THORChain cofounder Chad Barraford reacts to a Chinese crime syndicate recommending THORChain to ZachXBT for money laundering Laura: "Today, ZachXBT released an investigation in which he went undercover and exposed a Chinese crime syndicate that laundered the $1.5 billion in Bybit funds. And in his conversation with this guy, Jimmy, at some point, Jimmy suggests to Zach that Zach can also get into the money laundering business, and he messages Zach and he says, quote, 'Think you can do it too. All you need is Thor cross chain.'" "So how do you feel about that? That this Chinese crime syndicate is recommending that he use THORChain to get into the business of money laundering." Chad: "So THORChain is not a money laundering service, right? There's no obfuscation of information whatsoever. When you trade from Ethereum to Bitcoin, it is clear text to everybody in real time of where that money is going from and where it's going to." "THORChain doesn't do mixing of any kind. That makes no sense. You can make the same argument about, like, well, you should become a Bitcoin miner because you could make the argument in any decentralized protocol. What's the difference?" Taylor: "I mean, I'll also say the reason that we met Jimmy was because of the THORChain Discord. Literally, the money launderers are in the THORChain Discord." Chad: "Yeah. And I'm sure the people on, like, Silk Road were in the IRCs or the Bitcoin forum, right? Like, that's not indicative of anything other than just a diverse community around it."

I host THORChain core dev @cbarraford and @tayvano_ on the Bitget hack: what a Mimir vote can and can't do, the per-chain signing halt three nodes could trigger, and who collects the fees when DPRK swaps to BTC. Monday 3:20pm ET x.com/i/broadcasts/1qKDzWEWe…

Taylor presses THORChain cofounder Chad Barraford on why the protocol wasn't shut down when stolen funds were nearly 100% of one route Taylor: "Okay, so what happened in this case?So the admin key was used as an interim stop. And then the protocol was upgraded to take the actions. In reaction to a situation that was deemed to be bad by the protocol. Chad: "By a 2/3 majority." Taylor: "Okay. So why couldn't you do that in any case where, let's say, the majority of funds on a certain route are known to be directly stolen funds? What you did for THORFi, right? You take an interim action and then you do whatever you want to do." Chad: "Right. So the action you're referring to is, like, turn off trading, for example, right? To be clear, the admin key that we're talking about doesn't even exist in the code base today. It did a while back, but it no longer exists. It was removed, I don't know, a year ago, a year and a half, I don't remember how long ago it was." "But even if it still was around, you want the protocol to turn off its entire system and all the trading that it does, and the source of revenue and income, for 1 to 2 weeks every time some external exchange or external thing gets hacked." Taylor: "I'm advocating for it if that's the only functionality you have, right? And the vast majority of funds. So, like, for example, the XRP to ETH route, right? We can look at the numbers, but it was not 20%. It was not 50%. It was nearly 100% of assets on that route for that period of time that were directly stolen funds." "If you turned it off, I'm not saying a time limit. I'm saying any amount of time, right? That would have cut them off somewhere else, right? And then you wouldn't have laundered stolen funds for DPRK." Chad: "No, that's not right. That's not correct."