Architect of The DAO leaves Ethereum after nine years, says it has turned into a circus of centralized NFTs, endless Ponzi schemes and illegal securities

Stephen Tual was one of the main designers behind The DAO in 2016. He sent an email last week to ethereum London meet-up that he is stepping down from running the meet-up and will be leaving ethereum for good.

“I cannot, in good conscience, continue to act like 'all is well' in Web3. As of August 15th, 2022, the 'blockchain' (or should I use the hedge-fund coined terminology 'distributed ledger'?) has turned into a circus of centralized NFTs, endless Ponzi schemes, illegal securities or turncoat sycophants pledging loyalty to the nearest regulator. I do not recognize myself in that space, not even one bit.”

He also posted a separate open letter lamenting how the concept of DAO itself has been turned into centralized pump and dump ICOs.

“A DAO is NOT an ICO where the creators "keep a cut" and generate 'artificial scarcity' to "pump and dump" while members are made to "hodl" - however, I'm sad to report it's what most have now become while continuing to use the terminology, just like a blockchain running on a single computer is no blockchain at all, or an NFT hosted on Amazon S3 is in no way decentralized in the least.”

He noted in the open letter that the DAO failure was caused by flaw in the ethereum programming language solidity leading to what's known as a re-entrancy attack exploiting recursive calling vulnerability. Re-entrancy attacks happen pretty frequently in ethereum and has led to cumulative losses of more then $4 billion over the last 5 years.