TheDAO Recovery: How to Redeem Your DAO Tokens in 2026

That's a bug report filed in 2017, on Ethereum's Mist wallet GitHub. Almost a decade later, it still describes the situation for thousands of TheDAO investors.

If you bought TheDAO tokens before the infamous 2016 hack and never swapped them into Ether, you're in an odd position. Your money is still there. Anyone with a block explorer can see it. You just can't seem to get it out.

But the good thing is: You can still get your ETH back, even today. The contract that converts TheDAO tokens back into ETH is still live, still funded and still works as it did in 2016. If you've been putting this off because you assumed you'd missed a cutoff — you haven't.

In this guide you will learn how much ETH is still unclaimed, how to check in seconds whether your ETH address is eligible for any TheDAO claims, how to claim it yourself step by step, and what to do if you can no longer get into the wallet you used back then or get stuck along the way.

TheDAO launched in April 2016 as a decentralized investment fund: A pool of money with no managers, where the people who put ETH in received TheDAO tokens that let them vote on what the fund invested in. The idea caught on fast. By the time the crowdsale closed it had raised around 12.7 million ETH, worth roughly 150 million dollars in 2016, making it the largest crowdfunding campaign the world had ever seen.

That optimism only lasted about six weeks. On June 17, 2016, an attacker exploited a flaw in the way TheDAO's code handled withdrawals. The attacker used a reentrancy bug, which allowed him to repeatedly withdraw funds before the contract updated its own balance sheet. Roughly 3.6 million ETH was siphoned out. As of July 31, 2026, that heist would be worth close to 6.5 billion dollars.

What followed was the most controversial decision in Ethereum's history. Rather than accept the loss, the community voted to reverse it with a hard fork, splitting the blockchain in two on July 20, 2016. The chain that undid the theft is the Ethereum we use today. The chain that let it stand became Ethereum Classic. On the Ethereum side, a refund contract was deployed so that anyone holding TheDAO tokens could swap them back for ETH at the original rate of 100 DAO to 1 ETH.

That refund contract is the reason this article exists. It's still running and you can still get your ETH back.

More than most people expect. Nearly ten years after the refund contract went live, a large share of the money was simply never collected. As of July 31, 2026, with ETH trading around 1,800 US-dollars, roughly 82,000 ETH — about 148 million US-dollars — is still sitting in the main refund contract, waiting for TheDAO token holders to claim it. A further 70,000 ETH was owed to participants through ExtraBalance, a second and separate refund.

But these contract balances change as claims are made. We track both the WithdrawDAO and ExtraBalance contracts live on our TheDAO recovery statistics page — including the largest unclaimed balances, every verified claim and a dedicated lookup tool so you can check how much ETH your address can claim.

TheDAO token holders had a number of opportunities following the hack to swap their TheDAO tokens for ETH, including using a smart contract called WithdrawDAO directly via MyEtherWallet.

However, any recovery was reliant on users having access to their Ethereum wallet's private keys. Therefore, many TheDAO token holders never exchanged their tokens and have missed the opportunity altogether. Additionally, most recovery tools created to rescue the Ether back then are long defunct and users that didn't act swiftly back then are now left stranded.

In our experience, there are a number of different scenarios that can lead to loss in this case:

• Users didn't have the private key of the Ethereum wallet that they used to store their funds.
• Users didn't know that Ethereum was required for transaction fees and believed that they had the private key incorrect after a failed transaction. In addition, it could also fail due to false implementation of the recovery software with multi signature wallets itself.
• Users were unable to claim multi-signature wallets because most software wallets didn't support multi-sig.
• Users thought the restoration wasn't feasible due to missed deadlines.
• Users were told to use a tool that stopped existing. MyEtherWallet had a button that handled the whole thing automatically. It was removed in a 2021 update, and most guides still online assume it's there.

Whatever the reason, you can still recover your Ether today.

If you still have access to the wallet holding your TheDAO tokens, here's a step-by-step guide on how to get your ETH back:

Before anything else, find out whether there's actually ETH to claim. Paste your Ethereum address into the lookup-tool on our TheDAO recovery tracker. It will tell you whether that address still holds unredeemed TheDAO tokens, whether it has an outstanding ExtraBalance entitlement and what each is currently worth in ETH.

If you do not know the address you used back then, we recommend the following:

• Search your old emails for "DAO", "Slock.it" or exchange confirmations from mid-2016.
• Search your drives for wallet files. Look for filenames beginning with "UTC--", which is the standard keystore format and any .json file with "wallet" or "ethereum" in the name.
• Check any exchange account you used in 2016. You may find your initial ETH address that also holds your TheDAO tokens.

If none of the above help you, feel free to reach out to our team of experienced professionals for TheDAO recovery. Even if your address is not available now, every case is individual and we'd be happy to assist in finding your ETH-address.

The refund contract doesn't care who you are, it only cares whether the address holding your TheDAO tokens can sign a transaction. Therefore, you need to have access to the wallet, i.e. its private keys in order to make a claim. That means having one of the following:

• The private key for the address
• The keystore file (usually a filename starting with UTC--) and its password
• The seed phrase that generated it
• An Ethereum presale wallet JSON file and its password, if you bought ETH in the 2014 Ethereum presale and used it for TheDAO.

If you're missing some of the information needed to open the wallet, that doesn't necessarily end the claim. A forgotten password on a keystore file you still have, an incomplete or partially recorded seed phrase or a presale JSON whose password no longer works are all cases where the encrypted data still exists. If this applies to you, reach out to our team and we'll evaluate your case for free. Once you're back into the wallet, the steps below apply as written.

Your TheDAO tokens are sitting on an address that may not hold any ETH. Your TheDAO claim requires at least two transactions on the ETH-network. As every transaction costs fees, you first need to fund your address in order for your claim to work later on. This of course only applies if the ETH address eligible for a claim does not hold any ETH.

A small fraction of an ETH is plenty under normal network conditions. Send it from an exchange or another wallet you control, to the address holding your TheDAO tokens.

The refund contract can only process your entire TheDAO balance in one transaction. The original DAO documentation is blunt about this: "you HAVE to approve the transfer of ALL DAOs in your account, as the Withdrawal contract will only transfer ALL of your DAOs in the one go." Approve a partial amount and "the withdraw() function will throw an error, consuming all the gas specified with the transaction."

What you're doing is calling the approve function on TheDAO token contract, authorizing the refund contract to move your tokens:

TheDAO token contract: 0xbb9bc244d798123fde783fcc1c72d3bb8c189413
Spender to authorize: 0xbf4ed7b27f1d666546e30d74d50d173d20bca754 (WithdrawDAO)
Amount: your full balance

If your wallet lets you interact with a contract by function name, use that route. You can see what you're approving in plain language, which is always safer. If you need to send it as raw transaction data, these are the parameters from MyCrypto's support documentation. It's no longer published on their support site but preserved in their public GitHub repository:

To: 0xbb9bc244d798123fde783fcc1c72d3bb8c189413
Value: 0
Gas limit: 100000
Data: 0x095ea7b3000000000000000000000000bf4ed7b27f1d666546e30d74d50d173d20bca7540000000000000000000000000000000000000000da0da0da0da0da0da0da0da0

Wait for this transaction to confirm before moving on.

Now call withdraw on the refund contract. It takes your TheDAO tokens and sends back the corresponding ETH at 100 to 1, in the same transaction.

To: 0xbf4ed7b27f1d666546e30d74d50d173d20bca754
Value: 0
Gas limit: 100000
Data: 0x3ccfd60b

The ETH lands at the same address the tokens came from. That's it, your claim is complete!

ExtraBalance is a separate contract, and it follows the same two-step pattern. You approve the ExtraBalance withdraw contract as spender on the ExtraBalance token contract, then call withdraw.

First, approve:

To: 0x5c40eF6f527f4FbA68368774E6130cE6515123f2
Value: 0
Gas limit: 100000
Data: 0x095ea7b3000000000000000000000000755cdba6ae4f479f7164792b318b2a06c759833b0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000da0da0da0da0da0da0

Then withdraw:

To: 0x755cdba6ae4f479f7164792b318b2a06c759833b
Value: 0
Gas limit: 100000
Data: 0x3ccfd60b

Note: the ExtraBalance contract's balance fluctuates and now holds only a fraction of the roughly 70,000 ETH of entitlement that was never claimed. If your claim is larger than what currently remains in the contract, the on-chain route won't complete and will result in a failed transaction.

Claims fail more often than you'd expect, and almost always for one of a handful of reasons. Before you assume you cannot claim your TheDAO token, work through this list:

• You didn't approve your full TheDAO balance. By far the most common cause. The refund contract processes your entire balance in one go, so a partial approval makes the withdrawal revert and consume all the gas you allocated. Redo Step 4 for the complete amount.
• You ran the two steps out of order, or sent the withdrawal before the approval had confirmed on-chain. Wait for the first transaction to be mined, then send the second.
• The sending address had no ETH. The transaction never broadcast at all. Go back to Step 3.
• Your gas limit was too low. A reverted call burns the entire limit, which is why "out of gas" and "bad jump destination" errors look so alarming when they appear.

Remember: a failed claim costs you the gas fee. It never costs you the tokens. Your TheDAO balance is exactly where it was before you tried. You can attempt the claim as many times as you need to.

That said, no recovery process carries a guarantee and there are situations where the steps above can't recover your TheDAO tokens.