Headline: Arbitrum Council Steals $30M from Binance Exploit Address—Without the Hacker’s Key Arbitrum’s on-chain Safety Council quietly moved roughly 8,425 ETH and 74 million ARB — about $30 million at current prices — out of an address linked to the recent Binance exploit, and did so without any signature from the attacker. The move, executed last Friday, is a striking example of how governance emergency powers can be used to intervene on behalf of a network. While the roughly $30 million recovered is small compared with the roughly $6.3 billion taken in the Binance-related exploit, it nevertheless demonstrates Arbitrum’s ability to act decisively when large user deposits are at stake. Arbitrum is a Layer-2 network running on top of Ethereum to lower transaction costs and it holds billions in user funds. How it worked On blockchains, funds normally move only when the wallet owner signs a transaction with their private key. Arbitrum’s Security Council — a 12-member, token-elected body that can upgrade contracts when nine members agree — used those upgrade powers in an unusual way. The council’s shared Safe (a multisig wallet requiring nine signatures) executed a single Ethereum transaction that temporarily replaced the code of Arbitrum’s Inbox contract, the bridge component that relays messages from Ethereum into Arbitrum. The new, temporary code added a function named sendUnsignedTransactionOverride. That function let the council craft and submit transactions that Arbitrum would accept as if they originated from the exploiter’s address — effectively enabling transfers without the attacker’s private key. Using that capability, the council moved the ETH and ARB out of the compromised address. Why it matters This incident highlights both the strengths and trade-offs of on-chain emergency governance: it enables rapid intervention to protect funds, but it also demonstrates the power of privileged actors to alter protocol behavior and move assets in ways that bypass ordinary private-key authorization. The Security Council’s action recovered a modest slice of the stolen value, but it will also feed ongoing debates about decentralization, multisig emergency powers, and the limits of upgradeability in Layer-2 systems. Read more AI-generated news on: https://app.chaingpt.org/news