Former Ethereum CEO: Ethereum Foundation should not save The DAO

Crazy Review : Charles Hoskinson, former CEO of the Ethereum project, believes that The DAO was a decision made out of the "greed and arrogance" of the Ethereum Foundation and Slock.it. He believes that the Ethereum Foundation should not have been involved in this matter from the beginning. Slock.it did not properly review its work, which endangered the funds invested in the project and implicated other members of the Ethereum community. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin should first delay as much time as possible when resolving The DAO incident, and then provide more information in response.

Translation: Nicole

"I think they're fixing what went wrong with the Titanic."

When asked about the ongoing crisis surrounding The DAO, former Ethereum project CEO Charles Hoskinson said that the Ethereum-based fundraising tool was attacked due to a code vulnerability. Although Hoskinson left to start another new project in mid-2014 due to disagreements over the project's architecture, he remained one of the few Ethereum trustees before leaving.

According to Hoskinson, he wanted Ethereum to form a venture-backed entity to develop the protocol and then conduct a crowdfunding campaign through a non-profit organization. However, Hoskinson said project participants chose to create the Ethereum Foundation in Switzerland, and he soon left.

Now Hoskinson says he disagrees with the Ethereum Foundation and Slock.it, the German startup that commissioned The DAO’s code, continuing to rescue the troubled project. Hoskinson says the Ethereum Foundation and Slock.it made the decision out of “greed and hubris,” adding that the Ethereum Foundation should never have been involved in the matter in the first place.

Since The DAO hack, members of the Ethereum Foundation have been working on developments that could fork the network, or lead to a change in the rules, although this has not yet been determined.

Hoskinson added:

"The foundation should not be involved, and its officials should not be involved in this, it's a battle between interests. They pick winners and then they profit from it themselves."

Pyrrhic Hope

Hoskinson went on to argue that Slock.it failed to properly audit its work, and as a result, jeopardized funds invested in the project and implicated other members of the Ethereum community.

He added that he believed such a situation would eventually lead to a lawsuit from the body.

He told CoinDesk:

“Instead, they rushed to use an unproven model, implicated everyone, and then exaggerated the role of the unaudited code in the experiment. Now the foundation is trying to clean up the mess while hoping to avoid legal problems.”

Earlier this year, The DAO launched a task that allowed people to buy voting tokens using ether to vote on how collective resources should be spent.

But before the vulnerability was discovered and huge amounts of money were stolen, the idea generated huge enthusiasm, with more than 23,000 people investing up to $150 million.

Knee-jerk reaction

Hoskinson said he believes the ethereum development community has been more restrained in responding to the consequences of the DAO breach.

He said:

“Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin made a rookie mistake. The first thing you do is delay as much as possible. Once you confirm there is a problem, set a time to provide more information, and then delay for 48 hours.”

He said there could be a better way to protect shareholders’ interests and that exchange operators and other ethereum community members could work together to develop a solution.

Hoskinson said:

“Just knee-jerk saying ‘we’re going to fork’ is not a good solution, and even if you can eventually do that, you need to get community consensus.”

Hoskinson's new company, IOHK, is a company that specializes in building digital currencies and blockchains for academia, governments and businesses. The company currently has 27 employees and 12 cryptographers.