The Ethereum community has been having an all night (Australian time) forking party.
Just before 23:31:30 20/07/2016 AEST, the planned hard-fork in the Ethereum node software transferred all ethers locked in the hacked The DAO and it’s child DAOs into a Withdrawal contract (0xbf4ed7b27f1d666546e30d74d50d173d20bca754). The balance of this contract was then 11,597,664.781027947 Ether ($145,318,739.71).
The DAO thief no longer has access to the stolen ~ USD 50 million ethers.
This morning at 08:31:16 21/07/2016 AEST, the Withdrawal contract now has a balance of 6,369,298.685677664 Ether ($79,807,312.53), after 1,506 transactions were executed to convert ~ 45% of the total The DAO tokens into ETH. Investors in hacked The DAO converted their The DAO tokens into ethers using the Withdrawal contract.
More details at How do I convert my The DAO tokens into ethers using the withdrawal contract after the hard fork?.
Here’s a comparison of the hard-forked blockchain supporting ethers in the hacked The DAO being returned to the investors, the blockchain rejecting the hacked ethers being returned to the investors, and the non-upgraded Ethereum node client blockchain. The hard-fork blockchain is dominant by far – the hard fork worked very well.
fork.ethstats.net
Well done Ethereum Devs and the community!
The ~15% of ethers that was locked up in The DAO has now been freed up. Some naysayers (Bitcoin maximalists?) have been fear-mongering, warning that the freed-up ethers will flood the market driving down the price of ethers. But many who invested in The DAO were happy to lock up their ethers in The DAO to invest in bootstrap building the Ethereum ecosystem, and most of these individuals still have the same intentions despite the hack destroying the first The DAO.
I’m now waiting for the new security-improved DAO to re-invest my ethers into building up the Ethereum ecosystem. Phoenix DAO anyone?