TheDAO has been hacked, now what?
Over 3M of Ether ($50M at the time of the event) were siphoned out of TheDAO smart contract, and some claiming that it was within the contract’s rights to do this since the smart contract code was described as the final arbiter.
The Ethereum leadership response was swift with the proposal of soft and hard fork in order to reclaim the funds, however accompanied with a costly effect of shuttering the decentralization promise and the potential risk of alienating users and companies from ever using the public blockchain again.
The drama continues with Ethereum experts launching white-hat attacks against the remaining TheDAO funds, in order to safeguard the remaining Ether as much as possible. Moreover, further white-hat attacks are planned against the contracts which hold the coins from the initial exploits, in order to recover the funds that were managed to be captured using the exploit. There is a cautious optimism in the air now, however it still remains to be seen how everything will play out.
Where WINGS stands on this whole matter?
Despite being quiet on the matter, we have closely followed this from the start on Friday to this very moment. We also have extensively communicated with blockchain experts and security researchers, in order to have the best understanding of the situation and the ways to prevent it.
As our goal is to allow mainstream companies to launch secure and easy to manage decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), we must absolutely avoid even a hint of a possible compromise. Therefore, before continuing with our own DAO plans, we had to consider all the available options and find the most safe path.
Let’s start with the most important matter — our personal belief in potential of DAOs to change the way businesses and organizations are launched and operated remains as solid as ever. We believe that the Ethereum team will be able to recover from these events, and enable the community to leave this unpleasant episode behind them.
Moreover, following this event the fledgling blockchain 2.0 industry consisting of companies, developers and users will become stronger and wiser as the result. Those writing smart contacts are learning the lessons of this event in order to establish new standards.
How Wings DAO is different?
It is important to remember that the attack was on a specific DAO, rather than on DAOs as a concept. Considering all DAOs unsafe now is like considering that any software attack makes all the software in the world not safe.
WINGS will not act as a decentralized venture capital fund (similar to “The DAO”), and any funds gathered will be used to develop and promote the WINGS DAO platform, with no dangerous funds manipulation options such as splitting.
Each new DAO created on top of the WINGS platform will be a standalone project. It will issue its own tokens, work according to its own contracts, manage its own funds and have its own governance model.
Simplicity is key.
WINGS goal is to be a abstraction layer enabling easy interaction for DAO participants. By having each DAO running using simplified smart contracts will allow for faster code reviews, proofing and testing of contracts. Contract amounts will naturally be lower in real world terms, at least initially.
What WINGS plan to do on the matter?
Following this event, we decided to take a step back and double our efforts on the design of our DAO platform security, in order to ensure such situation may never repeat again.
We are planning to implement some unique measures that were not present at The DAO. These measures will include:
Cooperation with Rootstock for secure side-chain DAO’s on Bitcoin
Federated transactions control
Lawyers participating in smart contracts drafting
Research into functional language based smart contracts
Optional multi-signature for funds release
Unique contracts and tokens per each launched DAO
Code auditing by blockchain security experts
These and other details will be outlined in the white paper we are working on, which we will be presented for community review.
Conclusion
Bottom line we believe that the DAO Age we declared several weeks ago is alive and kicking. The blockchain 2.0 community will emerge stronger, wiser and more cautious, learning the necessary lessons out of this event in order to ensure it never happens again. People will prefer participating in smaller DAOs focused on concrete projects, rather than pooling funds into a single larger “virtual VC” fund, which provides a more lucrative target to the hackers.
This is exactly the area where WINGS will shine, and we can leverage the platform for bridging between the smart contracts technology and mainstream companies and participants, enabling funding of innovative products and services and further evolving decentralized applications ecosystem.
