I think @berachain did the right thing yesterday. The main consideration though being unintended consequences. In this case I think they made a judgement call and it was correct, having a key Dex get rekt probably sets you back more than halting the chain.

Many projects that could have prevented malicious actors from escaping with funds, chose to do nothing because they felt it set a precedent that they were not decentralised.

But inaction does not make you decentralised, being unable to do an action or coordinate an action makes you decentralised. If you are not decentralised then you need to accept that inaction makes you complicit in the activity.

In early DeFi we all aspired to be decentralised but most projects has major vectors of control at various levels. We thought if we wished it hard enough it would be true, but tbh I think if we had accepted and acknowledged the reality it would have been a forcing function.

Instead of larping we could have actually pushed for more transparency and eventually progress towards decentralisation.

Today Berachain has the ability to freeze those funds and roll back the chain, they could have chosen inaction, but they didn’t. In the future they may be sufficiently decentralised to not be able to act to save funds, that will also be fine. But we live in the present.

Now moral hazard of what if the government turns up and says shut the network down or freeze these funds. I actually think this is a risk but it is very possible the validators are sufficiently decentralised to resist this.

Rescuing $15m is a clear outcome, I am not sure if a DMCA takedown notice would be as effective. I guess we may find out.

But most importantly now the Bera community can have a hard conversation about how decentralised the validator set is and how (and whether) to try to push for more decentralisation.