Block 1920000 - The DAO fork

Data art from Ethereum block 1920000 (The DAO fork). A collaboration between generative artist HEX0x6C (digital layer coded in Processing) and visual artist Chiara Braidotti (hand drawing on top of) for a (forthcoming) Virtual Reality museum telling the history of Ethereum through art. The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (known as The DAO) was meant to operate like a venture capital fund for the crypto space. The lack of a centralized authority reduced costs and in theory provides more control and access to the investors. The DAO was an unexpected success and accumulated 12.7M Ether (worth around $150M at the time) during the creation period, making it the biggest crowdfund ever. However, on June 17, 2016, a hacker found a vulnerability in the code that allowed him to drain 3.6 million ETH ($70 million at the time) from The DAO. Two main issues made this possible: the fact that when the DAO smart contract was created the coders did not take into account the possibility of a recursive call and the fact that the smart contract first sent the ETH funds and then updated the internal token balance. To refund the lost money, Ethereum hard forked to send the hacked funds to an account available to the original owners. This happened at block 1920000. A small community decided to not upgrade their nodes, to fork the code and to mine a new network called Ethereum Classic. Anyone with a balance on the Ethereum network would, at the fork block, automatically have their balance on the Ethereum Classic network too.