EOS Block Producers Decide to Freeze Accounts That Were Allegedly Stealing from EOS Community Members
According to reports, all 21 block producers that operate the EOS network collectively decided to freeze up to seven accounts that were allegedly stolen from EOS community members. They decided to freeze the compromised assets but there was a lot of dispute from the EOS community, and most likely some reconsideration from the block producer EOS New York.
On June 17th, the 21 EOS block producers (BP) were all of one mind when they decided to freeze several accounts on the EOS blockchain that were allegedly stolen. This decision made by EOS BPs brings a lot of questions to the table again in regard to whether or not a public blockchain that has centralized nodes with freezing powers can truly be considered a permissionless blockchain. As stated by the BP members and the EOS911 (a system that shows if EOS keys were compromised), malicious actors using phishing attacks and other forms of social engineering were able to steal people’s keys.
Although all 21 BPs decided to unanimously vote to freeze these accounts, EOS New York has written that even though they voted on enacting the account blacklist, the firm wavered on the decision. The New York-based BP stated that; EOS New York chose to enact this freeze because we believe that we were following the spirit of the governance system we as a community seek to create, despite it being formally absent. EOS is a platform meant to enable solutions which protect life, liberty, and property and that’s what we believe we were doing through this emergency action.
In addition to that EOS New York elaborated that; As of right now, we do not have a timeline for when the freeze action can be lifted or sanctioned by ECAF – Freezing accounts outside of formal processes with no timeline or next steps being ok. We have asked for ECAF to submit a formal ruling on the merits of the case by 1300 UTC 19th June 2018. If no such ruling is released by this time, EOS New York will remove the freeze, which cannot be enforced without unanimous consensus by all top 21 Block Producers.
Nonetheless, EOS New York noted that if this continues to happen they may not be so supportive unless the state of the network was in critical need of the blacklisting solution again.
