A similar recovery already happened once, after somebody exploited a bug in The DAO, resulting in a fork into Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, which rejected changing the rules to bail out bugged but too-big-to-fail smart contracts.

> In May of 2016, a venture capital fund called The DAO built on Ethereum raised around $168 million, with the intention of investing in projects using smart contracts. In the same month a paper was released detailing security vulnerabilities with The DAO that could allow ether to be stolen. In June, 3.6 million Ether (approximately $50 million USD) was taken from accounts in The DAO and moved to another account without the owners' consent, exploiting one of the vulnerabilities that had been raised in May. Members of The DAO and the Ethereum community debated what actions, if any, should occur to resolve the situation. A vote occurred and in July 2016 it was decided to implement a hard fork in the Ethereum code and to move the Ether taken in the exploit to a new smart contract through which it would be restored to the owners from whom it had been taken.

> Ethereum Classic came into existence when some members of the Ethereum community rejected the hard fork on the grounds of "immutability", the principle that the blockchain cannot be changed, and decided to keep using the unforked version of Ethereum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic