Arbitrum council seizes 30 million dollars in Binance hack funds

Arbitrum's Security Council moved approximately 8,425 ETH and 74 million ARB tokens — worth around $30 million at current prices — out of an address linked to the 2022 Binance exploit, without any action or signature from the attacker.

The council, a 12-member body elected by ARB token holders, used emergency upgrade powers requiring nine of twelve members to approve. Those powers allowed the group to temporarily replace Arbitrum's Inbox contract with modified code containing a function that let the council send transactions treated by the network as originating from the exploiter's address. Two transactions moved the funds to a holding address; the original contract code was restored within the same transaction block.

The recovered assets cannot move again without a full ArbitrumDAO governance vote. A similar recovery in April faced legal delays before that process completed.

The mechanism works because whoever controls the upgrade path can override private key control for any address on the network. Arbitrum's Security Council has now used that power twice against the same exploit, on a network that describes itself as decentralized.

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