The DAO Security Fund: Turning a Historic Hack into Ethereum's Future | Griff Green

Friederike Ernst (0:00)

Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization in the Blockchain revolution. I'm Friederike Ernst, and I'm speaking with Griff Green today. My hot take is, this is not made for end users. If you are a user, you have probably shouldn't be on Ethereum.

Griff Green (0:17)

Ethereum is super secure, but it's not safe. You can get phished, you can have your assets in a smart contract that gets hacked. You can send money to the right address on the wrong chain. The DAO hack is probably the only hack ever where everyone made money.

DAO token holders got all of their Ether back and Ether classic. We just need to get more serious about making a safe environment for normal people. And then like, if that was a priority, we would be there. But we've always had this cypher punk priority. But we shouldn't force everyone down that route. We should actually give the people what they want, which is safety. So far we've actually been able to allocate over a thousand Ether to 135 different security projects.

Friederike Ernst (1:06)

Hi guys, welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization and the Blockchain revolution. I'm Friederike Ernst and I'm speaking with Griff Green today, who has been on the show many times before. Today I'm speaking with him as the co-initiator of the DAO Security Fund. Before we speak with Griff, let me tell you about our sponsors this week.

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Friederike Ernst (2:31)

Griff, it's been a while. How have you been?

Griff Green (2:35)

Great. I've been having a lot of fun with the DAO Security Fund.

Friederike Ernst (2:39)

Super nice. When the announcement came a while back, I was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, I have to convert the remaining DAO tokens that I still hold, because they're backed still, I can always redeem them, so I never did. It's like the original NFT, the proof you were there. I was like, oh, no, now my funds will be used.

In this, for this great cause, but kind of they're my funds, what do I do? And then kind of I read about it more, and I was like, okay, it's actually fine. It's not my funds being used and so on. So I assume almost everyone who listens to this podcast at this point knows about the DAO, but maybe let's talk about kind of your specific role in the DAO scenario. And then we can talk about kind of why so much truth was left over and kind of what you and a couple of others went on to do with it then.

Griff Green (3:49)

Sure. You want me to just rants about the DAO in my role?

Friederike Ernst (3:52)

I can go on.

Griff Green (3:53)

Make sure to interrupt me because I'm a hell of a ranter. Like watch out, feel free. But yeah, so my first gig in crypto was the DAO and Slockit.

So if we rewind to 2015, Ethereum just launched and a few members of the Ethereum Foundation broke off to start Slockit. Slockit was a sharing economy start-up and their goal, Slockit stood for smart lock.

So the idea was, hey, we could put a lock on a locker or turn on any kind of device, give that device its own Ethereum address and you could send money to that device, it would turn on or it would open up the lock and then you could take whatever is in that locker and you're good to go, right? And so I jumped on to Slockit because of the sharing economy dream before the DAO existed. I was technically their first employee.