Ethereum splits itself in two, on purpose, to undo a theft.

A month earlier, an attacker had drained roughly a third of The DAO, a $150 million experiment in leaderless venture funding built on Ethereum. The community spent weeks arguing about what to do next. Some wanted to leave the code's outcome alone, thief and all, because immutability was supposed to be the whole point. Others couldn't stomach watching the fund evaporate on a technicality. At block 1,920,000, on July 20, developers pushed a hard fork that rewrote history and returned the stolen ether to its original owners. About 89% of miners went along with it. The rest kept mining the old, untouched chain and called it Ethereum Classic.

I still find it wild that "the blockchain is immutable" turned out to have an asterisk the community was willing to vote on. That's the part nobody puts on a t-shirt.

Ten years on, Ethereum is the chain that took the fork, and it's the one that matters to most of the industry. Ethereum Classic still exists, still running on "code is law," mostly as a reminder of the road not taken.

That's today in crypto history, an identity crisis with consequences. See you tomorrow.