❗️ #THORChain has never been strictly decentralized @THORChain comparing itself to decentralized L1s like BTC and ETH does not hold. Do not enable criminals — or put the industry at risk — just to take swap fees on stolen funds. 1️⃣ Custody: TSS vaults ≠ base-layer consensus On BTC/ETH, users control assets with their own keys. Miners/validators order and include txs. They never hold user funds. The worst a single miner can do is refuse to include your tx. They cannot send your coins. Every THORChain outbound (vault → user/attacker) has to be actively produced by the current active set via a GG20 TSS threshold signature. During a swap, funds sit in a TSS vault jointly controlled by those nodes. Releasing stolen funds is an active signing event, not “neutral ordering we cannot stop.” As @star_okx put it: from a custody view it is an intermediary between users and native chains. Distributed centralized custody is not decentralization. 2️⃣ Validator set: small, and it can coordinate Official docs: THORNodes bond RUNE to join. Active-set cap is ~100 (can scale to 250+), with a churn about every 3 days that drops the oldest, slowest, lowest-bond nodes. Nodes coordinate in real time on Dev Discord’s #mainnet channel — anonymous relays, votes (Mimir / node votes). That is an organization with a comms channel, a voting process, and execution tools. Not BTC/ETH’s globally anonymous set with no coordination path. 3️⃣ Intervention is designed in. There are runbooks. There are precedents. make pause: one node can halt the network (720 blocks per trigger, stackable). Slogan: “Halt Earn, Halt Often!” Standard is “an abundance of caution.” False trips can be undone with make resume. Per-chain signing halt: node votes can pause outbound signing on one chain only — the tool needed to stop ETH/BNB → BTC exits without taking the whole network down. Mimir governance: nodes can vote live to change params, halt trading, halt signing. Precedent: when THORChain itself was drained in May 2026, they paused and ran a controlled halt to stop further movement. 4️⃣ Inaction pays In the Bybit case, the attacker washed all 499K ETH in 10 days, mostly through THORChain into BTC. That printed ~$5.9B volume and ~$5.5M fees for THORChain. In the Bitget case, ~101.5 BTC (≈$8.5M) has already gone out via THORChain, with another ~27.63M XRP (≈$43M) mid-swap into BTC. Potential fee take: hundreds of thousands of dollars. In Feb 2025, validators voted to intercept DPRK-linked funds, then reversed. Core contributor Pluto, who pushed the intercept, left after that. 5️⃣ “THORChain is just like BTC” mixes up two different systems. See the comparison screenshot. ⚠️ A per-chain halt / outbound reject on FBI- and OFAC-attributed DPRK addresses and funds fits THORChain’s own “funds-at-risk” emergency framework. THORChain should do the job. Do not put the industry at risk for the fee line.