Ben Zhou, the CEO of the recently hacked crypto exchange Bybit, suggested a possible Ethereum (ETH) rollback as a way to recover funds.
During a recent X Spaces conference, Zhou was asked if he supported an Ethereum rollback to before the Feb. 21 ByBit hack by the North Korean hacker group Lazarus. He answered:
“I’m not sure if it’s one man’s decision. Based on the spirit of blockchain, maybe it should be a voting process to see what the communities want, but I am not sure.”
The comments follow the recent ByBit hack leading to $1.5 billion worth of losses, with what some suggested being the biggest crypto hack so far. Still, Zhou, who also co-founded Bybit, claimed at the time:
“Bybit is solvent even if this hack loss is not recovered, all of the client assets are 1 to 1 backed, we can cover the loss.”
The details
Considering a rollback on a major blockchain as a solution to a hack is quite a controversial stance in the blockchain world. The reason is that blockchains are meant by their very design to be uneditable and making exceptions to this rule limits their reliability and trustworthiness.
If data held on a blockchain could be edited it would be essentially worthless. For this reason, the Ethereum re-organization that was performed to roll back the consequences of the infamous 2016 The DAO hack was so controversial that it split the network into two with users who refused to conform to the decision creating Ethereum Classic (ETC) by adhering to the principle of finality.
For this reason, another rollback is quite unlikely — especially considering that the consequences of the last one were disastrous despite the Ethereum network being young at the time.
