More than $40 mln worth of ether have been transferred from the attacker's account to a rescue smart contract. Meanwhile, this operation is the first precedent of blockchain transactions being reversed.

The block number 192,000 has been mined by a Chinese ether miner today, launching the hard fork. A few seconds later, the mining pool produced the first block on the new blockchain, returning the tokens drained by the anonymous attacker to their original owners.

Any extra balance left will be distributed within the community by a new group of curators appointed yesterday for this purpose.

The DAO’s principal developer Christopher Jentzsch expressed gratitude to the people who made a great work to develop and apply the hard fork and to the ones who was keeping the community informed.

"What I witnessed during this time was remarkable feedback and support from many different sides. A lot of work needed to be done, and many people came literally out of nowhere and helped in many ways."

He mentioned programmers, testers and bloggers who volunteered to save The DAO's funds and Ethereum reputation.

“Although some do question the analogy ‘code is law’. I do not. We just found out that we have a supreme court, the community!” the developer concluded.

The DAO investment platform was hacked on 17 June. After 3.6 mln of ethers equal to $60 mln at the time of the attack were drained from its accounts and the price of the currency fell from $21.5 to $15, exchanges were asked to postpone ether trade. It is notable that formally the attacker did not violate any rules, but exploited a function provided by the platform’s smart contract. Still, due to the platform’s design, the attacker could not withdraw the stolen currency immediately, which gave the developers time to come up with a solution.

Ludmila Brus