I met a senior person who told me about a thrilling turning point in the development of Ethereum$ETH - the DAO incident. DAO, a once popular project, attracted the attention of a large number of investors with the concept of decentralized autonomous organizations and successfully raised a huge amount of funds of up to 150 million US dollars. This was undoubtedly a feat that shocked the industry at the time, and made many people believe that it would become an important force to promote world change.

However, fate played a cruel joke at this moment. There was a serious security vulnerability in the code of the DAO project, which was exploited by a hacker, resulting in more than 50 million US dollars of Ethereum assets being easily stolen. This news was like a bolt from the blue, and instantly caused an uproar in the blockchain community. In addition to being shocked, people were more questioning the security of blockchain technology. After all, the creed of "code is law" seemed so fragile at this moment, and the immutability of blockchain also suffered unprecedented challenges.

Faced with this crisis, deep differences emerged within the Ethereum community. One side insisted on the purity of the blockchain and believed that its established rules should not be changed by any external events, even if it meant bearing the losses caused by hacker attacks; while the other side advocated taking active measures to recover investors' losses and maintain the credibility of the blockchain.

After intense discussions and weighing, the Ethereum community finally made a historic decision - to implement a hard fork. This means that the blockchain will be rolled back to the state before the hacker attack to restore the stolen funds. But this decision also had far-reaching consequences, which led to the split of the Ethereum community. Some people who adhered to the principle of decentralization chose to stay on the original chain, which was later called Ethereum Classic $ETC ; while most people followed the new chain after the hard fork and continued to move forward, which is the Ethereum (ETH) we know today.

Although the DAO incident brought short-term turmoil and challenges to Ethereum, it also prompted the entire industry to deeply reflect on the security issues of smart contracts and set higher standards for subsequent projects in security audits.