24-2-2025 – The alleged North Korean Lazarus group has purportedly orchestrated a massive breach of Bybit’s security infrastructure, making off with an eye-watering $1.4 billion worth of Ether (ETH).
The incident has sparked a contentious debate about blockchain immutability after BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes, a self-proclaimed significant ETH holder, publicly queried Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin about the possibility of reversing the blockchain to recover the stolen funds.
Bybit’s chief executive, Ben Zhou, subsequently revealed that his organisation had made overtures to the Ethereum Foundation regarding potential remedial actions, whilst emphasising that any such decision should reflect the collective will of the network’s stakeholders.
The suggestion of a potential rollback has met with fierce resistance from the Ethereum community, with numerous voices expressing incredulity at Hayes’s proposal. The cryptocurrency commentator @the_weso articulated the prevailing sentiment, stating that such an action would fundamentally undermine ETH’s raison d’être.
Technical experts have been quick to point out that Ethereum’s architecture, which employs an account-based model, makes a traditional rollback technically unfeasible. This distinction has led to discussions about the network’s historical response to the 2016 DAO hack, which resulted in a hard fork rather than a rollback.
The DAO incident, which saw the theft of $60 million in ETH, was addressed through what developers termed an “irregular state transition”. This solution involved the implementation of new client software, creating a fork that became the current Ethereum chain, whilst the original chain continued as Ethereum Classic.
Cryptocurrency journalist Laura Shin provided technical clarity on the DAO solution, explaining that developers had implemented a smart contract-based refund mechanism, rather than attempting to reverse transactions directly.
The current situation has reignited fundamental questions about blockchain immutability and decentralisation, with Ethereum’s core development teams strongly opposing any centralised intervention that might compromise these principles. Industry observers note that any unilateral action by Buterin would likely be viewed as antithetical to Ethereum’s foundational ethos of community-driven governance.
