I was always a little uneasy about the phrase:
“A blockchain cannot be stopped.”
This week I mentioned it again.
On August 31, Ontology simply stopped production of blocks.
First, the team found a potential security issue during the inspection.
And by September 1, it had already confirmed that this is about malicious activity aimed at the network. At the same time, Ontology stated that users' funds were not compromised.
And that’s when I got interested.
Not why ONT fell.
And the way emergency stop works in a blockchain, in general.
When mainnet was put on pause, new blocks stopped being created.
And since there are no new blocks, transactions simply can’t go through the network properly.
So at the critical moment, the team and validators effectively chose:
it’s better to temporarily stop the network than to allow a potential problem to keep developing.
And you know what?
I don’t think this is automatically bad.
On the contrary.
If you suspect a serious vulnerability, sometimes the ability to pause the system can save users from a much bigger problem.
But here a very inconvenient question comes up.
Who exactly has the right to press STOP?
Because the more centralized intervention options remain available to the team or validators, the harder it is to talk about the blockchain as if it were fully autonomous.
And this is where the real trade-off begins.
Security against immutability.
If nobody can interfere, the network really is very hard to stop.
But if nobody can interfere even during an attack, that can also become a problem.
Ontology finally restored mainnet on September 2 after the security review and network upgrade.
Now Sync Node operators must move to v3.1.5, and the team continues to monitor the network and works with technical and security partners.
But there’s one detail I wouldn’t ignore.
The full way of the attack has not been publicly disclosed yet.
That is, we know there was malicious activity.
We know the network was halted.
We know it was updated and launched.
But we don’t yet know all the details of what they were trying to do to the network.
And so for me, the ONT story right now isn’t even about “buying or selling.”
It’s about a much more interesting question:
How decentralized is a system that has a STOP button?
Maybe true decentralization isn’t the absence of the ability to stop the network.
Maybe this question:
Who can do that, under what conditions, and who controls the person who presses that button itself?
This is what I would much rather see in the next Ontology update than another ONT price prediction.
Because mainnet can be restarted in just a few hours.
But user trust is not so easy.
