After the group of developers known as “Robin Hood” rescued two-thirds of ethers to safer child DAOs, attackers are again in a position to utilise the weaknesses of The DAO.

According to Slock.it developer Lefteris Karapetsas, probably the attacker has successfully taken a stake in both “rescue” child DAOs where the funds were moved:

“Someone donated ether to The DAO with the sole purpose of having some balance inside The DAO so that he can join split 78, which is a whitehat DAO. He did not manage to get a lot but he has some tokens inside that DAO right now,” Karapetsas explained to CoinDesk.

Still, according to the rules of The DAO, the attacker will not be able to use it before a 27-day grace period expires. That means that the developers have enough time to decide whether to execute a fork in the system to prevent the attacker from hacking it again.

Ethpool and Ethermine, the mining pools that launched voting on whether to implement the soft fork, have been recently joined by the largest ether mine, Dwarfpool, though so far only 2.3% of its hash power has had their say. The voting  will end “a few days before the freeze period of the Child-DAO.” Until then, the majority of miners are expected to express their view through voting with their hash power in favour of or against a soft fork. The miners can also choose a “don't care” option to abstain. For the time being, most of the votes cast are in favour of the soft work.

As Lefteris Karapetsas wrote on the corporate blog, the rescued ethers are “safe for the time being”, but a fork is necessary to fully secure them. Since the attacker is still unknown, Karapetsas believes that, regardless of what the decision on the hard or soft forks would be, it is important “to identify each and every single one of the other split voters who have voted ‘yes’ in Prop #78 and Prop #99.”

After that, any of the following options can be executed: a hard fork, a targeted soft fork, or no fork at all. Karapetsas believes that a hard fork is the most “elegant” and easiest solution, while a soft fork is likely to rescue most of the ethers within a few months but is sure to take much more time, while the no fork solution might result in the ethers being locked and never returned from the attacker.

While the fight for The DAO is going on, the price of the ether has been changing dramatically, falling from $21 to $10 and fluctuating around that mark over the last days.


Maria Rudina