover their funds from that, but not everyone has claimed it. And then there's another like 700 about eth that is just a variety of things. Like I said, people sending ETH to the contract. You know, I feel like over the last 10 years, people just. I've seen people do crazy things. You know, there's something about crypto being like a push tool, not a pull tool. You know, like a credit card, you have to pull money out. But as with crypto, it's a push thing and people just push their money in the, in wrong places, you know, and so sometimes some people sent DAO tokens to the withdraw contract instead of calling the functions in the withdrawal contract to have the DAO tokens be pulled and then sent ETH and things like that. And there's just. People just sent ETH to the weirdest places, right? So that's like the leftovers, which is about 700 ETH that haven't detailed.
- [16:26]
B
So before we go into like where each of those buckets are going to go, I just have a quick question. So for the dao tokens, how are you converting that to ETH or to another asset?
- [16:40]
A
Well, the dao tokens, the main withdrawal contract we are not touching, we can't touch. I mean it's enshrined as part of the protocol. Basically it's a contract that will forever collateralize. A hundred dao tokens will always be worth one eth. You can always send them in there. It's like a floor price. It's like wrapped ether. Every wrapped ether has an ether backing it and every hundred dao tokens by design of the withdraw contract has one ether backing it.
- [17:11]
B
So but I thought you said in the curator multisig or something that you have a bunch of dao tokens. So how do you, so do you just send when you want to generate value from that, you send that to the withdraw contract to get one eth or.
- [17:25]
A
Yeah, we could. We're going to hold on to them because what if someone wants to claim them? And it, you know, I learned with the ETC stuff you don't convert assets that are, you know that you might want to return back to people, they don't like that. So we're going to hold, we're just going to hold that, that those dao tokens for a long time and, and then we're also, and, and if people don't claim them, then maybe one day we'll do something with it. But we have no actual plants on that. We believe we can get most of our money from staking the extra balance contract and has so much ether in it and we have a bunch of other ether as well. And so we'll hold the dao tokens for a while and then we'll make most of our funds funding for our, our operations just by staking all 69, 420 ETH.
- [18:18]
B
Yeah. So out of the 70,500 in the extra balance you're going to put 69,420 very crypto number into staking and then that's how you'll fund the security grants is simply from the revenue generate. Okay.
- [18:37]
A
So yeah, and we're also going to put some of the other eth we have on top of it to make that 69,429 number.
- [18:44]
B
Okay, got it. So the, the kind of like upshot is that for anybody who had money in the dao that they didn't ever claim. There's no scenario in which they will not be able to claim those funds even like 10 years from now.
- [19:02]
A
Absolutely. Claims are open indefinitely. We, we will always be supporting claims and it's pretty easy to do because honestly after 10 years and I've tried, we've tried a. Over the years and I've actually tried really hard, especially lately going through all the people who, we can find all the addresses that are claimed that can claim this extra bounce and I, we, most of them are dead addresses. They have some assets in them but haven't been used in 10 years, you know, and they just, they, I, I can't imagine they'll come back and claim in the last four years about 700 ETH has been claimed that and we have 75,000 ETH. So that's less than 1% of this over the last four years. I hope that by doing this actually and talking with you and making a big promotion, actually someone will be like, wait a second, I had money in the. I'm. I need to go get that. You know, it'll, it's probably worth a lot now. I mean, doubt the, the ether is up 500x since the Dow. If you had $1, it's worth 500. If you had $1,000, it's worth $500,000. You know, so people have come out of the woodworks over the years over these price accelerations and I'm hoping that actually by promoting it with you and all this work that we can be doing a good job is as you know, unofficial like stewards of these funds to like get people take it back. Because, you know, that was the goal in the first place and we still want to continue to maintain that goal. But yeah, okay.
- [20:48]
B
All right, so now let's talk about the security grants. What's the process you're going to use to award the security grants?
- [20:56]
A
Well, we really want to stick to our guns with the Dao and live up to the name of the Dao. So we're going to focus on DAO style distributions instead of just, you know, we have an incredible group of curators that are, that absolutely could probably just pick and choose security projects. But instead what we're going to do is we're going to pick and choose security distribution methods. So like for instance, retro funding, quadratic funding, conviction voting, maybe an RFP ranked choice voting and do something that, you know, supports the DAO ecosystem and supports the community and collective decision making. Because I feel like the DAO space is actually really at a low Point, probably the lowest. I mean I'm a dao guy, I'm in all the dao, I'm in so many daos and I have like, you know, my heart is really here in the dao industry more than anything and it just, right now there is not a lot of interest in using daos. And for me I could care less if corporate governance wants to be managed by a dao. I want to see us derive actual bottom up decision making tools that can be better than governments. You know, I mean there's a, there were three revolutions last year and that were in serious countries and there's going to be more this year. Looks, you know, there, there's likely to be several more this year and more and more and I can't wait for us to have the tooling where the people could actually replace their government with some tech that is, that is on top of a blockchain. But we're not there yet and I, I would like us to continue working towards that. So funding security initiatives from the bottom up using the best tools that the dao ecosystem has to offer is kind of the name of the game.
- [22:58]
B
So the other thing that's just so interesting to reflect on is that Ethereum is so much bigger now than it was when the dao launched on a blockchain that was not even a year old. And currently we have the base layer, we have a whole bunch of L2s, we have sidechains, we have ZKEVMs, we've also got EVM compatible alt layer ones. And I was curious if you could just talk about which types of projects will be eligible for these grants and where you'd like to focus.
- [23:29]
A
So we're mostly focused on Ethereum security projects and I think most Ethereum security projects will support every EVM and just by, by nature. But as far as our like mandate we're really focused on Ethereum and Altus. So we're not going to just go out of our way to support the Alt EVM sidechains or whatever. Like you know, the biggest ones being like Binance or even Gnosis. Like I'm, I'm big fans of Gnosis. Like I love the, I'm even on the Gnosis bridge, but they don't really fit under our mandate. We are going to really focus on Ethereum and Altus. But that being said, if someone makes a tool for finding hacks before they happen and preventing them in a sequencer, that would work for other chains too. That would work on Avalanche and that's great. We want to prevent hacks anywhere, but we have to draw the scope somewhere. And this is really an Ethereum. All of our assets are Ether and we're very much Ethereum aligned, as everyone in ethereum was in 2016. So we still love that dream and we love the values of Ethereum and that's really where we're focused on.
- [24:56]
B
Okay, so now let's talk about the different types of security initiatives that you plan to fund with the DAO Security Fund. And I'd also be curious because the ef, the Ethereum foundation, has its trillion dollar security initiative. So I was wondering. So, yeah, the types of initiatives you want to fund, but then also how that fits in with the EF's trillion dollar security initiative.
- [25:21]
A
Yeah, I mean I'm one of seven curators and the Ethereum foundation is actually tasked with with determining the eligibility criteria, specifically the grants management team at the ef. So we're working directly with them to decide which projects would be eligible for the rounds. And then we'll inject a different round operator to actually manage the rounds. So that's like how it'll work. It'll be like the DAO Security Fund. The seven curators, myself included, will kind of decide what the scope of each round will be and who the round operators are. The Ethereum foundation will do the eligibility requirements and then. And the round operators will execute on the DAO distribution using stakeholder votes or whatever tooling they're using. So as far as how do we, what will we really focus on? I mean, Obviously Seal and Seal911 are really critical initiatives. I think Seal 911 especially is. Well, we have two members of Seal 911 on our, on our board. So maybe we're a little biased. In fact, I'm even on this show because I asked Taylor, hey, should we do exclusive with Laura? And she's like, well, yeah, I'm a co host. Of course you should do it exclusive with Laura. Right. So you know, so we're. But I'm a big fan of what they do. Uh, they are the front line when someone gets hacked or phished and they need help. You, you call Seal 91 1, they have a telegram bot, you send a message, you say, hey, I was just hacked. And it gets ported into a bunch of rooms where behind the scenes, altruistic white hats that are volunteering their time working for free help talk you down from the situation. Maybe you have locked assets that can still be rescued, or maybe your computer is still vulnerable and they can get you to Turn off your wi fi or do whatever needs to be done to save it before the situation gets worse. And, and it's really an incredible service. So that's like top of my mind. But there's also Red Guild who does this phishing dojo and training to help people stop doing phishing attacks. There's, there's Open Zeppelin and the, the tooling that they provide. There's so many actually great security projects that are providing a lot of value to the space and most of them are open source tooling. Right. Safe multisig transaction decoders. There's a lot of really nice tooling. But I'll be honest, what I'm most excited about funding are the things that don't exist yet. The things that we really need in this industry to make wallets safer. I think from the trillion dollar security fund initiative. Like you said, it's, it's really important that we fix wallet security. Like that was their number one issue is wallet user experience. It's, it's, it's crazy to me. I, when I talk to a lot of the white hats, they basically say hot wallets are a bug. That account that you have on Metamask or Ravi if it's sitting in your browser extension, the private keys in, in many ways you're effectively fueling a complete, a huge industry of scammers because all they need to do is somehow trick you to give them access to your computer in about a million different ways. They can get access to your computer or some files on your computer and instantly they get paid. And if you have a hardware wallet or a dedicated signing device somewhere, even, even account abstraction like login with Google credentials in many ways make this safer. It's a lot harder to just take your money and run. And I, and so you know, what can we do to educate users or to get to solve these huge problems at a systemic level. And I'm open, you know, I really want to. We can't wait to be kind of a shelling point for solving this problem. It's not like it's something that one, there's going to be one magical solution if we just fund this one thing that'll solve all the problems there. We need an ecosystem of support and that's what we want to cultivate.
- [29:48]
B
So I wanted to ask because that means just what you said, said there about hot wallets was a little bit shocking that they are a bug. So are you saying, are you saying that you feel like people should just always use cold wallets because it just makes it Harder like if they want to trade and transact.
- [30:15]
A
Hardware wallets. Yeah, it depends on how much you're dealing with. Right. If, if it's not life changing money, then fine. And, and you know that doesn't solve every problem. Right. Like someone had just the other day someone had an approve in a, in a defi protocol where they lost, I don't know, was it like $10 million worth of Bitcoin wrapped bitcoin on their wallet. That could have easily been a hardware wallet that wouldn't have solved that. But there is this scamming industry. Another thing that came out last week was like, like some in the golden triangle where Thailand meets Lao and, and, and Cambodia, there's like a lot of scammers that literally have office buildings where they're treating people really horribly. Like these almost effectively slaves that are, that are victims in the cells. Like a lot of the scammers that you in it would interact with if they scam you, they're victims too. You know, they're, they're held, you know, they're basically enslaved in these camps.
- [31:20]
B
Yeah, you're talking about the pig butchering.
- [31:23]
A
Yeah, yeah. And, and a lot of, a lot of things. Right. They're, they, they have a lot of different scamming techniques. But either way, there just came out the other day like a report of someone who was there, who was, who was a victim. That was, their task was to scam other people and they recorded lots of videos and they have a whole story, I think it was in Wired that came out about how they escaped and how everything works inside and they took lots of pictures. There's a whole industry built around this and the main thing fueling it is keys in your browser. That is the number one thing or you know, even wallet. DAPP files. Any kind of key that is stored locally on your computer, even if it's encrypted, has the potential of being, you know, exploited. So it's really, and that's where they get most of their money to the point where it's fueling this whole industry. And it's one of the largest cybercrime industry. I think it is the largest cybercrime industry. So it's something we really have to fix. And there's, but there's a lot of things we have to fix. That's not the only thing. It's just the biggest thing, in my opinion.
- [32:42]
B
Yeah. Okay, so in a moment we'll talk about the grants for Daos. But first a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible.
- [32:53]
C
Before we built Walrus. What we heard a lot from developers was the need for speed. And we, we had it ourselves. So reads and writes are extremely fast on Walrus. And this means that apps don't lag even with really large files. Privacy was another thing that we heard a lot about. And Walrus lets developers encrypt data with our primitive called seal. And with that you have full control over who accesses your data. And everything is enforced on chain. And this enables these really incredible use cases that haven't been possible before. Everything from more reliable AI models to data markets where users can monetize their data. So if you put this all together, what this actually means, it's the developers can finally build apps and they feel web too fast, but you've got web three level guarantees.
- [33:50]
B
So you alluded to this earlier, you plan to distribute funds, you know, not only for security initiatives, but also to advance the dao space. And I, you know, knew like before you mentioned how you felt like daos were at a low. I knew the reason for this was because, you know, we've seen a bunch of daos have like disputes or go on pause or even disband. And then we've seen these disputes between token holders and the different labs, entities, foundations, over, you know, ip, et cetera. So what are some problems you're seeing in the dao space and what outcomes are you hoping to see with the funds that you contribute to daos?
- [34:33]
A
You know, when I got into the dao space, I wasn't excited about solving corporate governance. That wasn't like, that wasn't my move. You know, I was excited about building something better than governments. And I think that the current application of DAOs is mostly for corporate governance. And they have different needs. They don't really need for shareholder voting, they don't need anonymous voting. And, and actually it's great for them if they can kind of Skip Dunbar's number, 150 people and coordinate with less. Right. So this whole like delegates were like, I'm a delegate in many daos and, and, and they're great daos. It's just, you know, as like, as a top ranking delegate in some of the daos, I, I'm only with maybe you know, 20 sign in some DAOs it's like seven and other DAOs it's like 30 people that are really the decision makers. Right. And I would like to see tooling that really supports wide decision making processes. The only tools I, I've seen come out that actually address this is quadratic funding which really has a. You know, a lot of people can influence the results over dumbbell number numbers actually vote escrow voting. So VE curve, VE bal, all the VE tokens that they're kind of these gauges and it's more algorithmic, which is interesting. And also node voting for the gas price for the Ethereum, sorry, gas limit for instance, the gas limit voting from nodes that's also over a Dunbar number. There's a few other others too out there, but for the most part that's not what you think about when you see daos besides VE Curve. You don't even think of QF as a DAO tool. Right. It's like that's whatever Gitcoin did and Giveth does it too. Okay, cool. You know, that's it. So. But those are the tools that I'm really excited about. I want to see 200, 500 people be decision makers and collectively come to a consensus in a really easy, efficient way. And those are the kind of tools we want to support. And the way we're going to support them is not by just giving them grants, it's by letting them actually work their magic to decide what gets funded, what projects get funded, what maybe requests for proposals, ideas end up being like the ones we focus on, things like that. This is how we will support the dao industry and we will pay them to, to do those, to run those products with us. But we will not, we're not going to give grants out specifically to dao organizations or dao tooling providers. We're just going to let them practice their craft. And part of even being a round operator for us is they're going to have to tell us like what they have now and how they're going to improve it or what their hypothesis is to actually try out with us to distribute funds or distribute, you know, decision, decision making. And, and so they'll have to apply and we'll take the ones that seem the most interesting, like futurearchy and prediction markets. Maybe there's something, there's a lot of people working on that and I would like to see how we can help improve it by giving them space to, to, to play. Yeah.
- [38:00]
B
All right, so before we get into all the details about how this will all work behind the scenes, tell us more about the origin story behind this idea to use the DAO funds to fund Ethereum security and Dao initiatives.
- [38:15]
A
Yeah, it came about maybe six months ago. I was at Burning man actually and PC messaged me and PC is the co founder, PC over Sashio or whatever, right?
- [38:29]
B
Yeah, he's a co founder. 91 1.
- [38:32]
A
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, legend, legend, white hat. Seriously, like he, if you don't follow him on Twitter, you got to, it's bangers every, every day. But either way. So I, I, I, he had a reputation in my heart already and so when he messaged me at Birdie Man, I responded, even though trying not to work so much. But he said, hey, what about these DAO funds? Apparently this guy at Wintermute, Fade, I should say, PC was talking to the Wintermute crew about how Seal911 doesn't get very much money because honestly, they're volunteers and they're helping people who have been hacked. The people who've been hacked don't really have the money to tip you, you know, so it doesn't work as well as when you're protecting million dollar treasuries. Right? That's the security side that makes money. So he was like, ah, how do we get funding? He's got also a lot of values around like how, who he accepts money from and these sorts of things. So he makes it a little harder for himself, let's be honest. And, and so, but Fade, who was 17 years old at the time and about 8 years old when the Dow was hacked itself, said, hey, I saw a blog post that said there's a bunch of Ethereum that, you know, could be used for security projects. And you know, I was looking at the contracts the other day and it's like $20 million or something. This is, I think, just the curator multisig. And so then PC messaged me and I'm like, dude, $20 million. The extra balance has like $200 million in it. And so we started talking about this and I actually brought that idea to the other curators saying, hey, remember we said this in the blog post. We were like, hey, if no one claims this money by January 31, 2017, then we're going to donate to Ethereum initiatives and maybe we have an opportunity to do that. And so we're talking with other curators and honestly, as we started looking at it, the security of these funds, it's not bad, but it's a little risky for $200 million to be sitting in this old contract that has, you know, was written when Solidity was like nine months. It was deployed when Solidity was nine months old, written when it was five maybe. And like, you know, there's all these old hacks of Balancer and you know, old protocols getting hacks, like, what if someone finds a Weird bug in a compiler we, we also like with these funds we can't do basic things like the infrastructure around these funds is not really. The old multisigs don't have the infrastructure that safe does. You can simulate transactions. You can really know what's going to happen every time you make a transaction. This old multisig, you're basically YOLOing. You know, it's like we'll see. Well, I mean you can maybe run something on tenderly and figure it out, but it's not nearly as simple. And really it's a three of six multisig with keys that have been sitting there for 10 years public. You know, what if North Korea has two of them and we're one wrench attack away from getting all these. We need more signers, we need more, we need better, we need newer smart contracts, we need a reset of the whole thing. And really for $200 million we also need a source of funding to adequately protect this money. And so this idea of staking the ether and just using the rewards to not only protect the current assets but also to distribute to support Ethereum security in general just made a lot of sense. And so yeah, so the old couriers, we went back and forth on the idea and eventually now here we are with the Dell security fund.
- [42:49]
B
Okay. And so as he mentioned, you're going to be staking the, that 69,420 eth in the extra balance so that you can generate yield and then basically that will fund all of the grants like every year. So I think like right now with the price of ether as it is, it would generate about $8 million in yield this year. So is the thought that it will be, you know, for now, while the price of ETH is about this much, that that's the amount that you'll get give out in grants this year.
- [43:25]
A
Yeah, I think it, it might even be less than that as we get our feet under us because we don't, we want to start out slow and make sure we have processes in place and we're making sure that we don't make the mistake that a lot of, you know, we're not, I mean we are actually a DAO LLC. So we are a DAO and in the Marshall Islands. So we're a DAO LLC, we are a DAO and I've seen many DAOs just hit the ground running and start just blowing cash. You know, we're not going to repeat that mistake. We're going to go slow, we're going to get our feet under ourselves, we're going to build an ecosystem. You know, we're, we're going to work on this with the ecosystem at large and, and really, not only will we have this bulk of money that is really dedicated for supporting Ethereum security projects, we're also going to work with the external community and really be a shelling point for finding what the best initiatives are and helping them find funding from us and others. Because it really, this isn't just like, hey, the Dow Security fund is going to solve all the problems. You know, we're not everyone's mom, okay? Like, you know, we got to work together on this. We don't need the nanny state government coming in telling you how security should be done in Ethereum. We need to be working with L2s, large Dapps wallets and all the entire ecosystem to figure out what these problems are and be funding them together. But I think that we will become a shelling point for this very specific, very specific niche.
- [44:57]
B
Okay, and so you still have this curator multisig. And this goes back to the original concept in the DAO of curators. So explain like who curators were for the original dao, but then what function they're performing under this new setup.
- [45:17]
A
Okay, so the original, original DAO had like Gappin Wood, Alex Van de Sande, Fabian Volschweiger, Christian. Right. Wiesner Vitalik, Vlad Zamper, Ethan Buchanan. Man, I might even be able to name them all.
- [45:37]
B
Anyway, a bunch of old Buchanan.
- [45:40]
A
Sorry, you're right. Aaron Buchanan. Thank you, thank you. I actually mixed him up with Ethan from Cosmos back in, you know, anyway, so bunch of old OGs from the Ethereum days. And then when the Dow hack happened, most of them were like, yo, peace, I'm out. You know, like, this is getting sketchy and I don't want to have to.
- [46:04]
B
Yeah, and just to be clear. Yeah, they're. Yeah. Their role was to make sure that for anybody who made a proposal that they were who they like, the connection between who they were and the proposal was like legit. That's, that's basically it. It's sort of like Oracle type work.
- [46:24]
A
Yeah, yeah, they were, they were a. And a technical oracle. So like, is the person who they say they are and is this code going to hack the dao, Right. And then they'll whitelist and then the person can't propose. So they're kind of proposal gatekeepers and for safety of the assets. And then while the role changed. Hey, who wants to help get back 3% of the funds? I was raised no one, let's be real. But Vitalik and Vlad stayed on and then so they're, they're still og. I, I called that there was the original curators and I'm calling these guys the OG curators. So we got Vitalik and Vlad and then I joined and then Jean from Git from Bitty joined as well as Alexi Akanov who founded Turbo Geth. Now Aragon, which is one of the clients, sorry, execution clients like Geth and then and is really great for archive notes and stuff like that. And then Timon Rapp from Kraken. So there were six curators and there were some people who were there and then left and da, da, da. But like it was these six specifically Sherman, she, she was great. But anyway, there were these six curators that I stayed on and made sure that these asset recovery was, was done and basically I was leading the show and they were validating like you know, making sure that everything was correct. That I'm saying like this guy said he had DAO tokens, he sent Dao tokens to the Dao. Let's send him this much Dao tokens back. Here's a transaction. Da da da. People read it and then they click sign sense, right? And, and so then now those six curators are going to move more towards an oversight role and they're still going to protect the funds and make sure that the claimants are going to be able to get funding. But in all this chaos and like, hey, this announcement, it's probably going to be a lot more claims, I hope. And then the DAO security fund itself is going to now manage those claims. And by doing that we're actually going to have seven new curators. Well, two of them aren't new, so it's me and Vitalik still as curators. Vitalik is everywhere in this thing somehow. He actually was one of the first curators stayed on and now he's still an active curator. And I can't tell you how much I appreciate that. And it shows how important security is for Ethereum to have the founder be active in this. Also we have Alex Bandisande is coming back. He is great because he's also a UX designer. He designed Mist back in the day. He's the founder of ENS as well, along with Nick Johnson and Alex Van de Sande is going to help us have a lot of influence on improving user experience in this space. We have Taylor Monahan who actually flipped the coin that chose the DAO and was very active in the Dao days, but also is, is probably the leading expert in the world on North Korea's, you know, crypto hacks and, and Lazarus group.
- [49:35]
B
Small correction, it was her husband that flipped the coin that selected the dao, not. Not her. She made the video. Yeah, yeah, I watched the video from my book and I described it in the book. I described the coin flip, right? Yeah, I described the trajectory of the coin.
- [49:56]
A
Yeah. And Kevin's, Kevin's a fun guy, but he, yeah, he wasn't nearly as active as Taylor. Taylor was like super active in the DAO back in the day and also, you know, founded myether Wallet which helped probably most DAO token holders even hold their, hold their assets. And obviously she's also an expert in user experience, especially around wallets as and lead security at MetaMask as well as co hosts with you and. And then we also have Jordi Belina who hacked the dao with me back in the day and co founded Giveth dapp, Node and a few other projects with me. And currently he's leading work, leading one of the groups that's working towards moving Ethereum to a zkevm, a Zisk. And so he's going to be our ZKEVM expert who will support us in supporting that up very the security around CK vms, which is extremely critical. Of course we also have Lansky Polanski, he's a Dapnode CEO. Dapnode is managing the staking process for us. So it's important to have him on the multisig not only for managing the largest bucket of our assets, but also because node security is another important aspect for us. So I think I got everyone man. Oh and MPC Seal911 co founder and obviously one of the leading white hacks hats in the space.
- [51:29]
B
And so just to go back a little bit more to, you know, the origin of this idea, like what was Vitalik's reaction to hearing this idea?
- [51:40]
A
Well, I mean once we got it to the point where it was, you know, everyone had constructive feedback and for him, you know, he helped us ensure that the claims would always be open and you know that we would do this in the, let's say the most politically acceptable way. Right. That we don't take any risks. And also he. But of course he's super stoked about the idea. You know, the trillion dollar security is no joke. We really need to like. Ethereum is the most secure blockchain in the world in my opinion. And I think it can be. I think it still needs Improvements, all of them do. We're not there yet. We, we're in, not in a place where, you know, anyone should actually store the, the, you know, their life savings on, on chain in a wallet they control. It's probably not super safe for that, you know, so it's like we got it, we gotta actually improve this. And so he is so excited that we could create basically an endowment for security. I think, you know, there's all these gitcoin rounds and all this public goods funding. Never once has there been a security focused public goods like funding round ever in 10 years of Ethereum's existence. And we've had all these public goods funding around. So it's time, it's time that we really like focus on this subject because I think it's the most important thing of our day and I'm confident Vitalik agrees.
- [53:15]
B
So something that's so interesting to me is you know, obviously the Dao was such a huge thing in Ethereum's history at that time, but in the year since, there's been so many more hacks in Ethereum and the wider crypto world. You just mentioned North Koreans. They've been stealing billions in crypto. You know, that led to the whole ofax sanctions on the tornado cash smart contracts and that alone also created a number of censorship problems on Ethereum. You know, obviously a year ago we saw the $1.5 billion Bybit hack. That was the largest one in the history of the world, not just in crypto. And I wondered between your experience with the Dao and then watching all of this transpire over the years with Ethereum and all these hacks, I wondered if you could create a billboard. This is a popular Tim Ferriss question, but I love it. If you could create a billboard and make every blockchain developer read that and then another billboard for every crypto user to read. Um, and it should be, you know, security messages. What would you want those billboards to billboards to say?
- [54:25]
A
Well for the users, I mean I already kind of gave away before. Buy a hardware wallet. Don't store your keys on your computer, your day to day computer, like just get them off. Like if, if you want to go crazy and have like a air gapped computer, da da da. That's great. Hardware wallet. That's great. But like the billboard says like buy a hardware wallet. It's worth it, it's the cheapest. It's a one time insurance policy. Like you know, most insurance policies they get you on that like month to month thing. This is like you know, less than $100 once. And yes, it's a little bit more friction, but you could store a little bit of money here and there, store your gambling money on there, but keep your lifesaver savings on a hardware wallet. For the developers, you know, it's tough, but I think probably the thing that most developers don't appreciate the most is opsec, you know, like operational security, making sure that they are also not doing that PI hardware wallet. Right. But even more so, you know, some keys on servers and these things. Like, I think it's really important to separate, maybe the billboard would say, like, separate your crypto work from like your, your, your, your SSH keys and, and all the, all the like crypto development, like DevOps kind of stuff that you have on your computer. Keep that like separated from also the video call and the normal other stuff that you do because it, it really has, you know, operational security is, is, is probably the most important thing that any blockchain developer could do or founder. I mean, we've seen founders get kidnapped and stuff. Like, maybe also, like, don't flaunt your wealth is another one. It, you know, it can get kind of dark. Some of the security stuff. I, I'm not really like the biggest fan of going that direction, but you just gotta be careful out there. And, and I think people, especially developers, sometimes forget that now they're dealing with money, not just code. And it does have a little bit of extra like, levity. Like there's a little not levity, like, like importance. There's. You have to be a little bit more careful with things than what if it was just code, you know, like, don't run anything. I mean, these days especially, you can't just run someone else's code on your computer. You know, you just can't. There's so many hacks of just random people, like, hey, I have this like, issue. Can you like run my repo and help me figure it out? And then NPM just like auto installs some malware and their whole, their whole thing is taken over. And you know, the worst is sometimes these things happen and they don't even know it and that the hacker waits for it to strike. That's what happened, I think with Bybit. Right. I honestly am not an expert in the Bybit hack. So.
- [57:37]
B
No, I mean, it was very calculated because they targeted it specifically at Bybit. They must have realized, oh, they, they just keep these wallets with like huge amounts of crypto in them. So they changed the code on the AWS for Safe. And they changed it back after they did the BYBIT act. So they, like, waited for the right moment and then they went in for the kill and then they, like, tried to cover their tracks. So.
- [58:07]
A
Okay, you know, what's craziest about BYBIT hack is that was the largest hack that ever happened and yet almost no users were affected. You know, and to me, five, it.
- [58:19]
B
Makes so much money.
- [58:22]
A
Yeah. You know, but also because they were. Users were protected because they weren't holding keys themselves. You know, and to me, that's a little sad. It's a sad state of our industry that that's something you probably want to recommend to people right now. I. And I don't like saying that, you know, I'm a. I'm a be your own bank kind of guy. Like, you know, we've talked many times. I didn't have a bank for several years. I. I want to hold my own assets and I do. But in the end, for your average crypto user, it's probably better for them if they just have Coinbase or a BYBIT account. They're less likely to get phished or get hacked or, you know, owning your own keys is its own liability. And that's. That's really. That. That's really sad to me. And I think that that's like, the BYBIT is like a. Like a sign that we. We as an industry need to. Need to really look at ourselves and figure out how do we make this more secure.
- [59:26]
B
Yeah, I mean, I could, like. So I totally get what you're saying, but between your advice about the hardware wallet and what you just said about using a custodian, it almost feels like maybe diversifying between them. You know, not having all your eggs in one basket is the way to go, because just things can even go wrong with, like, centralized exchanges. So, anyway, not that anything we're saying.
- [59:52]
A
Here is investment advice, but definitely not investment advice. I. I took that approach back in the day where I would have my money on multiple exchanges and in different places, different walls, wallets. And then what happened was, like, every time an exchange went down, I got hacked, basically. So there weren't that many back in the day, you know, so it's like, oh, Crypsy goes down. Ding. Mint pal goes down. Damn. I had money there, too. Oh, man. You know, I never had money on Mount gox, thankfully, but, you know, so there's like, pros and cons to that diversification strategy.
- [60:23]
B
Okay, yeah. Yeah, I guess. I mean, 2022 alone shows, like, for people who had money, you know, In Terra Luna and Celsius and Voyager and. Yeah, ftx. Like. Anyway, okay, okay, yeah, so maybe that wasn't such a good idea, but you referenced your long history in crypto and I wanted just kind of get a little bit more reflection on your personal journey because, you know, your, your story in crypto I find totally fascinating. You know, you were this biopharmaceutical chemical engineer, you were genetically engineering hamster cells. You are a rabid Seattle Supersonics fan then. And you were a libertarian with an interest in Austrian economics. Then you basically got laid off. You escaped the matrix, went full on hippie. You started, you know, attending Burning man, you got into bitcoin, and then you ended up, you know, working for Slock it, which created the dao. You were their community organizer. And then the hack happened. And then you just spent this like very intense few months of your life trying to rescue people's money. Getting criticized for a lot of things along the way, you know, being involved in the hard fork. And then after the hard work, when you were rescuing the Etc, we referenced how people were upset that you, you know, and you had a lot of reasons for why you wanted to turn it into eth. To sell it back. Having to do with fairness. People couldn't read my book to learn more about what went into that decision. But obviously you backtracked, you ended up giving it back in etc. But anyway, point is you have just like that alone is not even like half of your history in crypto. But I, Yeah, I also have the first.
- [62:10]
A
I have the first degree ever in digital currencies. I. A master.
- [62:14]
B
Oh, you like you were the first person.
- [62:17]
A
Yeah, there was a group of nine of us, but yeah. Oh, wow. To ever get a degree in digital.
- [62:22]
B
Currencies from the university.
- [62:24]
A
And I collected the diploma a week. Yeah, exactly, I did. I collected the diploma a week after the Dow was hacked. Yeah.
- [62:35]
B
So when you look at, you know, that time in your life and obviously you've done a lot of other things in crypto since then, like what reflections or takeaways do you have about that super intense few months of your life and, and because you're probably still being contacted by people to, you know, receive their money and stuff. So I don't know if you have like certain lessons that you've learned from that or like takeaways that you have or. Yeah, just what your thoughts and feelings are about those few super intense months.
- [63:07]
A
Yeah, you know, you asked me my feelings earlier and I still. Maybe it's like a male syndrome or Just my own personality. I'm like, what are my feelings? I have no idea. I don't know my feelings. But I can tell you some takeaways. First off, you know, rescuing money, the hardest part is giving it back like consistently because I ran the White Hat group for a while with Jordy and a few other guys and we rescued 200 million, we rescued the DAO and then we rescued $200 million from the first parody multisig hack and lots of ICOs and all these things. And you know, it's like you can rescue the money in a couple of seconds and it's super fun and super easy. And then the grueling, hardest part is just trying to give it back to people, figuring out exactly who does it, get the accounting right, you know, and it's like sometimes doing the right thing is actually the hardest thing to do, you know, but it is the best thing to do and it's the most rewarding and it pays dividends. And the other thing I learned is like, from this whole experience, especially these days, I think like reputation is worth way more than money. Way more than money. Like if you. I basically live off of my reputation. I'm on the Ethereum, I'm on the Arbitrum Security Council, I'm on the NS Security Council. I'm an active delegate in several Daos and the Gnosis Bridge. I think I mentioned earlier several other things that I'm there because I did the right thing several times, even though it was hard. And that goes a long way. You know, money is so easy to quantify. It's like, look, I made more money. Look I made more money. Oh look, I made more money, you know, and it's like, look, my, my number goes up and that's so easy, right? Whereas reputation is more qualitative and, and I think most of the good things in life are qualitative and they're harder to measure. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't like really optimize for those things. Things that's, you know, I, I know we talked about this before, but I made, I feel like I made some mistakes not going for like an ICO in 2017 or. I've never really actually done a fundraise like a VC fundraiser. I've never taken any money from a vc and I've had many opportunities too. And it's just never been like, you know, I'm founding non profit platforms and these sorts of things. But. And so in many ways I'm like, ah, you know, I probably missed out on a lot of money. But I also have, I feel like, so much reputation and so much respect from so many great people, and that really opens up doors for me more than anything any money amount of money could. And so I feel like I'm proud of that, and I'm really proud of the way that my trajectory in crypto has gone in general. You know, I feel like we. I've been challenged many times to do the right thing, and I don't always do it the right way. I've definitely made many mistakes, like trying to convert the etc to eat is one example, but many others, too. But I always try to do the right thing. And I think that, you know, people. People see that, and. And they. They. They support me in. In. In things in ways that I never would have imagined. So I'm just really grateful to have this trajectory. It's been a wild ride, and now I have another wild ride ahead of me with the Dallas security fund, which is very exciting.
- [66:32]
B
Yeah. Yeah. I think. I mean, just the symbolism of this step is, to my mind, it's just incredible. So one thing that I'm curious about, we've kind of alluded to this throughout the episode, but can you just describe a little bit more how frequently people were coming to you to claim their eth from the dao or, like, you know, what would prompt them to come to you long after all these events happened? Or, you know, why is it that they, like, didn't claim the money earlier? Like, just give us a picture of what your life has looked like for these past 10 years trying to get these funds back for people.
- [67:10]
A
Yeah. You know, most of the action, of course, happened in 2016, 2017. That's when most of the funds were claimed. And then, you know, in. And especially the end of. There was actually a lull in 2017, and then when ether went up to, like, a thousand dollars at the end of 2017, I think it was like, you know, bunch of people were like, wait a second. I have money in the dao. What do I do? There's this jinx on file, and most of the time that people end up coming to me mostly because they're scared. They know exactly what to do, and they just want someone to hold their hand. And I'm that nice guy who hold their hand, you know, and help them in a video call, click the button, you know, and. And then. And so, you know, a lot of it's come from these, like, pumps. And, you know, it was very quiet at the end of 2018, 2019, but then at the end of 2019 and, and no, sorry, at the end of 2020 it got busy again. A bunch of people came out of the woodworks. It's like this is a long time ago and we were making blog posts and saying like guys, claim your money. There's a bunch of money here that doesn't matter. It's just number goes up and a bunch of people are like wait a second, I had some of that, you know. And so then they come back and they're like, hey, help me out because I don't even know what I'm doing. And even, Even this in 2025, we had someone who had a huge claim. They had $800,000 worth of DAO tokens and they wanted some support in doing it because you know what, it's, it's kind of sketch. Back in the day there were like Taylor made this incredible user experience where you could click one button with your key and you would claim on etc, you would claim the extra balance, withdraw and you'd claim your DAO tokens all in one button click. Like Taylor Monahan probably did more work to help people claim DAO tokens just by building that one tool but to claim their money from this than I ever did, honestly. So yeah, and I mentioned that button in my book. Oh really nice. You know, I, I actually, you know, I, I, I was using your book during the DAO security fund. Like I actually like opened it up and was like what were the four words that we used in the DAO website? I was like looking through the book and so I remember reading and seeing them there. So I was like, it's like amazing reference material. Like your, your book is by far the number one resource on early days Ethereum, but especially the dao. I think you have like a hundred pages plus just like the play by play. Like it is way better than my memory that is for sure. Like, I don't know, maybe. I think you interviewed me. Did I get anything wrong? Did I get anything wrong in there?
- [70:01]
B
Oh, I'm not going to remember that.
- [70:02]
A
Probably did.
- [70:03]
B
But I mean you were one of my best sources for all the info. I mean, well, especially the links. Yeah, you helped me so much. So, so all the detail that you're crediting for my book it like you know, whatever, some huge percentage of it came from you.
- [70:23]
A
Probably, probably that's probably true. Well especially on the, all the on chain stuff, the white hats and I mean that was really complicated. So like hacking the dao, I'll tell you that is Not a simple thing. It's actually ridiculously complicated. It's. It's a real challenge. And Jordy Balina and Lefteris and. And the White Hat group that. That really united on that, like geniuses, because it was not an easy beat. And following it on chain was even hard longer.
- [70:58]
B
Yeah, I actually re. Listened to my own audiobook because, like, researching for. For this interview, like, made me ask some questions, and then I just ended up re Listening to it and. Oh, my God, like, you guys were. I, like, just. There was so much thinking and, like, considerations for every single thing you were doing trying to rescue that money. It's like, well, you know, we're gonna have to hack the DAO the same way that the hacker hacked the dao. So, like, legally, like, when is the right time to do that? Like, you know, if we do it at this time, what does it look like? If we do it at that time, what does it look like? What justifications we have at the different times? And then it was, you know, like, basically just you. You had to create so many different smart contracts to hack it. And then, like, the contracts were. Would sort of break down. And then Jordy was kind of. Who. So Jordy. Somebody mentioned to me, when they told me about Jordy, they were like, oh, he's probably the best smart contract, you know, like. Like, engineer or auditor in the whole, you know, Ethereum ecosystem. But it's funny because, you know, when I interviewed him, it turned out that at that time, he was so shy. He was really new in the ecosystem, and your smart contracts kept breaking down, trying to get, like, the last bits of money to rescue from the dao.
- [72:17]
A
And.
- [72:18]
B
And finally he was like, well, I have my contract. And, you know, he, like, felt really shy about it, but his contract worked, and it got the last $4 million out of the. Out of the contract. And. Yeah, and so he. I don't know, it's just, like, kind of funny to, you know, now that I look at all you guys and then I think about these details of this story. Like, things were so different then, and, you know, all of you were different people then. Um, and then, yeah, that whole.
- [72:46]
A
Jordy just. Jordy was.
- [72:47]
B
All the stuff about.
- [72:50]
A
Jordy was the CTO of a camping website, basically, in Spain. You know, it was like that. That was. He. It was a family business. He was also. He was also CTO of, like, the independence movement in Spain for a while there too. So it was. It wasn't just that, like, he was a. He's a revolutionary deep down, you know, Catalan independence and, and really led the technical stuff for that. But his day to day job was managing websites for campsites, you know, and then he comes in here guns a blazing. He built liquid democracy for the Dao. That's how I met him. He built like a tool for doing better delegation than we have today in Ethereum. Like in, in all the daos. Now like you don't have liquid deli delegation, you have one hop. Like I delegate to this guy and now as a delegate I can't delegate to anybody else. You know, he built liquid democracy where he could delegate to someone and they could delegate and they could delegate in the DAO in 2016. And actually the day before the Dao hack, I was calling him, interviewing him about how he built it and I was going to write a blog post. I wrote like, I opened the file and had it like half some notes in there. I never wrote that blog post because the Dao was hacked. But you know, he, he knew the contracts really well and so of course I got him involved along with Blifted. I mean I was just bringing in anyone who could do anything and who, who knew anyone's background, who cared, you know, so it was, those were crazy times and we were all very fresh. You know, Ethereum was so young. Solidity was nine months old when the Dao was hacked. You know, like those are crazy times.
- [74:32]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean it just, yeah, it was a huge saga. Okay, so let's now talk about like for people who have projects that they want to be funded, like projects for Ethereum security that they want to get funded. Where can they go for more information to, you know, see about how they can apply for these funds.
- [74:58]
A
So the best thing to do is follow the Dao Fund on Twitter and you can also go to the Dao Fund, the website and we have a type form that you can like get like, I think it's get involved or connect with us or something. It's a button you can click on the very front page and you put down your name and email and stuff and we'll make sure that you're informed. We don't have our first round like publicized yet. You know, it's one thing at a time. We have to launch and tell people we exist and do all the on chain actions that we need to do to even get the funds out. But we will have some distributions soon and we are, we will also announce our rounds soon, but you know, over the next couple weeks. So. But if you want to get involved, if you Want to, you know, you know you can also always DM me at Griff Green on, on lots of things and let's talk, let's talk about this. I'm really excited especially to talk to ecosystems, people who rely on the security of Ethereum to understand what the needs are because there's a lot of projects out there. Some are amazing, some aren't so important. They're not actually solving the most important problems we have. Even though they're great, they might be great projects but if you're not, you know, if you're solving. I feel like we spend so much time on like solving these niche technical problems that no one really cares about and we still have too many, we have you know, hundreds of billions of dollars stored on people's MacBooks just like Ready for the taking, you know, like there's like different levels. Every, every security problem is important of course but some are better funded than others and we really need, we're, we're excited to really address some of these things and probably do more research first. Like I said we're going to go slow. We want to understand the landscape and make sure that we're going to do, we're going to allocate our resources in the most impactful way possible. So but that doesn't mean you shouldn't reach out to me, tell me what you're doing, you know and, and really especially in the form of on the website like tell us what you're doing and every data point is really valuable especially in the days of AI, we can manage this, all this data. So.
- [77:21]
B
Yeah, yeah, like clearly we're in this moment where AI is taking off. All right, so for anything I'm almost.
- [77:28]
A
Scared to say everyone message me, you know, because it's like oh man, I'm going to get torn up by AI bots saying my like random security projects. I don't know.
- [77:41]
B
All right Griff, well is there anything that I didn't ask you that you would want people to know?
- [77:46]
A
Hmm. You know, maybe this is a kiss ass thing but how great your book is, you know, like seriously your book was really amazing as an, is an amazing resource for the Dell. So like if anyone wants to know like the real play by play and it's also just really enjoyable, you know, it's a really, really enjoyable book especially if you're interested in the early days Ethereum like check out the cryptopians and, and thank you for making me look so good and I have to recommend it to people because you know you've portrayed Me so. Well, like, some people do not come out as well as me, that's for sure. Oh my gosh. Some real drama in that thing. But yeah, just.
- [78:28]
B
And just to be clear. I know just to be clear, sometimes people in the reviews, they're like, oh, Laura really didn't like, so and so. And I'm like, wait, I. I didn't live through these events. Like, the events I'm recounting. It's from interviews with people who live through these events. It's like I'm getting the information somewhere. So.
- [78:49]
A
Yeah, on your citations are like this thick. Like it's like a quarter of the book or something is just citations. Like, I mean, you, you can't really argue with that.
- [79:00]
B
Yeah, no, but I like, would interview so many people and if they're all kind of saying the same thing, then, yeah, I'd write a description of, you know, that person that way. But yeah, it was just interesting to see so many people thought that it was like my personal opinion and I'm like, no, no, no. I'm gathering the opinions of, like, many people. Anyway, anyway, thank you for plugging my book. That was very sweet. I'm not gonna lie, though. Yeah. When I relisten to it. Oh. Huh.
- [79:26]
A
Thanks. And thanks for making me look so good in it. I, you know, and, and like, even, even your description, I can tell you listen to the audiobook again, because it was almost in this pod. It's very humbling to hear you saw other people tell your story, you know, and even in this description, I think it was almost word for word. What you said in the book about me was like, you know, I think it was something like I had. He also described my hair like an eagle's peak and a man bun. And this whole thing, it's like, it's so funny, so awkward, honestly, to read about yourself in a book. You know, it's like, oh, no, Is that what they call this? An equal speak? I'm like, you know, I don't know, you know, but it's. Yeah, it was very humbling. So. And thank you. Thank you for that. Well, and other. The only other thing about. The only other thing about the Dell security fund is like, I really want to say, like, we're. I don't want to tear Ethereum Security apart. Like, Ethereum is doing a lot of work and so many security engineers are doing so much good work to make this very difficult thing, like allowing people to hold their own digital assets safely. And we've made huge strides. I mean, when I got into this space. There weren't even hierarchical deterministic wallets like the seed phrases. You had a wallet dat file for Bitcoin, just public, like open private key, not encrypted or anything, just sitting on your desktop, you know. So, like we've made huge strides. Hardware wallets and all these tools are out there. So I don't want to be discouraging. I just, you know, I, I really want to see the Dallas Security Fund help Ethereum come to the place where people feel that it's safer to store assets on Ethereum than in a bank. I think we can get there and if we can become that secure, we will obviously become the financial backbone of the space. And I hope also we can become the technical background for civil society. Society, you know, and, and it really does take a certain level of robustness that we don't have yet today. And I, I think the Dow Security Fund hopefully can become a shelling point where everyone comes to, to really address that problem and make Ethereum so secure that everyone wants to use it.
- [81:57]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it would be amazing if from the Dao that that was the end result.
- [82:04]
C
Alchemy is one of Walrus's many great partners. They're an advertising platform. Every click and impression is recorded on chain. They're live, they've got great clients. Coca Cola is one of them. They're already processing more than 25 million ad impressions a day. And by building on sue and Walrus, Alchemy's clients get two really big advantages. So the first, first one is cost saving and the second one is full transparency over their spend. The real time visibility they get allows their clients to make really fast decisions, do very effective A B testing and truly understand their roi. And anything that involves money, like defi this auditability, not only is it super important, but is that actually a legal requirement in many places and being able to prove what happened and that what you're saying has happened hasn't been edited or massaged in any way. Well, it's really important for DTI today, but to be honest, it's only going to become more and more important as this industry grows and more value is pushed through blockchains.
- [83:18]
B
So, Griff, it's been such a pleasure telling the world about the Dao Security Fund and I personally have loved being a witness to your arc in crypto over the past decade and I hope the fund is a great success.
- [83:33]
A
Thank you so much, Laura, and thanks for giving us this exclusive.
- [83:37]
B
Yeah, yeah. And for listeners who are more interested in the details around this. We have an exclusive article on our website, which you can check out@ Unchained Crypto.com and for listeners who are interested in learning more about crypto security, be sure to check out the late December episode we did with Pablo Sabatella and Isaac Patka of seal, because they, yeah, they gave kind of a little masterclass on how to keep your crypto assets secure here on the pod. Amazing conversation. Highly recommend. And yeah, that, that concludes our, our news. So thank you so much, Griffin.
- [84:15]
A
Yeah, it's always a pleasure to hang out, Laura.