The Ethereum ‘rollback’ idea was a joke

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First, let’s get one thing clear. No serious person in the Ethereum community was advocating to “rollback” after the $1.5 billion Bybit hack.

These are simply not genuine debates. As some have pointed out, they’re more like an external psyop designed to sow confusion.

Ethereum has never performed a rollback. The term itself is a misnomer. A true rollback would require reversing all transactions since the Bybit hack — disrupting DeFi, liquidity pools and every user who has transacted in that timeframe. That’s not how Ethereum works.

Instead, critics point to the 2016 DAO hard fork as some sort of precedent — but that was not a rollback either. For a bit of history, The DAO exploited locked funds in a time-delayed smart contract, meaning the hacker had not yet moved the stolen ETH. The community opted for an “irregular state change” — not merely semantics — transferring the ETH to a safe contract before it could be moved.

Even though it was in no way a chain-wide reversion, those who disagreed — around 20% of the network — continued using the old chain, causing a fork now known as Ethereum Classic.

Since The DAO’s fork, Ethereum has had multiple “opportunities” to intervene in major hacks — but has never done so, demonstrating that its threshold for any intervention attempt is exceptionally high:

• 2017 Parity Multisig freeze – $180 million locked forever.
• 2022 Ronin bridge hack – $620 million stolen by North Korean hackers.
• 2023 Multichain Exploit – hundreds of millions drained.

In all cases, no intervention. Even if it were technically feasible (which it isn’t), it would violate the very ethos of the decentralized credibly neutral network. If Ethereum didn’t intervene to recover one of its own co-founder’s funds (Parity’s Gavin Wood) — eight years ago when ETH’s market cap was about 7% of what it is today — there’s no reason to believe Bybit would receive different treatment.

Well-meaning critics vs trolling narratives

It’s important to separate two types of critics.

On one side, there are genuine misunderstandings in my view, like those expressed by Bybit CTO Larsson, lamenting the admittedly unpleasant consequences of the theft. But unless the entire Ethereum network itself is at existential risk, there’s practically nothing anyone can do — not Vitalik, not the Ethereum Foundation.

On the other side, we have bad-faith actors, engagement farmers and trolls who are pretending there’s a debate when none exists.

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As @ChainLinkGod pointed out, the Bybit hack was a centralized exchange failure, not a smart contract exploit. The attack method — compromising the multisig signers’ machines — could have just as easily been used to steal bitcoin instead of ETH. Yet, when BTC is stolen from exchanges, there’s never a similar push for a rollback — because, just like Ethereum, it’s infeasible.

The irony is that Bitcoin maximalists (assuming they don’t know full well that it won’t happen) expose the emptiness of their own FUD — if Ethereum were centralized, the network might be compelled to attempt some action. Instead, when nothing happens, it’s further proof of Ethereum’s immutability.

Rolling back the chain is not, strictly speaking, impossible, but it would require a fundamental existential crisis, just like the Bitcoin inflation bug in 2010 (where BTC actually did roll back). The Bybit hack, while large, does not meet that threshold.

Ethereum has just demonstrated its credible neutrality. The sooner the trolls realize this, the better.

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