The $55M Hack That Almost Brought Ethereum Down

Bloomberg News reporter Mathew Leising's new book, "Out of the Ether: The Amazing Story of Ethereum and the $55 Million Heist That Almost Destroyed It All", tells the story of the infamous DAO hack that almost brought down the world's second-largest blockchain.

A religious family man, Jentzsch takes this extemporaneous moment to reflect on the challenges that faced the DAO's creation - from securities worries that still plague token projects to the critical opinions of the early Ethereum community - before taking action.

A DAO is what got him into Ethereum in the first place, the moment he realized its potential.

How the heck do you do that? Easy; it's like any other proposal to the DAO - it gets voted on by DAO token holders.

Now, back to the DAO. The people who bought DAO tokens never gave their money to Christoph or anyone at slock.

It's not overstating it to say that the DAO made Ethereum.

The brightest minds in Ethereum at the time also gathered to act as a sort of fail-safe mechanism to prevent an attack against the DAO. Known as curators, group members included Vitalik, Vlad Zamfir, Alex Van de Sande, Gavin Wood, Taylor Gerring, Aeron Buchanan, and others.

It's important to note here that the DAO had a huge part to play in the early history of Ethereum.

You first had to buy ether to then buy DAO tokens, so it's easy to see that thousands of people were converting Bitcoin to ether to then buy DAO tokens, sending the price of ether to a record high.

As the May 28 DAO fundraising deadline had approached, the amount of ether in the DAO just kept going up.