A report from Bybit’s “Lazarus Security Lab” at present claims 16 blockchains have built-in fund freezing measures, whereas a further 19 are able to the identical freezing with some minor tweaks, elevating issues about decentralization and transparency.
Researchers used synthetic intelligence (AI), alongside handbook overview, to look into 166 completely different blockchains to find out their freezing capabilities.
The total report discovered 16 chains using three strategies of freezing mechanisms, corresponding to hardcoded public blacklists, config file-based freezing strategies using personal blacklists, and a blacklist enforced by an on-chain good contract.
Hardcoded freezing mechanisms are constructed immediately into the chain and are utilized by Binance’s BNB Chain, in addition to Chiliz, Viction, XDC Community, and VeChain.
The config file-based freezing is utilized by Concord ONE, HAVAH, Apts, Supra, EOS Community, Oasis Community, WAX, Sui, Linea, and Waves. This methodology depends on a blacklist saved in native configuration recordsdata and managed by validators, the muse, and core builders.
Solely the HEC chain, in any other case often called the Huobi Eco Chain, makes use of on-chain good contracts.
Certainly, BNB Chain and VeChain had been ready to make use of their hardcoded freezing strategies in response to a $570 million bridge exploit and a $6.6 million breach, respectively, whereas Sui froze $162 million in stolen belongings following the Cetus hack.
The report additionally discovered that 19 blockchains might implement these strategies with some “relatively minor protocol changes.”
These blockchains embrace Arbitrum, Cosmos, MANTRA, Terra, Axelar, Babylon, Celestia, dYdX, Dymension, Dymension DYM Evm, Evmos, Initia, Kava, Nillion, OKExChain, THORChain, Sei, Secret Community, and XION.
Bybit’s Lazarus Safety Lab requires higher freeze transparency
Bybit’s report means that blockchain foundations and companies are usually not being absolutely clear about their freezing capabilities, and in flip, the extent to which they’re actually decentralized.
It concluded, “The presence of these mechanisms fundamentally challenges the foundational principles of a decentralized ecosystem and necessitates further discourse within the blockchain community, but it has prevented hackers from stealing funds.”
An openness about these on-chain freezing capabilities and emergency intervention mechanisms, it says, is essential to blockchain governance and must be publicly disclosed extra usually.
A31 Labs’ Armin Reiter notes that any blockchain can implement freezing. He argues that the true differentiator is “how decentralized a system is and if the validators/miners accept the change or not.”
He claims that such freezes won’t be applied on Bitcoin as a result of there may be robust neighborhood consensus towards it and that a very powerful takeaway is which chains have already accepted these tradeoffs.
In some circumstances, these freezing mechanisms have failed. Crypto safety agency GoPlus Safety highlighted that the hacker of DeFi change Balancer bypassed a freeze on the Sonic chain, and moved roughly $3 million value of crypto from a frozen tackle to a brand new one.
The agency claimed the hacker was ready to do that as a result of the freeze solely affected its native token and never different ERC20 tokens.
