A group of so-called “white hat hackers” are attempting to block access to the 7 mln ETC remained locked in a child DAO after the Ethereum hard fork so that TheDAO attacker could not withdraw them.

The hard fork performed in July was only a partial solution to TheDAO robbery. One of the child DAOs created by the intruder still contains the undistributed pre-fork Ethereum Classic tokens, their total value reaching $17 mln, Newsbtc reports. According to the Ethereum blog, the mostly-anonymous white hat hacker group associated with the Ethereum team intends to save these tokens from the attacker, who managed to withdraw two-thirds of ethers from TheDAO on 17 June, thus making the developers to hard-fork the whole platform.

It is yet unclear how the community will be informed about the result of the “rescue operation.”

The further fate of the tokens in case of their successful rescue has raised a vivid discussion in the crypto community. The user Satoshi- suggested that “they could be distributed based on number of % each person had on DAO.” Other commenters say it would be better to use this asset for further fund development or to sell it off.

There is a suspicion that the white hat hackers are going to keep the ETC for themselves. According to the user reddibrek, “DAO investments already returned to rightful owners in ETH. ETC is no-man's land.” 

Ethereum Classic is the original version of the token in the Ethereum blockchain not subject to the hard fork implemented last month. It was preceded by a campaign launched by those Ethereum users who did not agree with the “hard fork”. Presently, Ethereum Classic (ETC) is traded on numerous crypto exchanges along with forked ether (ETH).

Lyudmila Brus