On Tuesday, the exchange was hacked, resulting in the theft of $40 million worth of bitcoin. Following the hack, Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance, publicly expressed the idea that the company would try to convince bitcoin miners and node operators to “rollback” the bitcoin blockchain, reversing transactions to return the funds.
To move forward with this plan, the company will need to secure the consensus of most crypto miners.
Zhao said that this is possible, but resetting the network to this extent could negatively affect the reliability of bitcoin.
For this reason, many have criticized this plan negatively.
The network reset could only happen if the entire industry and community agreed. Otherwise, some could view it as an attack on the bitcoin network.
Zhao knew that many people might be against the idea. He has seen many people oppose a rollback in the past, as there are concerns about the ethics and reputation of the bitcoin network.
“The team is still thinking about it and we’re trying to check everything out,” he said. “It’s interesting that this is a technology solution that was suggested to us by the community, including some of the core members of the bitcoin development team. We’re going to look at it very, very carefully, taking into account the feedback we get.”.
The company is currently trying to rebuild and restore its exchange system and has currently suspended all trading, withdrawals, and deposits. It will take about a week for it to start operating again as before.
Speaking about the attack, Zhao said that very sophisticated techniques were used and that the hackers acted methodically. They did not attack a single account but expected to gain access to multiple high-value accounts.
Zhao said that Binance has sufficient resources from the Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU Fund) to recover the $40 million loss for users.
Binance has been keeping a portion of the trades for the Fund and thus has a lot of capital. However, it has not stated the exact amount.
