The Blockchain industry faces significant challenges: The Sui public chain incident has triggered a Crisis of Confidence

Recently, a decentralized exchange in a well-known public blockchain ecosystem suffered a hacker attack, resulting in losses exceeding $220 million. This incident not only caused significant economic damage but also triggered deep reflection throughout the entire Blockchain industry regarding the essence of decentralization.

Event Review

On May 22, hackers exploited a flash loan and a smart contract vulnerability to siphon off a large amount of funds from the exchange. The public blockchain immediately took emergency measures to freeze the hacker's account. Subsequently, the public blockchain team proposed a controversial plan - to upgrade the protocol through on-chain governance voting to "recover and transfer" the stolen funds.

On May 29, approximately 90.9% of the validating nodes voted in favor of the proposal. The public chain officially announced that once the proposal is approved, the frozen funds will be transferred to a multi-signature wallet "without the need for a hacker's signature."

Technical Implementation

The public chain has introduced an address alias mechanism, allowing specific transactions to be bound to the target address (, which is the hacker address ). Any executor who signs and publishes these fixed transactions is regarded as a valid owner of the hacker address. This enables validating nodes to bypass blacklist checks and execute fund transfers.

Deep Impact

This incident has sparked deep reflection within the industry on the core values of Blockchain:

1. It subverts the traditional consensus of "code is law" and introduces a new model of "governance can override code."

2. Unlike the past where problems were solved through hard forks, this "protocol-based amendment" deprives users of their choice.

3. "非你钥匙,非你币"(Not your keys, not your coins) concept has been dismantled on this blockchain. Even if users have complete private keys, the network can still prevent asset flow and redirect assets.

4. This could become a precedent for how Blockchain addresses security incidents in the future, but it also sets a dangerous precedent for abuse.

Future Thinking

1. If this practice becomes the norm, more operations in morally ambiguous areas may emerge in the future.

2. The voting mechanism itself has problems: is it based on the amount of tokens held or the number of people? The former may lead to the "producer" problem, while the latter may fall into group irrationality.

3. Although the regulatory trend is obvious, if Blockchain loses its core characteristics, it may degenerate into another set of less efficient financial systems.

4. The true value of Blockchain lies in: even if it has the ability to change the rules, it chooses not to.

This incident has torn apart the deepest ideological conflicts in the industry. The future of a chain depends not only on its technical architecture but also on the set of beliefs it chooses to uphold. In the pursuit of efficiency and adherence to principles, the entire industry will face difficult choices.