Blockchain historical events are quite interesting and useful little pieces of knowledge; let's write an article about it after discussing it in the live stream!
The token crowdfunding of Ethereum experienced a major catastrophic event, which even led to a fork in the Ethereum blockchain.
On April 30, 2016, the The DAO project conducted a token crowdfunding on Ethereum, and by May 28, this project had raised 11.5 million ether, which was worth over 150 million dollars at the price of ether at that time, making it the largest crowdfunding at that time.
However, on June 9, 2016, a developer discovered a vulnerability in The DAO's smart contract and submitted a fix on the open-source platform.
On June 17, hackers exploited a vulnerability to transfer 3.6 million Ether to an anonymous address, accounting for one-third of the total.
Fortunately, constrained by The DAO's 28-day lock-up period, the hackers could only transfer the Ether on July 14.
Regarding how to deal with this vulnerability and hacker attack incident, and to recover losses, the Ethereum community split into two groups. At that time, the total number of Ether was over 80 million, and if 11,500,000 were stolen by hackers, it would indeed have a huge impact on the Ethereum ecosystem.
After various proposals failed, Vitalik (known as 'Lord V') proposed a hard fork plan (that is, the Ethereum blockchain would not be backward compatible from a certain block), thus reclaiming the Ether raised by The DAO and transferring it to a recovery address to return it to the contributors.
The hard fork plan received 85% support in community votes and successfully forked on July 21, 2016, recovering the losses.
However, some members of the Ethereum community disagreed with this hard fork (believing that no one should change the rules), and they remained on the original Ethereum blockchain, continuing to develop and maintain that chain. Subsequently, the Ethereum blockchain forked into two branches:
One is new and called Ethereum (its token is called ETH);
The other is called Ethereum Classic (Ethereum Classic, its token is called ETC, the original Ethereum).