Up until the point when The DAO collapsed, it was a symbol of the explosion of innovation that the ethereum blockchain had enabled.
While the consumer-facing apps built on the bitcoin blockchain have been largely limited to various wallets, exchanges and casinos, at the time of The DAO's collapse, more than 50 projects were awaiting votes on their request to fund ideas as diverse as a new way to lease cars and entirely new forms of governance.
But, these efforts are now stalled, and the $60m worth of ether destined to be invested in them, as of now, is lost in limbo.
Amid the ongoing crisis, some of bitcoin’s best-known computer scientists are using the incident to point to bitcoin’s slow growth as its greatest asset.
They argue that while bitcoin’s simplistic machine language takes much longer to write with than ethereum’s Turing-complete coding language, Solidity, it is also less prone to mistakes.