UPDATE (20th June 22:10 BST): This piece has been updated with a statement from Deloitte

Three members of Deloitte’s blockchain team specializing in building custom distributed ledger products for enterprises have left the organization to found what could be seen as a competing product.

But, far from a radical departure, the co-founders of the newly launched startup, called Nuco, say the real reason they've departed is to raise more capital faster than they could have with Deloitte.

Instead of competing against his former colleagues at Deloitte, Nuco CEO Mathew Spoke said they’ll be one of his earliest partners.

Spoke told CoinDesk:

"We’re essentially continuing on the track of what we started doing at Deloitte. We recognized the need for more capital and realized that we could move more quickly if we were a standalone company."

Based in Toronto, Spoke said his team of six is currently building a customizable technology stack that would allow users to build blockchain services that can help streamline across a wide-range of possible use cases.

Nuco’s business model is to build, license and deploy customized private blockchain networks for clients across industries. Specifically, Nuco will begin building tools for tracking compliance duties for firms accountable to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and federal environmental regulators.

The spin-off

Founded in 2015, Deloitte's Rubix blockchain division played an integral role in positioning the company at the forefront of global financial institutions working to tap the emerging technology for new efficiencies.

As the effort progressed Deloitte wanted to focus its efforts on blockchain app development for its clients, while spinning off the Ethereum-based network on which the apps might be built to Nuco. Deloitte already works with at least five other blockchain companies.

"The subtlety on this," said Terry Stuart, Deloitte Canada's chief innovation officer, "is that we’ve taken the Rubix kernel and we said lets put that over in Nuco for Matt and his team to drive that forward."

As part of an agreement with Deloitte Jinius Tu, Rubix's lead blockchain developer and a Nuco co-founder, is staying at Rubix for the next two weeks to three weeks as part of the formal hand-over of intellectual property developed by the team, but owned by Deloitte.

Spoke and co-founder Kesem Frank, a blockchain specialist at Deloitte, are now working on Nuco full time.

The first steps

In the weeks and months ahead, Nuco will work to develop a strategy that will allow it to gain market share.

Apart from its technology stack, Spoke said another option currently "on the table" is to add its offering to Microsoft's Azure platform, designed to help streamline the creation of enterprise blockchain tech.

Nuco is currently in the process of raising its first round of capital, which Spoke expects will close soon.

Spoke said the company is not sharing the amount it plans to raise, but that his co-founders have already proved valuable in the negotiation of terms. Stuart said Deloitte plans to be a minority investor in the company.

Spoke said:

"This is my first foray into the entrepreneurship world, but our history of working together has made for easy conversations with investors."

Nuco co-founders image via Matthew Spoke

DeloitteNuco

Original author: Michael del Castillo

More than $19m worth of bitcoin is now being sold at auction in a public sale overseen by professional services firm Ernst & Young.

Announced on 30th May, the auction finds E&Y auctioning 24,518 BTC (worth roughly $19m at press time) over a 48-hour period that began at 12:01am AEST today. As previously reported, the bitcoins were confiscated by law enforcement officials from an Australian native in late 2014 in connection with a narcotics investigation.

But with bitcoin trading at two-year highs, just who is interested in the auction and whether it draws the same number of high-profile participants as major US auctions, remains to be seen.

So far, CoinDesk has only been able to identify one auction participant who has come forward to indicate they will be entering bids as part of the event, Silicon Valley-based bitcoin buying service Binary Financial.

US auction participants including itBit and Pantera Capital said they will not be entering bids, while New York-based trading firms Genesis Mining and Cumberland Mining had not responded to requests for additional information at press time. (E&Y declined to provide insight into the number of participating bidders).

While the high price of bitcoin at auction may seem a likely deterrent, Binary managing partner Harry Yeh indicated that the auction blocks could prove enticing to over-the-counter bitcoin trading firms like his own, who he said have been struggling to source demand stemming from bitcoin’s recent gains.

Yeh told CoinDesk:

“We want to help our clients accumulate more bitcoin. Right now, getting any access where you can buy bitcoin without a huge premium is an advantage.”

Sources suggested OTC buyers are now paying as much as 2% above market prices, meaning at $748, bitcoins sold off exchanges would be trading at above $760.

The price of bitcoin has seen rapid appreciation in recent weeks ahead of a long-planned network change called the halving. Though experts debate the exact impetus of the price increase, the halving has long been of interest to speculators as it marks the start of the amount of new bitcoins minted daily declining by 50%.

While the first bitcoin auction drew global interest due to the participation of the US government, subsequent auctions have largely failed to draw strong bidder and media interest.

Auction image via Shutterstock

AuctionsAustraliaErnst & Young

Original author: Pete Rizzo

Gabrielle Patrick is a UK and US lawyer specializing in cryptofinance and distributed ledger technology. She is the co-founder and general counsel of Epiphyte, a startup enabling instant settlement of trades and transactions using distributed ledgers.

In this feature, Patrick discusses the balancing act regulators face in such a fast-changing technological environment, and describes the issues raised at a European Central Bank (ECB) meeting on the subject this week. 

Today, regulators face the challenge of delicately balancing innovation enablement and avoiding premature and overly burdensome regulation.

On the one hand, they are expected to ensure market stability and ensure public trust and confidence, yet on the other they are being asked to spur innovation.

This all comes at a time when technology is advancing much faster than laws can adapt and when the bitcoin blockchain network offers a fundamental shift in how we transact value instantaneously and how money supply management can be improved.

The opportunity for regulators seems clear: an ability to regulate with enhanced transparency, with access to the best data in real time with regulatory features built into the infrastructure itself (eg: monitoring transaction flow end to end in real time with built-in settlement and compliance functionality).

So why aren't regulators jumping at this opportunity?

Regulators’ questions

Epiphyte was invited to address 25 central banks at the ECB this week to discuss the FinTech impact on payment and settlement systems, and the regulation of digital innovations. The discussion was dominated by the impact of the bitcoin blockchain network.

Some of the topics raised were:

the pros and cons of closed loop vs permissioned and open distributed ledgers cross-border flows and how to avoid systemic risk if adoption of bitcoin significantly increases global blockchain standards and ensuring that all proprietary systems are built with interoperability the scalability of the bitcoin blockchain network and liquidity resource savings using distributed ledgers, resource intensity of maintaining multiple databases and using distributed ledgers as an enhanced sharing mechanism the lack of incentive of large banks to progress instant settlement solutions capital efficiency and reduction of (capital, market and counterparty) risk.

Instant settlement solutions

Focus was also placed on settlement cycles versus assets using the blockchain. Presumably, if using the network, the settlement cycle is significantly reduced. This would not require regulatory change, but a change in settlement asset, such as bonds issued on a distributed ledger, would trigger a regulatory change.

Another major point raised was the premature exposure of systemically fundamental systems to distributed ledgers.

Since central banks must rely on mature and resilient systems, the introduction of base money on a distributed ledger at this time may be premature.

Digital identification

Perhaps one of the most interesting discussions was on identification and the need to address digital ID as part of the essential fabric of an evolved financial services ecosystem.

In the current system, ID frameworks still remain primarily paper based, and the process of onboarding into the financial services system is riddled with inefficiencies, friction and expense.

A transformation to digital ID is long overdue, taking the Estonian example, whereby an electronic national ID card provides the user with legal picture ID in addition to use for digital signatures and for proof of e-access generally.

At the ECB meeting, the open-source standard Epiphyte has been developing was also discussed, whereby ID can be ported using a multi-signature key mechanism with different schemes and different layers of access being created for different views of subject data.

What about RegTech?

While regulatory interest continues worldwide, perhaps regulators should pay more attention to how they can leverage the advantages of distributed ledgers themselves to help firms better understand and manage their risks.

After all, RegTech is the new FinTech.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, CoinDesk.

ECBRegulation

Original author: Gabrielle Patrick

Bitcoin’s oldest trade organization has voted in a new executive director.

Weeks after outgoing executive director Bruce Fenton notified the board his term was nearing conclusion (rumors suggested he had resigned), the Bitcoin Foundation has named Llew Claasen to the position.

A relative unknown in the bitcoin and wider blockchain community, Claasen is a venture capitalist from Cape Town, South Africa and the managing partner of Newtown Partners, who primarily has a background in online and mobile infrastructure. Fenton will remain a board member of the Bitcoin Foundation.

The vote reportedly took place on 14th June. Notably, board member and Civic CEO Vinny Lingham did not vote due to a "long business relationship" with Claasen.

The appointment follows news the Bitcoin Foundation had received new funding, months after continuing to operate with close to no reserves.

Though it once boasted a nearly 10-person full-time staff, the Bitcoin Foundation shed all of its paid employees over the course of 2014. Entering 2015, the organization reorganized as a primarily volunteer organization focused more on software development, thought its relevancy in this space has recently been challenged.

For more on the Bitcoin Foundation and its path forward, read our most recent feature.

Image courtesy of the Bitcoin Foundation

Bitcoin Foundation

Original author: Pete Rizzo

Jonathan Wolinsky is senior managing director and chief scientist of Genesis Project, the company behind the private blockchain platform OpenBlock.

In this opinion piece, Wolinsky – and colleague Robert Wolinsky – focus on the blockchain technology industry's inability to deliver on its promise: the bone crushing, market flattening creative destruction of the Bitcoin-style blockchain innovation.

In recent weeks, hot topics in the banking and blockchain technology sector have been the heist of $81 million from Bangladesh's central bank facilitated by hackers manipulating the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications) messaging platform, and the oft-repeated buzzwords "blockchain" and "distributed ledger" as the "white knight" technology duo that's going to correct all that ails SWIFT.

SWIFT is a global interbank messaging service connecting 11,000 financial institutions in more than 200 countries and territories around the world. SWIFT handles 25 million transfer messages worth approximately $5 trillion daily. However, because of SWIFT's importance to the global financial system, SWIFT's activities do not happen in a vacuum. Plainly said, the SWIFT hacking problem is a global banking industry problem.

Seeking to address this and other questions, since 2014, SWIFT, along with many major firms in the securities and banking industries, have banded together through consortia and collaborations to investigate how to reduce or eliminate mutualized costs, and improve security and reliability. These companies are embracing distributed ledger blockchain technology initiatives as a new means to long- term sustainability in an increasingly digital challenged marketplace.

Of course, there's nothing new about technology collaborations, even amongst competitors. So, let's chalk that up to just good public relations. However, despite the collaboration, the what's "new" is the increasing clarity that saying the word "blockchain" may be more about selling the "old" than delivering the "new".

Recently, I collaborated with colleagues at our firm to pen a contrarian viewpoint entitled "Can Trust-based Private Blockchains Be Trusted?". Our call-out was simple: permissioned or trust-based blockchains without the proof-of-work protocol provably do not deliver historical record immutability and are merely distributed databases impersonating blockchain technology. And since the article's debut, many blockchain development initiatives including the R3CEV group have fessed-up: they are not building blockchains at all. Investors take note.

So what's going on here?

A little history is in order. Since the inception of Bitcoin there's been two distinct evolutionary or generational steps. First, there was Bitcoin, the tour de force of market flattening and all sorts of disruption. In the abstract, Bitcoin was a fresh idea with tremendous promise. Nonetheless, enterprise- class users had problems using it right off the bat. And rightfully so.

Think about it. Having to get involved with or entangled by the openness of a public blockchain, the Bitcoin brand and its checkered history, internal convulsions, software rigidities and forks, regulatory murkiness, and having to rely on Bitcoin in perpetuity is a really big ask, especially for the folks in the C-suite. The reality was obvious, absent some miraculous innovation – Bitcoin's purpose is to be a digital currency, not an enterprise platform.

The eureka moment came in 2013, when the 2nd generation blockchain salesmen said, "We don't need the openness of a public blockchain; we can build 'private' blockchains without the limitations of Bitcoin, and build them better! Let's separate the blockchain from Bitcoin and make private, permissioned blockchains."

And, soon "the blockchain is going to change the world" meme made selling anything with the word "blockchain" easier. And, the idea of the "blockchain" as a discrete element conveying heretofore not seen revolutionary new efficiency to non-digital money activities was born. Capital started to flow into so-called "use cases" for blockchain technology.

However, in their zeal to harness the awesome power of blockchain technology for enterprise users, many newly minted "private" use-case innovations quickly jettisoned the blockchain data structure and the proof-of-work protocol. Because without having the market flattening disruption and network effect of a public blockchain, it's hard to rationalize the inefficiency of a blockchain database and its associated proof-of-work energy costs.

So what's left?

Once you remove the technology that makes Bitcoin what it is, what's left is a shared or common protocol platform consisting of existing "permissioned" parties inside the walled garden. Yes, getting onto a common platform can add some computational efficiencies between parties, but it's not a true P2P blockchain experience that changes worlds, levels markets and generates maximum efficiency – the type of disruption people think about when they hear the term "blockchain."

Blockchain technology is really a holistic technical assemblage

What most fail to realize is the blockchain structure becomes largely superfluous without the trustless environment. The blockchain data structure by itself – blocks of information chained together through cryptographic signatures – is not a particularly efficient way of storing or distributing information. However, when combined with the proof-of-work protocol, this ordinary chain of blocks transforms itself into an immutable record with tremendous potential.

Add an objective mechanism for determining the record's validity along with a consensus protocol and, poof, say "goodbye" to the necessity of a central authority and trusted or permissioned parties to maintain the veracity of a multiparty record; say "hello" to uber-efficient P2P transactions without counterparty risk.

In the case of blockchain technology, the benefits gained by removing counterparty risk results in an efficient peer-to-peer environment facilitated by the elimination of multiple and varied rent seekers. These benefits outweigh the costs of using an inefficient data structure as well as the energy costs required by the proof-of-work protocol to secure the provenance of the historical record in perpetuity.

However, when practitioners of 2nd generation blockchain technology reintroduce trusted third-parties in the form of permissioning, or trusted nodes, in order to maintain and "guarantee" the validity of the record, the inefficient blockchain data structure provides little to no value. The blockchain salesmen therefore logically remove the blockchain data structure or modify it into a pseudo-blockchain without real immutability, resulting in an information sharing network strangely similar to the systems that currently exist, albeit maybe using a new, common protocol.

It's important to note that pseudo-blockchains may have cryptographically signed blocks but lack the deterministic and external validation capabilities provided by the proof-of-work protocol that ensure the immutability of the record and the famous self-enforcement blockchain efficiency gains.

The gain comes at a price, though. Bitcoin pays approximately $400m to $500m a year to provide immutability for its record.

Second generation blockchain technology practitioners have repeatedly attempted to circumvent the costs of mining with various software, validator round-robins and circularity workarounds like proof-of- stake, not realizing or carelessly ignoring that both the externality and the resource consumption associated with the proof-of-work protocol are essential to providing immutability of the record, without which a blockchain becomes just your usual common protocol information-sharing environment.

Of course, a common protocol for sharing information may be beneficial, particularly for a system that lacks a common protocol. That's pretty obvious, but it is certainly not the type of efficiency provided by authentic blockchain technology. Nevertheless, the Bitcoin-style, trustless blockchain efficiency is the type of "efficiency" being sold with the term "blockchain" but not being delivered.

By 2016, the wheels started coming off the story. Not only did R3CEV admit they are not building blockchains, it appears Ripple, Blythe Masters' Digital Asset Holdings' Hyperledger, Chain, IBM and a lot of others may be just hawking the same-old common protocol (permissioned) information sharing systems along with varied round-robin consensus software, dressing them up as something new and revolutionary.

And, of course, gaining only the efficiency of going from a non-common-protocol environment to a common protocol environment, not delivering the bone crushing, outside the walled garden, creative destruction of the Bitcoin-style blockchain innovation.

And, so, with a bit of alchemy the "old" became "new" again.

Blockchain disruption is not alchemy

While all this profound thinking was churning the blockchain technology intelligentsia, there remained a small cadre of blockchain enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and data scientists, not alchemists, which understood the poetry behind the blockchain technology.

In the world of digital money, Bitcoin is a technological haiku, a masterpiece of simplicity, balance and rationality. We should not easily dismiss this amalgam of proportionality because, like haiku poetry's unique ability to convey a deep thought in the simplest of word and sentence, a blockchain does one thing extremely well: it eliminates counterparty risk in a transaction, leaving gobs of parties that previously ensured the completion of a transaction without jobs. This is both the simple elegance and the disruptive force of blockchain technology.

To be specific, Bitcoin's "high-art" blockchain innovation is the "trustless" or "self-enforcement" environment powered by the proof-of-work protocol. Without it, all you have is...a bunch of computers talking to each other the way they currently do.

As an aside (but relevant to deeper meanings), maybe Bitcoin's inventor chose the Japanese pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto to hint at his creation's Haiku-like perfection.

Where do we find Satoshi's 'high-art' in today's transcribers of his blockchain poetry?

Nowhere!

Only seven-odd years since exploding onto the world, "blockchain," once a descriptor of elegance, is now a pop-culture money slogan entering middle age. The slogan has raised over $1 billion from venture capital firms, businesses, angels and incubators. Many have likened it to the halcyon days of the Internet all over again.

Yes, slogans are useful for some things. However, blockchain slogans are not of the useful kind. Because when it comes to blockchain technology, where there's smoke, there's usually more smoke.

And the fall has been fast. In a mere seven years, cadres of blockchain salesmen and their academy cohorts have devolved and deconstructed the "high-art" into its several components, selling various elements as "blockchain technology" while either excluding or redefining the one component that animates the ordinary distributed ledger to become disruptive Haiku art, the "trustless" or "self- enforcement" environment made possible by an immutable record.

I would like to digress for a moment into a small technical discussion in order to elucidate the preposterous notion that blockchain components are malleable, interchangeable or removable while expecting the type of disruption associated with blockchain technology. Blockchains are comprised of three main interlocking components: 1) consensus, 2) authentication and 3) immutability. And, for the sake of clarity, the technology behind each of these components predates Bitcoin and the "blockchain" hype by decades.

Both the consensus mechanism (built into the underlying application logic) and authentication technology (provided by public key cryptography) are commonly used in distributed systems. However, prior to Bitcoin, the third component, immutability (provided by proof-of-work), was never before used in concert with the other two technologies. And, when all three were combined, something truly fresh and amazing, almost magical was created. In other words, proof-of-work tied the other components together into what became known in modern parlance as a "blockchain".

Of course, not everyone's happy with the inelasticity of the proof-of-work protocol and the science behind immutability and its cost, especially the promoters. So, in eagerness to commercialize, many promoters watered down the definition of immutability in order to shoehorn blockchain technology into their dream state. Unfortunately, the vaunted resiliency of blockchain technology – self-enforcement – is not transferable without the historical record immutability provided by the proof-of-work protocol.

In the face of the prior discussion, the most common response – said in a matter-of-fact manner to disguise the contempt for being caught – is: "well, we're not really building 'blockchains', we're building 'distributed ledgers'."

That is to say, they got rid of the inefficient blockchain data structure and the proof- of-work-enabled immutable record and brought back trusted third-party validators that merely reimpose a modified or virtual central authority scheme.

To use another big concept, what came – although, very slowly – was an understanding that blockchain promoters are just back where they started. And, the "where" is merely "work for hire" software projects, not the Internet all over again kind of stuff worthy of big investments and high-multiple financial exits customarily expected by the sophisticated investor class.

Where do investors go from here?

Until now, use-case validation schemes have guided investment. And there's likely many use-cases for common protocol systems in various sectors and industries. However, to achieve Nirvana, common protocols require en masse existing participants' adoption.

There's two problems here.

First, experienced financial individuals instinctively know that amassing whole industries is like herding cats and will likely never happen. The second problem is that investors didn't invest their cash into building common protocol software, they invested into (disruptive) blockchain technology.

So, investors need to take hold of the situation before too much money is lost and reputations destroyed because most if not all blockchain investment has gone into common protocol use-cases masquerading as "blockchain technology" with a return on investment likelihood of zilch. If you are one of those investors who thought you were investing in disruptive blockchain technology only to find out you got a "distributed ledger," I'm sorry to tell you – you got played. This isn't the Internet all over again, get used to it and cut your losses.

Moving forward, I recommend the following two guidelines.

One – investors need to differentiate between the few projects that unleash the Bitcoin-style disruption into new markets from the many so-called "blockchain" (use-case) projects that merely repackage common protocols that empower existing participants; and, two – if the blockchain technology industry persists in pretending to build blockchain technology, then the investment community should "pretend" to invest money.

As for the folks at SWIFT, be careful what you wish for. A real implementation of blockchain technology will put you out of business!

This piece was co-authored by Robert Wolinsky

Image via Shutterstock

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, CoinDesk.

Blockchain Technologydistributed ledgers

Original author: Jonathan Wolinsky

An entire ecosystem of decentralized autonomous ambitions was diverted yesterday following an attack on The DAO that sent millions of dollars worth of ether destined for startups to the account of an unknown attacker or group of attackers.

Of the more than $150m worth of ether raised from the sale of voting tokens, about $60m worth was withdrawn when an attacker exploited a vulnerability in the way the smart contracts distribute resources.

Originally meant to stimulate innovation in the ethereum community by giving the voting members a say in which ethereum-based projects they wanted to fund, plans are currently underway to return the digital currency to the original owners and shelve the project.

While not everyone agrees that this is the right course of action — or even possible — the events of yesterda leave 52 proposals awaiting review with an uncertain future.

There are those who argue that the attack, which took advantage of the way the smart contracts were written, should not be considered hack, and that the exposure of such a vulnerability is a fundamental part of a healthy ecosystem discovering its own weaknesses and improving.

But there’s something also of an effect that the air has been sucked out of the room. The once bright future of a technology built on a distributed ledger, with its promise to redefine even the way we govern ourselves has been sucker-punched.

The discovery period

As the sun came up yesterday morning news was already spreading on Reddit and in industry forums that someone appeared to be removing funds from the account valued at $162m at the time the token sale stopped.

Ethereum’s creator, Vitalk Buterin called for a “pause” of trading of both ether, the digital currency that powers the Ethereum network, and The DAO tokens that were meant to symbolize the voting power of the stake holders. In total, 3.6m ether valued at $60m at one point yesterday were moved to the account before the dust settled.

What was left of the nascent ecosystem by the time the funds stopped being redirected was the antithesis of the order promised by a code-based governance model with a built-in consensus mechanism designed to function as a young, digital democracy.

Reason for concern

Prior to this week, The DAO had already experienced a trove of problems that had the appearance of typical growing pains experienced by any young startup, but on a larger scale due to the exciting nature of an entirely new business model.

Problems with the governance model were found to lead to what is called a "yes bias" that discouraged token holders from casting a "no" vote, along with other issues pointed out by a team of researchers at Cornell University.

By the time the funds began moving into the rogue account, called a “child DAO”, an entire niche industry of alternative governance models taking advantage of prediction markets and something called Futarchy, had risen to prominence.

It wasn’t until earlier this week that most of us watching the development of what appeared to be a healthy young ecosystem got the first strong evidence that there might be more than just governance issues at play in the largely untested code.

More than growing pains

Members of the ethereum community discovered a vulnerability in the way some developers were implementing ethereum-based smart contracts, called a “recursive call”. After a bit of sleuthing, the problem, which let funds be drained from an account using the existing contract composition, was identified in the way The DAO itself had been created.

The makers of The DAO, a Germany-based startup called Slock.it, released a "fix" on their GitHub account in the form of a pull request and asked that the community respond with objections within two weeks.

No DAO funds were at risk as a result of the "bug", according to a post on the company’s blog.

But in the interim period someone, or a group of people, discovered how to exploit the vulnerability by creating what is called a "child DAO" using a splitting mechanism with the two-fold purpose of helping create a break-off DAO in case that a malicious token holder tried to gain control over The DAO, and to encourage the creation of new DAOs.

In the fallout, three paths forward emerged.

A "soft fork" in the code that would essentially blacklist the address with the 3.6m ether in question; a "hard fork" that would actually return the funds to their state prior to the attack; or do nothing and let the system sort itself out.

Too big too learn?

At stake here is essentially whether The DAO is too big to fail.

Both the soft fork option and the hard fork option would help preserve the interests of the anonymous token-holders. But the potential conflict of interest that arises is that those with the power to do the rollback of funds might also be those whose funds are at stake.

The perception has caused concern among some members of the ethereum community across social media networks.

Even if the best interests of all token owners of The DAO are being considered, the future reputation of a system designed to be immutable — but that can erase transactions conducted via approved smart contracts — isn't one some find attractive.

In a report we published last week, we analyzed the potential side-effects of a Mt Gox-style collapse of The DAO. In that article, Ethereum Foundation member Taylor Gerring said he believes it is important for the community to learn from past mistakes in order to ensure they aren’t repeated.

In light of the resources at stake to so many projects still awaiting review from The DAO — and the potential implications for smart contracts generally speaking— what he told CoinDesk then is even more prescient now:

"We should try to draw the comparison and try to ensure we’re not making the same mistakes from the past. If we make the same mistakes we could end up in a situation where there’s negative implications to all blockchains."

First aid kit image via Shutterstock

The DAOThe DAO Attack

Original author: Michael del Castillo