Centralization risk is about whether too much power sits in too few hands, even when each individual component looks legitimate in isolation.
The whole system can depend on a small group of founders, validators, delegates, or infrastructure operators without any single component technically being centralized.
The risk is structural, not individual - it emerges from the combination, not from any one part being wrong.
Focusing on governance attacks while ignoring governance capture is a good way to create a secure organization that is now controlled by a small group of people
crypto news is a hard business.
particularly without succumbing to paid promotion
@dlnews was great, and I'm sorry to see them go
we need to figure out how to actually fund the news
The risk and burden is now:
1️⃣ Operational: Subjectively vetting every request
2️⃣ Legal: Taking on the liability & responsibility with having "the power to act."
I assume it costs social media companies billions to manage this. Hence Elon put it back on community notes.
no win situation I think
probably the right decision in the moment but curious to see if security councils or other points of control get pressured to take action more after this and where that line gets drawn
The Arbitrum Security Council has taken emergency action to freeze the 30,766 ETH being held in the address on Arbitrum One that is connected to the KelpDAO exploit. The Security Council acted with input from law enforcement as to the exploiter’s identity, and, at all times, weighed its commitment to the security and integrity of the Arbitrum community without impacting any Arbitrum users or applications.
After significant technical diligence and deliberation, the Security Council identified and executed a technical approach to move funds to safety without affecting any other chain state or Arbitrum users.
As of April 20 11:26pm ET the funds have been successfully transferred to an intermediary frozen wallet. They are no longer accessible to the address that originally held the funds, and can only be moved by further action by Arbitrum governance, which will be coordinated with relevant parties.
you can be happy that north korea did not get $70m to fund nuclear weapons and you can also be sad that trusted human intervention was the only way to prevent them from doing so.
lots to figure out and excited to see these processes get stronger, less fallible to future attacks, and be focused on user empowerment.
PS: for anyone upset at the arbitrum security council, you must know that as public members holding keys, they are likely THE most in favor of decentralizing further as there is direct risk to them as individuals if this does not happen.
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I think it's great that the security council stepped up and stopped NK.
The interesting question is what the line will be in the future. Personally I think it will be great if crypto projects start establishing their own jurisdictions and clearly define how they make decisions like this.
Couple of questions on the Arbitrum recovery:
1) Are all future hacks on Arbitrum open to being frozen and moved to the DAO address?
2) Are past hacks eligible for fund recovery by the security council?
3) What’s the dollar cut off for the involvement of the council?
doesn't go far enough, delete the forum entirely. cant have the unwashed masses reading the words of the enlightened and thinking they could possibly understand them and contribute in any way.
Governance forums were always a mistake. I think I've read <10 useful posts from so called "community members", and I've read a lot. But now in the age of AI agents, the cost of producing governance slop has gone to zero, and the supply of spam has exploded.
I think I'd like to see someone (maybe @LidoFinance ) experiment with permissioned forums. Everyone can read, but only a curated set of human contributors, customers, community members etc. can write.
Everyone knows that the key to a good group chat is keeping it small, and tighting controlling who gets in. The product is the curation. Letting spammers post freely is a guaranteed way to kill any debate before it can even start.
not tryna dunk on this person in particular but it's kinda sad how we went from being excited about new things being built to actively asking for stagnation what happened here
🗳️ With @tallyxyz winding down, delegates and token holders need reliable places to participate.
Multiple independent frontends aren't just nice to have, they reduce single points of failure.
🔗 Anticapture is now available as a governance interface:
https://t.co/J9nzGBmHQK
the bad news is this is where most 1 token 1 vote governance has been heading for a while
the good news is happy collectives that all cooperate for a better future are still possible! they just take intentional design from the foundations and not trying to staple it on afterward
(not so) hot take: @aave recent drama imo shows that DAOs actually work, not the other way around.
Just the perception of DAOs as happy collectives that all cooperate for a better future is dead.
DAOs are ruthless power structures that allow (but do not guarantee/provide out of the box) for coordination to extract the most value out of network effects in a given system.
I'm rather bullish Aave going forward. And in some way I'm also bullish DAOs going forward (although I expect they'll be used less and with more caution from now on).
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the problem with everyone closing their discords is there's not really another good place for users of something to get information from each other quickly even if it's not a "community"
thinking of things like when Euler had their hack and their discord actually was useful
underrated part about public comms and narrative control is LLMs - if all that’s searchable publicly is FUD and narratives of your adversaries LLMs catch that and whoever queries them about you/your project gets misinfo and FUD flagged as potential risk - both normies and professionals rely on LLMs more and more to do their research and make decisions…how AI models view your project is your new Google pagerank
people already barely read through details of proposals so if you can get the ai summary to sound good enough you're set to get most things through discussion phases
it's not really that decentralized organizations cant work it's more that a lot of the people around them really just wanted to run a normal company but online