"Hayes Proposes Ethereum Rollback After $1.4B Bybit Hack"

Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX and a major holder of ether (ETH), has proposed rolling back the Ethereum network to negate a recent $1.4 billion hack on the Bybit exchange. In a tweet, Hayes urged Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin to advocate for the rollback, stating that ETH stopped being a form of money in 2016 after the DAO hack hard fork. He argued that if the community is willing to do it again, he would support it.

As of publication, Buterin had not yet responded to Hayes' proposal. The Bybit hack was discovered on Friday when on-chain analyst ZachXBT noticed suspicious outflows of over $1.4 billion from the exchange. The attacker quickly swapped mETH and stETH for ETH through a decentralized exchange, then split the funds across multiple addresses.

Bybit CEO Ben Zhou confirmed that the hacker gained control of a specific ETH cold wallet and transferred all the ETH in it to an unidentified address. Zhou assured users that the exchange remains solvent even if the hack loss is not recovered. One potential solution to address the hack is to roll back the blockchain, reverting it to a state before the hack occurred. This would erase malicious transactions and restore lost or stolen funds, but it requires consensus from network participants.

In 2016, the Ethereum network was rolled back using a hard fork to reverse a theft of $60 million in ETH from The DAO. The hard fork split the chain into two – Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. In 2019, Binance's CEO Changpeng Zhao considered pushing for a rollback on the Bitcoin network following a $40 million hack, but the idea was criticized for going against the principle of decentralization and immutability.

Immutability is a security feature that prevents data from being changed after it's added to the blockchain, making it trustworthy and tamper-proof. There are concerns regarding a potential Ethereum rollback, as the ecosystem is now too interconnected for a clean solution like the one in 2016. Some experts argue that Ethereum is stuck between a rock and a hard place, as rolling back the chain could destroy what's left of its decentralization claim, while allowing the hack to stand could unleash an eternal internal battle.

As the debate surrounding the potential rollback