Binance Considered Pushing for Bitcoin Rollback Following $40 Million Hack

UPDATE: After this article was published, Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance, said in a follow-up tweet that after speaking with various parties, the exchange decided not to pursue the rollback approach.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said the team considered pushing for a rollback on the bitcoin network after hackers stole 7,000 bitcoin.

Zhao hosted an Ask-Me-Anything live session at 3:00 UTC on Wednesday to address various questions from the community including the hack that stole some 7,000 bitcoin from the exchange just a few hours ago.

"To be honest, we can actually do this probably within the next a few days. But there're concerns that if we do a rollback on the bitcoin network at that scale, it may have some negative consequences, in terms of destroying the credibility for bitcoin."

To try and roll back the network without an agreement between the entire industry and community would most likely be seen by many as effectively an attack on the bitcoin network, which is intended to be immutable.

Binance has not found any other of its hot wallet addresses that are compromised.

Zhao said the hackers used sophisticated methods to gain access to users' accounts and orchestrated the hack patiently, in the sense that "They don't move as soon as they have one account but have waited until they have a large number of high net worth accounts."

Elsewhere in his session, Zhao said Binance has enough resources from its Secure Asset Fund for Users for recovering the loss of $40 million for users, though "It does hurt very much."

Binance started allocating 10 percent of its trading fees every month since July last year to the SAFU fund.

Based on the amount of the Binance BNB tokens burnt using 20 percent of its quarterly profits, Binance generated about $210 million in profits from July last year to March.