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TheDAO logo

TheDAO(DAO)

Token
Frontier GlobalRegistrar
0xbb9bc244d798...d3bb8c189413
HomesteadContract #15KSource VerifiedEdit this contract
Deployed April 30, 2016 (10 years ago)Block 1,428,757

The DAO was a decentralized autonomous organization and investor-directed venture capital fund built on Ethereum by Slock.it. Its April 2016 crowdsale raised ov

Homestead EraVerified Source

Historical Significance

The DAO represents the single most consequential event in Ethereum history prior to the Merge. It demonstrated both the revolutionary potential and catastrophic risks of smart contract-based governance. The hack and resulting hard fork permanently split the Ethereum community and blockchain, creating Ethereum Classic. The SEC investigation that followed shaped the regulatory landscape for all subsequent token offerings. The reentrancy vulnerability exploited in the attack became the canonical example in smart contract security education, leading to the widespread adoption of checks-effects-interactions patterns and reentrancy guards.

Context

The DAO launched during a period of intense optimism about Ethereum smart contracts. It attracted 14% of all ETH in circulation, creating systemic risk. The hard fork decision was the most contentious governance event in Ethereum history, with the community debating code-is-law immutability vs. pragmatic intervention. The SEC report in 2017 established that token sales could constitute securities offerings under the Howey test.

Token Information
Logo
The DAO logo
via RPC
Token Name
The DAO
Symbol
DAO
Decimals
1
Contract Information
Registered Name
TheDAO
Frontier GlobalRegistrar
The official Ethereum name registry hardcoded in go-ethereum for Frontier mainnet. Referenced in the original ethereum.org 'Register a name for your coin' tutorial (2015).
Key Facts
Deployment Block
1,428,757
Deployment Date
Apr 30, 2016, 05:42 AM
Code Size
10.6 KB
Gas at Deploy
3,711,215
Transactions by YearPartial (capped)
201650,000

Description

The DAO enabled anyone to become a stakeholder by contributing Ether during its creation phase. Token holders could submit funding proposals, vote on them, and, if approved, release Ether from the contract to proposal recipients. The system also included a mechanism allowing participants to exit the DAO by splitting into a new instance and reclaiming a proportional share of funds. At the time, it represented the most ambitious attempt to encode organizational governance and capital allocation directly into Ethereum smart contracts.

The DAO was conceived and coded principally by Christoph Jentzsch of Slock.it, a German startup building decentralized smart locks. The contract implemented a decentralized venture capital fund: token holders voted on project proposals, and approved proposals received ETH funding directly from the contract. It launched April 30, 2016 with a 28-day token sale that attracted over 11,000 participants, raising approximately 11.5 million ETH (over $150 million at the time). At its peak, The DAO held nearly 14% of all Ether tokens in circulation.

On June 17, 2016, an attacker exploited a recursive call vulnerability (reentrancy bug) in the splitDAO function, draining approximately 3.6 million ETH (~$50 million) into a child DAO. The Ethereum Foundation published an emergency advisory the same day. Because the child DAO had a 27-day creation period, the attacker could not immediately withdraw the funds, giving the community time to respond.

After weeks of heated debate, the Ethereum community executed a hard fork at block 1,920,000 on July 20, 2016, creating an irregular state change that transferred the drained funds into a recovery contract. This fork successfully returned ETH to DAO token holders but was controversial — those who opposed it continued operating the original chain, which became Ethereum Classic (ETC).

In July 2017, the U.S. SEC issued an investigative report concluding that DAO tokens were securities under federal law, marking the first major regulatory action related to Ethereum-based tokens.

Source Verified

Etherscan verified
Heuristic Analysis

The following characteristics were detected through bytecode analysis and may not be accurate.

Detected Type: Token
Has ERC-20-like patterns

Bytecode Overview

Opcodes10,838
Unique Opcodes251
Jump Instructions635
Storage Operations400

External Links