Blocklist for 2019 Wasn’t a Kill Switch

VeChain confirms that its 2019 blocklist was an approved community response.

VeChain clarified recent accusations made in an article published by Bybit’s Lazarus Security Lab. The report claimed that the Blockchain includes a secret feature which allows funds to be froze.

VeChain released a categorical statement on Thursday that rejected these claims. “factually incorrect and reputationally damaging.”

VeChain Slams Bybit Research Lab

In its latest post, the team addressed specific accusations in its previous post regarding X. explained It is believed that this only happened in December of 2019 after a theft of a VeChain private key compromise a wallet. After the breach, VeChain’s community decided to create a community-approved, one-time blocklist in order to stop the liquidation.

Validators modified their software so that transactions from a thief’s wallets were rejected. This prevented the theft of funds and allowed them to be removed or reallocated. VeChain said the move was transparent and governance-driven, not an unilateral freeze of funds embedded into protocol code.

It was also explained by the company that technical differences between “blocking” The following are some examples of how to get started: “freezing” While criticizing the Bybit Report for confusing inclusion policies at the level of validators with freezing capabilities hardcoded,

“We encourage the author of the report to conduct a deeper technical review to understand the implications of mixing up these two mechanisms in a public forum.”

VeChain noted that independent audits by NCC Group Coinspect and Hacken confirmed that VeChainThor’s software allows validators to refuse certain transactions through community-approved governance but does not allow them to freeze or seize assets. VeChain explained that blockchain consensus checks support decentralized decision making rather than centralized controls.

Bybit’s research

Bybit’s Lazarus Security Lab Report, entitled “Blockchain Freezing Exposed: Examine the Impact of Fund Freezing Ability in Blockchain,” claimed The report states that 16 major networks offer features to developers and validators that can be used to limit or freeze funds. VeChain is listed among several other networks including Binance’s BNB Chain (backed by Binance), Aptos and XinFin’s XDC Network that include hardcoded mechanisms for freezing funds directly in their source codes.

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According to the study which examined 166 networks by using AI assisted code analysis, manual verification and manual validation, there are three main categories of freeze mechanisms: configuration-based, hardcoded, and on chain contract.

Sui freezing BNB Chain hard-coded blacklists in order to prevent a $570,000,000 bridge exploit. $162 million of stolen assets after the Cetus hack. Researchers found that although such interventions could help reduce the impact of security breaches, there are also concerns raised about censorship and centralization. The report said the fact that fund-freezing is possible, even if it’s done for security reasons, undermines the idea of decentralization.