The White Hackers Group has extended the deadline for withdrawing DAO tokens on the ETC chain from the 15th of April 2017 to 10th of January 2018.
The extension was made on the 10th of April this year as, despite loud warning of the looming deadline, some 1.5 million ETC, worth around $4 million, remained in the contract at the time of the deadline.
All users who had DAO tokens are able to withdraw around 70% of their value on the ETC chain, with one DAO worth 1 ETC, currently trading at above $2.5. Millions have already been withdrawn, but some continue to stay on the smart-contract.
The reasons are not very clear. It may be that the sums are small, such as perhaps 5 or 10 ETC per user, with their owners unbothered or too lazy to go through the withdrawal process. It may also be due to a lack of awareness.
While most are probably aware that ethereum forked to take the eth from the hacker and give it back to their rightful owners, many may not know that on the ETC chain the hacker was prevented from taking around 70% of the DAO tokens.
They may have, therefore, fully ignored what happened on ETC, but anyone with a significant amount of DAO tokens would probably have kept up with events and would have probably withdrawn, with the remaining amount potentially being pocket change dispersed over many users.
The question now rises what should happen to these funds if they remain unwithdrawn by January 2018? Some suggest the White Hackers Group should keep it as a bounty for managing to rescue some 70% of the DAO tokens.
Others say the funds are stolen property and therefore need to go back to their owners. Moreover, the ETH DAO tokens do not have any deadline. As such, it isn’t very clear why the ETC DAO is time limited instead of indefinite.
We’ll probably see what happens in January as the deadline has now been extended. Until then, anyone with DAO tokens on ETC can follow these steps to withdraw them and gain some ETC which they can keep or convert to ETH, dollars, etc.
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