Ethereum Foundation
Independent
ZisK
SEAL 911
ENS
Giveth
Dappnode
In 2016, funds recovered from TheDAO hack were made claimable by TheDAO Curators with the intention that any unclaimed assets would be used to support Ethereum security.
A decade later, the unclaimed ETH has sat idle and significantly appreciated.
TheDAO Security Fund enables the community to reallocate these funds toward the projects and people that strengthen Ethereum security.
Everything you need to know about TheDAO Security Fund.
Yes, that one. In 2016 TheDAO raised about 14% of all ETH in existence, and then got famously hacked. The White Hat Group and an Ethereum hard fork recovered the funds, and a Curator Multisig was set up to handle the edge cases, with a promise that unclaimed ether would be sent to a not-for-profit entity to support Ethereum security.
TheDAO Security Fund is the fulfilment of that promise, with a slight modification. Claims are kept open and the bulk of the unclaimed collateral is being staked, and only the rewards are being used to fund Ethereum Security.
We are a fund dedicated to improving Ethereum security. In January 2026 we activated over 75,000 ETH of unclaimed TheDAO funds as an endowment. The ETH is staked, and the staking rewards fund security work for the whole ecosystem.
The fund is stewarded by 7 Curators: 2 OG Curators from 2016, Vitalik Buterin and Griff Green, plus Taylor Monahan, Jordi Baylina, pcaversaccio, Alex Van de Sande and Pol Lanski. All legends in their own right.
Our goal: make Ethereum so safe, your life savings are better off stored on Ethereum than in a bank.
Two smart contracts that sat mostly untouched since 2016:
We operate as an endowment. Roughly 69,000 ETH is staked on decentralized infrastructure run by Dappnode, with validators spread across clients and 4 continents. The rewards from staking are used to fund Ethereum Security.
Note: the main DAO withdraw contract created by the hard fork is NOT part of the fund. DAO tokens continue to be redeemable for ETH, same as they have been since 2016.
Yes. Keeping claims open is a core commitment of this fund.
We want to fund security initiatives that are creating clear public value to Ethereum. Every project locks its own doors: audits, bug bounties, monitoring for their own four walls. Almost nobody funds the shared building: the compilers, the wallets, the signing flows, the incident responders who pick up the phone at 3am.
That is our focus. Work we have supported includes:
We have supported 134 projects with over 1000 ETH so far across these categories, check out who we have supported on our Transparency page.
From the bottom up, with real experts in the loop.
The 7 Curators act like a board: they set each round's budget, approve the distribution mechanism, and sign the multisig transactions (4-of-7) for funding execution. The actual funding direction comes from the ETHSecurity Badge holders, the top security experts in Ethereum, who apply their expertise to decide where the money goes, and the broader Ethereum community itself.
Every round runs on an open mechanism, and ends with a public retrospective so the next round is better than the last. Open books, on-chain distributions, & published learnings.
ETHSecurity Badges are NFTs on Ethereum mainnet held by the top security experts in Ethereum: the auditors, whitehats, researchers, and protocol engineers who have spent years finding bugs, preventing hacks, and cleaning up when things go wrong. They are TheDAO's DAO.
The Badge is not a job. We don't require Badge holders to do work for the fund. We ask them to apply their expertise to our funding decisions, so the money follows the judgment of the people who actually understand Ethereum security, and we give them special opportunities to become more engaged.
Each badge holder gets two NFTs: a public credential Badge and a separate private voting Badge, so they can vote honestly without social pressure. Selection was rigorous: every application was researched and scored against a rubric (with help from the Bonfires AI team), and Badges went out in three batches through 2026.
Applications are open, and we will consider bringing on new members as needed for future rounds. There are no concrete plans to do so now. Follow @thedaofund on X for updates.
They are the expert signal at the center of every funding distribution.
In our first quadratic funding round, each $1 a Badge holder donated counted as $4 in the matching calculation, roughly doubling their influence over the matching pool. They also received FINN & TIK, donation tokens backed by the fund, which they allocated across projects.
In future rounds, Badge holders may rank ecosystem initiatives to allocate a budget set forth from TheDAO Security Fund.
Badge holders participation in these rounds is generally private but is always reviewed to ensure integrity in the process.
We experiment deliberately: one mechanism per round, a public retrospective after each one.
We started with quadratic funding. Our May 2026 round put a 500 ETH matching pool behind community donations, with Badge holder votes amplified and cluster matching to resist collusion. The ecosystem showed up with over $600k on top of our matching pool, from sponsors like Wintermute and Quantstamp, alongside hundreds of individual donors, funding 134 projects.
Our next round, targeting late 2026, will be built around funding larger ecosystem initiatives through RFPs (Requests for Proposals). We are working with experts to write RFPs for specific security work with a budget attached. More on this to come soon...
Future rounds will keep evolving as we learn what works and moves the needle.
It depends on the round. Every funding round publishes its own eligibility criteria.
Our quadratic funding round required projects to be security-focused with a track record of public benefit. RFP rounds will be different: for-profit companies can compete to win them, and some RFPs may even call for closed-source work where that is what the job requires.
Two things never change: we believe in competitive mechanisms, and we do not pick winners. Funding flows through our funding rounds, never through one-off grants.
In short, we will not pay for your audits.
Depends on the round. Soon, we will be collecting ideas for ecosystem initiatives that can be formed into competitive RFPs. Reach out on X or through our website.
Still have questions?
Our team is happy to help you out.
