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TheDAO Security Fund opened the second round of its ETHSecurity Initiatives program on Tuesday, publishing a crowd77 million in funding and asking the companies that benefit from the work to co-fund it
In round one, more than 20 ecosystem funders and 3,934 donors put over $1.6 million into security projects, TheDAO said, adding that it has coordinated funding of more than 1,000 ETH to 135 security projects since inception.
“The first round spread funds widely; this round will instead go deep,” the team said. “We willdinate the funding & execution of the best of them. Think of it as Ethereum’s security to-do list, and anyone can add initiatives to the list!”
Co-Funding as the Filter
Initiatives arrive as RFPs, with a budget and draft milestones but no team, or as grants, which name the team up front. Live now are a $600,000 grant to the Vyper Foundation for an end to end formally verified compiler and $300,000 for a privacy-preserving endpoint detection tool from Auditware. At least a third of every budget must go to adoption milestones, and payment on each one is withheld until an independent reviewer, picked and named in the agreement before any work starts, marks it a pass, though teams can draw up to half of the first milestone in advance, TheDAO curator Griff Green said.
“Co-funding is the filter,” Green wrote in the post. If the teams that would benefit will not chip in, he added, the work is either wrong, not urgent, or overpriced.
A Record Year for Attacks
TRM Labs <a href="https://www.trmlabs.com/resources/blog/h1-2026-crypto-hacks-reach-record-high-as-losses-fall-below-usd-1-billion” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>counted 207 attacks in the first half of 2026, “the highest number TRM has recorded in any six month period,” even as total losses fell by more than half. The firm put the year past **$1.2 billion**across 276 incidents after the Coldcard exploit in late July.
The rise of exploits, particularly ones targeting long undiscovered bugs in code, has come with the advancement of AI tools for debugging. Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team reported in December that AI agents “developed exploits collectively worth $4.6 million” in simulation against contracts hacked after the models’ training cutoffs, and uncovered “two novel zero-day vulnerabilities” the same way. Green told teams in Tuesday’s announcement that draft milestones can be rewritten, “especially given the speed of development we’re seeing now in the age of AI.”
Unchained reported in January that unclaimed money left over from TheDAO, most of it crowdsale overage never collected after the hard fork that followed the 2016 DAO hack, would seed a $220 million endowment. “We have 69,000 ETH staked, earning ~5 ETH a day to support Ethereum security,” Green wrote Tuesday.
Two hundred ETHSecurity Badge holders will rank whatever is still unfunded in mid-November, and the highest-ranked get completed from the treasury. The round closes at the end of January, and anything that misses closes with it.
“We hope ETHSecurity Initiatives becomes a Schelling point for discovering and co-funding the security holes most of us don’t even know we have,” Green wrote in the post.
Related Listen:The Chopping Block: ColdCard’s $100M RNG Hack, AI-Powered Security & Ethereum’s Staking Yield Taper
Source: unchainedcrypto.com