On a recent Friday, Bybit, a major cryptocurrency exchange, reportedly fell victim to a cyber attack orchestrated by North Korea’s Lazarus group. The group seemingly siphoned off roughly $1.4 billion in Ether (ETH) from the exchange platform.

In the aftermath of the cyber attack, Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX and a supposed major holder of Ether (ETH), penned a message to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. He asked if Buterin would support a chain rollback to assist @Bybit_Official. Concurrently, in a live session on platform X, Bybit CEO Ben Zhou disclosed his team’s efforts to engage the Ethereum Foundation. They sought to understand if a network rollback was a feasible solution, emphasizing that the decision should align with the desires of the network community.

Hayes’ proposition sparked a strong backlash from the Ethereum community which steadfastly rejected the idea. Many community members wondered if BitMEX’s founder was being facetious. CoinDesk reached out to Hayes via platform X to shed light on his remarks.

The Ethereum community, including its core developer teams, is staunchly against a network rollback, as it would undermine key aspects of decentralization. If Buterin unilaterally decided to proceed with a rollback, it could potentially undermine the core principles of Ethereum. The platform values collective decision-making involving developer teams and community members in maintaining the health and stability of the blockchain.

A user named @the_weso commented on platform X, “Rolling back the chain would render ETH pointless. What’s the use if rules can be arbitrarily changed?”

Commenters outside the Ethereum community referenced the infamous 2016 DAO cyber attack where $60 million in ETH was purloined. The Ethereum network responded to the breach with a hard fork, essentially creating two separate networks. The new network continued to operate as Ethereum.

However, the hard fork action was not a “rollback”; it was an “irregular state transition.” The architecture of Ethereum, which employs an account model, makes a network rollback technically impossible.

Following the DAO breach, developers updated their nodes to new software or client. Those who did not update remained on the old network, now known as Ethereum Classic.

With the node update, the misappropriated ETH could be transferred across different Ethereum account addresses.

In a post on Platform X, Laura Shin of Unchained elaborated, “The ‘irregular state change’ implemented at the time of the DAO hard fork was that all the ETH in the DAO smart contracts was moved to a refund contract. This contract would return 1 ETH for every 100 DAO tokens submitted.”

Read more: Arthur Hayes Suggests Ethereum Network Rollback Following $1.4B Bybit Hack, Ignites Community Backlash.