It’s been a decade since I frantically pounded out a warning letter known as The DAO Moratorium. So urgent was the missive that we pushed the document live before it was complete, allowing anyone who was interested to read along in real time. Even as I and two colleagues typed out the finishing touches, hundreds of viewers appeared as Google’s anonymous wombats, aurochs, and chupacabras. They had come to read our message to the world that warned of critical early vulnerabilities in the codebase of an Ethereum project that left nearly $200 million exposed to hackers.
The message was clear: do not use The DAO. The term stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization, what was then a new crypto-based governance structure, pioneered in large part by the Ethereum community. In this case, the DAO offered a crowdfunding mechanism, designed to let anyone contribute to a pool of capital, and share in a new pool of tokens.
