Ethereum community completed hard fork on Wednesday, July 20. Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder, said that the fork took place smoothly, adding that he looks forward to working together with developers and the community to continue making the Ethereum ecosystem and protocol a success.

“Block 1920000 contained the execution of an irregular state change which transferred ~12 million ETH from the “Dark DAO” and “Whitehat DAO” contracts into the WithdrawDAO recovery contract”, he said.

CoinDesk reported that at around 14:30 UTC on Wednesday, BW.com, a China-based ethereum miner, mined the ethereum blockchain's 192,000th block. Within seconds, it also mined the first block on the new blockchain, which returned funds lost in the DAO hack to an account available to its original investors.

According to data from the Ethereum blockchain, users started removing funds in ether soon after the fork. The address for the new smart contract shows 5.8m ETH (at the time of writing), down from the roughly 11.58m ETH (worth $145.2m) available in the original smart contract shortly after its creation. This means that half of all funds associated with The DAO have now been withdrawn by former project investors.

Various participants of the cryptocurrency ecosystem congratulated the Ethereum community on the success of the hard fork. Co-founder of ethereum startup Slock.it Christoph Jentzsch wrote in a blog post:

“[T]he very fact, that the Ethereum community (devs, miners, exchanges, researchers, …) has come together, often setting personal opinions aside, and successfully managed a hard fork in this situation is truly remarkable. Given the time constraint, the fact that we were able to come to consensus on this matter is an outstanding accomplishment.”