Summary
PeopleDAO is a community-governed decentralized autonomous organization that emerged from ConstitutionDAO in late 2021, adopting the PEOPLE token as its governance instrument and operating as a meta-DAO incubator for social-good subDAOs. In March 2023, the organization suffered a significant treasury exploit in which an attacker stole 76.5 ETH (approximately $120,000) by exploiting a publicly shared Google Sheets payroll form with edit access — a failure of basic operational security controls. The stolen funds were moved to centralized exchanges and no recovery has been confirmed; the incident drew engagement from on-chain investigator ZachXBT and blockchain security firm SlowMist.
Connected Entities
1 entitiesTimeline(8 events)
2021-11-01
ConstitutionDAO forms with the goal of purchasing a copy of the U.S. Constitution at Sotheby's auction, raising over $47 million in ETH from 17,000+ contributors and issuing the PEOPLE ERC-20 token.
2021-11-18
ConstitutionDAO is outbid at the Sotheby's auction by hedge fund manager Ken Griffin, whose bid of approximately $43.2 million wins. The DAO announces dissolution and opens redemptions.
2021-12-06
Community members vote via Snapshot to form PeopleDAO, adopting the PEOPLE token as the governance instrument for a new meta-DAO structure focused on social good and Web3 coordination.
2022-06-01
PeopleDAO has incubated two subDAOs (PandaDAO and LanguageDAO) and one community project (Constitution Fractionalized), establishing its operational model as a subDAO accelerator.
2023-03-06
PeopleDAO's accounting lead accidentally posts a Google Sheets payroll form with edit access to a public Discord channel. An attacker inserts a fraudulent payment row for 76.5 ETH, conceals it, and the entry passes multi-sig review. The attacker receives 76.5 ETH (~$120,000) from the Gnosis Safe treasury.
2023-03-06
The attacker transfers stolen funds: 69.2 ETH ($110,000) to HitBTC and 7.3 ETH to Binance.
2023-03-13
PeopleDAO publicly discloses the exploit. The organization announces it is working with ZachXBT and SlowMist to trace the attacker and has reported the incident to U.S. law enforcement and the exchanges involved. A 10% white hat bounty is offered.
2025-11-01
KuCoin delists PEOPLE from Spot Margin Trading services, reducing leveraged trading access to the token.
Decision Log
- hash: 3KeJEGawKarCuVtYp5VWhAZzuc4FeiRmD2CtyDjH9vFZ
This investigation is cryptographically anchored to the Solana blockchain and source URLs are archived via the Internet Archive.
model: claude-sonnet-4-6
generated: 5/4/2026, 2:54:43 AM
last updated: 5/30/2026, 5:05:38 AM
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