Arbitrum’s Security Council pulled off a remarkable blockchain maneuver: it moved about $30 million in cryptocurrency from an address linked to the $6.3 billion Binance hack — without the attacker’s signature, CoinDesk reports.
Arbitrum logo (Credits: CoinDesk)
Last Friday, the council moved over 8,425 ETH and 74 million ARB out of an address tied to the Binance exploit. At current prices that’s roughly $30 million — “a rounding error next to the roughly $6.3 billion taken from Binance,” CoinDesk notes.
How Arbitrum’s Council Moved Funds Without the Key
The 12-member Security Council, elected by ARB token holders, used emergency upgrade powers that require approval from nine of twelve members. Its shared wallet sent one Ethereum transaction that temporarily swapped the code of Arbitrum’s Inbox contract — the contract carrying messages from Ethereum into Arbitrum — adding a function called sendUnsignedTransactionOverride.
That function let the council send transactions that Arbitrum treated as coming from the exploiter’s address. Two such transactions moved the ARB and ether to a holding address ending in 0DA0, and the original Inbox code was restored in the same transaction, according to the council’s governance forum notice. “No other user’s funds or applications were affected,” it said.
The Recovered $30M Needs a DAO Vote to Move
The funds now sit in a holding address that can only be moved by an ArbitrumDAO governance vote. That process faced legal delays after a similar recovery in April, when the council moved 30,766 ETH (then worth $71 million) from the KelpDAO exploiter after law enforcement identified the attacker.
Security firm Zealynx traced the transactions and noted the big caveat: the assumption that an address only moves when its key signs “holds up to whoever controls the upgrade path” — meaning whoever controls the upgrade path can make any address on Arbitrum spend. A sharp reminder for a network that markets itself as decentralized.
Also Read: Binance Spent Half Its SAFU Bitcoin Fund ($580 Million) After $6.3 Billion Hack, Data Shows
Also Read: Binance $6.3 Billion Hack: Why Crypto Exchange Theft Is Harder to Stop Than a Bank Robbery
Source: CoinDesk — read the full story there.
