After Ethereum hard fork, 5% of investors frantically withdrew nearly half of The DAO funds

After the Ethereum hard fork, about 43%, or nearly half of The DAO’s funds, had been withdrawn by its previous project investors.

The withdrawals occurred hours after developers executed a hard fork on the ethereum network designed specifically to reverse the failure of The DAO and move funds tied to the project’s compromised smart contracts to a new account.

Data from the Ethereum blockchain shows that users began moving ether funds soon after the fork. At press time, the new smart contract address only has 6.6 million ether (about $80 million worth).

This figure is a significant drop compared to the nearly 11.58 million ether (worth approximately $145 million) in the original smart contract when The DAO project was first created.

A total of 1,188 withdrawal transactions have been executed in the first 6 hours since funds became available for withdrawal.

Before The DAO collapsed in mid-June, the project estimated that there were 23,574 users who had purchased DAO tokens and were therefore eligible for a refund. If the withdrawal transaction figures represent individual users, this would mean that approximately 5% of DAO users have now received a refund.

It’s not surprising that just 5% of users withdrew nearly half of The DAO’s ether funds.

The ether funds were originally intended to be exchanged for DAO tokens in a crowdsale earlier this summer that, while ultimately yielding impressive results, attracted relatively few investors.

According to previous analysis by CoinDesk, the top 500 DAO addresses hold more than 70% of DAO tokens, while the top 50 hold more than 40%. The ownership of funds by developers and individuals closely associated with the ethereum project and Slock.it, the company that wrote the code for The DAO, has been a subject of much debate in recent weeks.

Regardless, reports on social media indicate that DAO users began withdrawing their ether this morning, in a fairly positive response.

Block explorers show that not all withdrawals were successful, and the failure of these transactions is believed to be unrelated to the design of the new smart contract, and the failure of these transactions is attributed to paying the necessary gas fees. At press time, users need to pay 1 cent to execute the transaction.