DAO attackers transfer millions of ETC, ETC development team receives $1,500

The attacker has successfully transferred the stolen funds from The DAO from the ETC chain and donated part of the funds to ETC developers.

Last Tuesday, the DAO attacker transferred funds. First, 1000 ETC worth about 1500美元was transferred to the address of the ETC development team. People began to speculate that the initial motive of the DAO attack was to force Ethereum to fork and eventually split the entire community.

Ethereum Attacks

Hackers exploited a vulnerability in the DAO smart contract and stole funds, totaling 3.6 million Ether, worth $50 million. In order to retrieve the stolen funds and prevent the hackers from succeeding, Ethereum implemented a hard fork, which also promoted the emergence of ETC. Afterwards, a white hat hacker team took back 7 million ETC from the attackers, equivalent to about 16 million US dollars.

Since then, ETC has experienced a speculative bubble, with an early value increase of 300%, and is even regarded as the world's third largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin and Ethereum. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin publicly stated that he would not support ETC no matter how much the price of ETC increased. In any case, the ETC community has already grown to a small size, and even has a small part of the funds of the DAO attackers.

Attacks are a part of the early days of cryptocurrency

When a digital currency is in its early stages of development, its systems are relatively new, and without the protection of central banks, large exchanges are vulnerable to attacks. In fact, one-third of large exchanges have experienced attacks. This is partly because exchanges choose to provide user fund transfer services in hot wallets rather than cold storage models. Although it is basically impossible to retrieve funds from attackers, since most cryptocurrencies operate on public chains, their transactions are transparent and can be traced back to the source of funds to some extent, which makes it difficult for hackers to sell off funds later.

However, it is difficult to track transactions for currencies like Monero that run on private chains. In other words, hackers can convert their ill-gotten gains into Monero, which can avoid transaction tracking and avoid exposing their private information.