The Arbitrum Security Council recently passed an on-chain emergency action with a vote of 9 to 3 to freeze approximately 30,766 ETH involved in the KelpDAO attack case, worth about $71 million. However, the hacker has already transferred the remaining stolen proceeds of roughly $175 million across chains via decentralized protocols, and as a result, protocols such as Aave have incurred more than $120 million in bad debt.

Technically, this freeze by Arbitrum adopted a new paradigm: it did not “freeze” the hacker’s address. Instead, it injected system-level transactions through the Security Council’s authority, directly changing the on-chain account status of specific addresses—moving the assets under the hacker wallet’s “own” name—without modifying any historical transaction records.

Many view this incident as a critical “stress test,” once again exposing the core paradox at the heart of the crypto world’s “security” and “decentralization”: a council composed of 12 members can interfere with on-chain assets with nothing more than a simple majority consensus. Supporters believe that, in the face of state-level hackers, this “emergency brake” is an indispensable safeguard for users’ assets; opponents, however, worry that such emergency powers could be abused at any time.

The final disposition of the frozen stolen funds is still undecided, to be determined by a subsequent governance vote among ARB token holders.#Arbitrum冻结KelpDAO黑客ETH