Unchained The DAO’s Unclaimed ETH Becomes a $220M Ethereum Security Fund
Jan 29, 2026
Griff Green, co-founder of Giveth and longtime Ethereum organizer who helped recover funds after the 2016 DAO hack, discusses turning unclaimed DAO ETH into a staked security endowment. He outlines plans for funding Ethereum and rollup security, reviving DAO governance experiments, staking leftover ETH for sustainable grants, and prioritizing tooling, audits, and incident response to make crypto safer.
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DAO Leftovers Become A Security Endowment
- The DAO leftovers are being repurposed into a long-term Ethereum security fund by staking unclaimed ETH.
- Staking the extra balance will generate sustainable revenue to fund security research and incident response.
Where The Remaining ETH Comes From
- About 3% of the DAO funds were edge cases post-hard-fork, split into buckets like child DAOs and extra balance.
- The largest unclaimed bucket is the extra balance, roughly 70,000 ETH remaining to be claimed.
Preserve DAO Tokens, Fund By Staking
- Hold the original DAO tokens and don't convert them immediately to ETH to preserve claimants' options.
- Use staking of extra-balance ETH as the primary funding mechanism rather than touching the DAO-token-backed withdrawal contract.
