The DAO Hack sequel – what’s next?


HOME PAGE KRYPTO BITCOIN EPILOGUE TO DAO HACK – WHAT’S THE NEXT STEP?
What happened to the thief after the DAO hack? A question you want to avoid even now, weeks after the big theft.

Questions from CoinDesk suggest that the Ethereum community has finally abandoned the search for the criminal individual or group – the money is now refunded.

Let’s remember: the DAO Hack has motivated a large part of the Ethereum community to become Hard Forks. The idea was that all Ethereum users would quickly switch to the new fork, so the DAO attacker would sit on his now worthless coins.

But what didn’t happen: the old blockchain was maintained by people who were critical of the Bitcoin loophole

Two weeks went by and Ethereum Classic – the Ethereum without Hard Fork – has reached a market capitalization of 200 million dollars. The market has given the Bitcoin loophole tokens, which used to be called ETC, the value of the fifth largest digital currency.

This development is not only interesting for investors and traders, but of course also for the DAO hacker…

In the event of a successful sale, the thief would get away with $8.5 million.
Sure, it’s small compared to the original stolen funds, but it’s still huge.

Currently you can see that the hacker has recognized the value of his stolen property: in recent days the funds have been moved within Ethereum Classic.

DAO Funds on the news spy

So onlinebetrug asks the question if and when the hacker wants to sell his values stored in ETC. The rules concerning the DAO regarding the the news spy of funds have not changed, so that the 27 days countdown, which is needed to remove the DAO funds after a split, came into effect again at Ethereum Classic.

Nick Johnson, software developer at the Ethereum Foundation (which supported the Hard Fork), explained how the DAO hacker could make a profit by converting the funds into another digital currency.

He suspects, but admittedly without further investigation, that the attacker was not among the curators. He therefore had to open another DAO in order to transfer the funds there in order to be able to control them.

The same interviews explain the desire to deprive the DAO hacker of his profit. But there are often no more than wishes.

Continue to the Rabbit Hole
The whole story’s gonna get more complicated anyway. Before the Hard Fork, an attempt was made to gain control over the funds as part of a White Hat hack. At the time of the fork, there were several DAOs, which in turn contained finds that could be stolen from the hacker’s DAO. Finally, these DAOs and their finds still exist on the Ethereum Classic Blockchain.

ETH has a total value of about 17 million dollars in two White Hat DAOs. It is still unclear how these values could be sold, who is behind each DAO and whether any efforts are being made to involve the original Token Holders.

Ethereum lead developer Fabian Vogelsteller and UX designer Alex Van de Sande both said they don’t know what to do with the resources or who owns the corresponding private keys. Ultimately, however, that’s not where their interest lies, which is entirely on the post-hard fork blockchain.

According to them, the hacker will get away with his stolen property. Van de Sade comments on it maliciously:

„I don’t know what will happen to the White Hat DAOs. But the people behind the Dark DAO got away with a lot of Ether Classic. And that’s what Ethereum Classic was about, right?“

The goalkeeper
For the hacker, this leaves the Ethereum Exchanges as a possible final boundary between the funds and his profit. However, there are problems here: although it is quite easy to exchange money for the currency of your choice via Exchanges, the hacker will be disturbed by the AML and LYC rules.

According to Tristan D’Agosta, the founder and CEO of Poloniex, the next step would be to
the hacker’s conversion from ETC to BTC. However, if there is movement in these funds, the attacker will have difficulty hiding – which will be difficult on a public blockchain.

Kraken, the second largest Ethereum Exchange, did not want to answer the questions.