Crypto is a technology, but for many it's also a religion. If you doubt it, consider the prophet-like status accorded to Satoshi, the memes and iconography surrounding every blockchain, or the sectarian-style rivalry between hardcore devotees of Bitcoin and Ethereum. And like every religion, crypto has sacred values—the highest of which is decentralization.
I bring all this up in light of venture capital investor Jump Capital's successful bid to steal back $140 million of Ethereum from a hacker who, in one of the biggest heists in crypto history, last year robbed a flimsy piece of software called the Wormhole Bridge. There is much more to the story but the long and short of it is Jump used blockchain to trace the stolen funds to Oasis, a provider of DeFi wallet software, and then leaned on Oasis to tamper with its smart contracts in order to snatch back the funds. The episode was hailed as a brilliant "reverse hack" on the part of Jump, but also raises awkward questions about decentralization—or rather the lack of it in the realm of DeFi, a field that's supposed to embody crypto's highest value.
