BitMEX co-founder and prominent Ethereum (ETH) investor Arthur Hayes has stirred controversy by suggesting that the Ethereum network be restored to its former state to mitigate the impact of the $1.4 billion attack on cryptocurrency exchange Bybit.
Hayes directly addressed Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin on X (formerly Twitter), urging him to consider the drastic measure.
Hayes said in his post on X:
“Vitalik Buterin, will you advocate for the chain to be restored to help Bybit? As a mega ETH holder, my view is that ETH ceased to be money after the DAO hack hard fork in 2016. If the community wants to do it again, I support it because we already voted no on immutability in 2016, why not do it again?”
The Bybit attack came to light on Friday when blockchain analyst ZachXBT noticed suspicious outflows of over $1.4 billion in ETH. The attacker quickly converted mETH and stETH into ETH via a decentralized exchange before distributing the stolen funds to multiple addresses. According to Polynomial.fi co-founder Gautham Santhosh, the attacker transferred 10,000 ETH to 39 different addresses and another 10,000 ETH to nine addresses.
Restoring a blockchain involves reverting the network to a previous state to delete transactions linked to an attack. While this approach has the potential to recover Bybit’s lost funds, it would require a large degree of consensus from Ethereum network participants.
Ethereum has previously experienced a similar reversal following the infamous DAO hack in 2016, where $60 million worth of ETH, representing 30% of the total ETH supply, was stolen. This incident resulted in a controversial hard fork that split Ethereum into Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC).
In 2019, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao considered advocating for the reinstatement of the Bitcoin network following a $40 million hack, but the idea was largely rejected by the Bitcoin mining community, who argued that such an action would jeopardize the principles of decentralization and immutability.
*This is not investment advice.