Following the Bybit hack, community members began discussing the possibility of rolling back the Ethereum network to recover stolen funds. However, several experts, including core developer Tim Beiko, strongly criticized the idea.

Bitcoin maximalist Samson Mow and BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes were among those who supported a blockchain rollback.

ELI5 why we cannot "rollback" Ethereum?

After yesterday's Bybit hack, crypto commentators are again asking why Ethereum cannot "rollback" the chain to reverse the hack.

While experienced ecosystem actors near-unanimously agree that this is infeasible, it's worth breaking down…
— timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) February 22, 2025

Beiko emphasized that the Bybit incident did not involve any issues with the Ethereum protocol itself or the multisig application used by the exchange. Instead, the attack was due to manipulated transaction data in a compromised interface.

For comparison, he cited Bitcoin’s rollback in 2010 when a bug in the client software mistakenly created 184 billion BTC. In response, Satoshi Nakamoto released a patch invalidating those transactions, and the restored chain quickly became the main one. However, in the Bybit case, the Ethereum protocol functioned correctly, and the stolen assets have already been moved by the attacker.

Another argument against a rollback, according to Beiko, is the lack of a transaction delay mechanism. He referenced The DAO exploit in 2016, where $60 million in ETH was lost due to a vulnerability in a smart contract. However, since outgoing transactions were frozen for a month, the Ethereum team had time to intervene and fork the network. Part of the community rejected this approach and continued using the original chain, which later became Ethereum Classic.

In the Bybit case, the stolen funds quickly spread across Ethereum’s ecosystem. A rollback would invalidate numerous legitimate transactions, including off-chain components, which would remain unaffected, Beiko noted.

Yuga Labs Vice President, known as Quit, stressed that reversing part of Ethereum’s history would cause damage greater than the amount stolen. He warned that many regular users would lose funds, and accounting systems of major stablecoin issuers like Circle and Tether could collapse.

Ethereum could rollback, yes (so could bitcoin btw, all you need is majority consensus).

The impact of doing so would be larger than $1.5B. Thousands of innocent people would lose money, thousands more would gain money they shouldn't Accounting for all major players like Circle…
— Quit (@0xQuit) February 22, 2025

“It might be cheaper to just send a strike team to North Korea to try to recover the funds. Or maybe just ask very politely, I don’t know,” Quit wrote.

Earlier, on February 19, part of the funds stolen in the January hack of Singapore-based crypto exchange Phemex were moved again.