Running a node since D1 here.
We stopped ourselves after the announcement. Nobody has a button on my machine. And I can still say no to the upgrade if I want.
The tokens that hit exchanges got locked. They weren’t sold.
Of course there was a hack, I’m not pretending there wasn’t. I just don’t see the story people are spinning. Team and validators spent the weekend cleaning it up.
Ugly, we lost 100% uptime, but nobody’s funds disappeared.
EGLD has been totally exposed for its lies & hidden centralization today! ⚠️
3 days of downtime is only the tip of the iceberg: 76M EGLD (2.5x supply) was minted & partially sold!
EGLD did not halt; the foundation used an off-switch!
All consequences of its reckless design! 🧵
Unlike a normal chain halt, where the chain stops due to a "consensus failure/disagreement", this was far, far worse. Instead of the chain stopping because an "inflation bug" caused consensus to fail, it kept going...
That is what allowed the hacker to actually send their EGLD into exchanges & cause considerable harm. What comes next is even more unbelievable. As I was wondering how it was even possible to shut down a chain with 3k validators in 66min...
That is what made me uncover the next bombshell: There is a literal foundation-controlled off-switch in the code!!!
The Off-Switch
Every mainnet node runs with a hard-fork trigger enabled that listens for a message signed by one specific public key. That is a remote stop switch held by the Foundation! We cannot know for sure if they pressed that switch, but it is highly unlikely they could have stopped the chain that quickly otherwise & the fact that it even exists is bad enough!
This is all a direct consequence of the shortcuts they had to make to bring a sharded chain down to 600ms...
Reckless Design
Sharding comes with certain trade-offs: EGLD claimed to overcome these trade-offs through its unique design. Turns out, in reality, those trade-offs had some extreme consequences we are feeling now:
EGLD sharding splits every transfer into a sender-shard debit & a destination-shard credit that must be reconciled by hand, & on one path the credit had no debit: a money printer. With no global supply invariant, finality before execution, & no protocol-level freeze, the only fix was manually shutting down the chain & a hard fork erasing the "final" history!
Lack of Disclosure
Given what I just explained, you can judge for yourself whether the team's disclosure is adequate. I argue it absolutely was not. The fourth screenshot shows their communication on the matter so far & exactly what they failed to mention
Including the mint, the hackers' success & the off-switch!
The fact that it took my own chain & code analysis to reach these conclusions tells us the team cared more about minimizing PR damage than properly disclosing the incident. At least with this piece out, they will not be able to get away with that anymore & will have to also include this information in their report
The community deserves to know what is really going on, how centralized EGLD really is & how the tech is not a magical panacea but instead comes with serious trade-offs
Chain Analysis
The record is clear, all on a public chain for all to see. The attacker exploited this vulnerability in the chain & managed to mint 76M EGLD! Over 2.5x the supply! Along with 430M bridged USDC, about 430M bridged USDT & 5,540 bridged WBTC...
The hacker then proceeded to split these into 16 wallet addresses & then send EGLD to multiple exchanges. If we look at the timing of when these exchanges "froze" EGLD, we see that MEXC did not act in time & it perfectly corresponds with very suspicious selling activity on that exchange, which was not even arbitraged out when the full freeze took effect. We cannot tell whether the hacker managed to exit the exchange afterward, but they certainly could have!
Which means the hacker was likely able to walk away with around $1M USD, effectively defrauding the exchange in the proccess, by leveraging this EGLD vulnerability
Please look at the visuals, as they provide all of the supporting evidence that can also be independently verified with publicly available information
Conclusion
This is BTC's 2010 inflation bug & ETH's 2016 DAO's hack rolled into one. That this all happened in 2026 is even more embarrassing
Unlike those historic failures, there was no full disclosure of the problem as it was happening. People deserve to know; we are blowing the lid off this story now!
This is also nothing like SOL's historic downtime, which involved network halts caused by bugs. Something that has happened in over two years. While EGLD managed to beat SOL in total downtime with this single incident!
SOL also never ever had an off switch! The irony & I apologize; some degree of schadenfreude cannot be helped in my situation. As the EGLD community was one of the loudest spreading that false narrative. Turns out it was unknowingly a projection!
The biggest red flag is still the team itself, after my fallout with EGLD last year. The toxicity & dishonesty became too much to bear
This will likely trigger another ad hominem campaign against me, as it did last time & as it did for other influencers/journalists/thinkers. Fortunatly, I am specialized in weathering the storm. While these facts are undeniable & mostly speak for themselves
EGLD certainly has some good technology; we can learn something from everyone. However, what we saw here over the last few days is beyond the pale
That's where the value lies: In also understanding the character of a chain's leadership, especially at an early stage, as even with decentralized governance, bad leadership can still mess it all up!
This is a truly worst-case scenario for a blockchain; there are very few examples of this level of collapse in blockchain history. After such an event, we have to question the competence & the wisdom of the underlying design choices
EGLD's design is flawed & reckless, making centralization trade-offs other chains would never even dream of. All while claiming to be holier-than-thou
It is never too late to change our minds in the face of new evidence; please study the supporting visuals for yourself. The truth cannot be credibly denied
What occurred here is undeniable, while the silence of EGLD's leadership speaks louder than words: 🎓