Matt Levine, Columnist

Blockchains and Buzzwords

Also mergers, management style, Yahoo, insider trading and unicorns.

June 20, 2016 at 1:08 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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D'AO!

On Friday I wrote about a hack at the Distributed Autonomous Organization, the odd venture capital fund built on top of the Ethereum smart-contract blockchain. In particular, I wrote about the possibility that the hack was not a "hack," and that the $60 million that the hacker stole was not "stolen," because the DAO's governing documents, its terms and conditions, were set out solely in its code. If the code allowed someone to take $60 million, then that's just how the DAO worked, and whoever took the $60 million got it fair and square.