Linea pledges decentralization after halting block production to stop hacker

Ethereum’s layer-2 solution Linea is promising greater decentralization after the project’s team manually halted block production in a bid to censor a hacker’s address.

Linea, Ethereum‘s zkEVM solution designed to improve scalability with over billion in locked value, has found itself in hot water over its what appears to be ambiguous decision to stop the whole network in a bid to censor one address associated with a hacker, who attacked Linea-based decentralized exchange Velocore for million.

In an X thread on Jun. 3, the team behind the project confirmed the suspension of block production, saying “it was not a decision we took lightly.”

“One of the key drivers in our decision to pause the sequencer was that the hacker had acquired and was beginning to sell a large sum of tokens into ETH. This would have created other issues in the ecosystem for users beyond the liquidity pool draining exploit.”

Linea

The pause in block production, spanning a critical hour between block 5,081,800 and 5,081,801, allowed Linea to assess the situation. During the period, efforts were made to engage with the Velocore team and coordinate responses to the vulnerability, the thread reads.

The move, however, raised concerns among members of the crypto community, raising their eye brows due to the move that blocked the whole network with over .2 billion in value, according to data from L2Beat.

Linea acknowledged that its current reliance on centralized technical operations highlights the need for ongoing efforts to transition towards a fully decentralized, censorship-resistant network, noting though that its core values are “permissionless” and “censorship-resistant environment.”

In parallel, both Linea and Velocore teams have initiated measures to address the exploit, including on-chain negotiations and coordination with centralized exchanges to freeze exploited funds. The Velocore team has released a post-mortem on the exploit, outlining affected pools and ongoing efforts to compensate affected users.