Bitget CEO Gracy Chen has asked Thorchain to block wallets tied to the hackers who stole $387.5 million from her exchange, and Thorchain has refused. The standoff has pulled in OKX founder Star Xu and Dashpay's Joel Valenzuela, who are now clashing over whether Thorchain is truly decentralized, while critics point back to Thorchain's role in the 2025 Bybit hack.
Hackers stole $387.5 million from Bitget on Sept. 24, and the attacker has since moved the funds through several rails, including the decentralized exchange Thorchain. Chen tagged Thorchain's account on X and asked the platform to block the attacker's wallets.
Thorchain responded with sympathy for Bitget but said its protocol runs the same way as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and BNB Chain, then asked what responsibility those networks bear in the matter. Dashpay's Joel Valenzuela sided with Thorchain, arguing that no one asks Bitcoin or Ethereum to reverse transactions, even though both networks have rolled back chains before — Ethereum explicitly to undo an exploit.
OKX Founder Disputes Thorchain's Decentralization Claim
Star Xu, OKX's founder and CEO, argued that Thorchain's validator model isn't true decentralization, since a selected set of validators collectively controls the assets held in the network's vaults and can move them once the signing threshold is reached. He said that made Thorchain an intermediary between users and the native chains, not a base-layer network comparable to Bitcoin or Ethereum.
Xu and Valenzuela then traded barbs directly on X. Xu pointed to Thorchain's own vaults being drained in May, when node operators paused the entire network within minutes and kept it offline for 13 hours. According to a post on X: "Thorchain effectively proved that it is not truly decentralized."
Bybit's $1.2 Billion Hack Returns to the Spotlight
This isn't Thorchain's first brush with stolen-fund controversy. After Bybit was hacked in February 2025, Thorchain became the primary route North Korea's Lazarus Group used to move an estimated $1.2 billion, and it kept processing the swaps even under pressure from the FBI. After the Bitget attack, Bybit founder Ben Zhou offered his exchange's help tracing the stolen funds.
To many observers, Thorchain makes a fair point that decentralized protocols shouldn't be expected to censor transactions. But some KOLs say the network's decision to halt itself for 13 hours when its own vaults were at risk undermines that defense as selective.
Source: Bitcoin News
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