Last night, the crypto market staged a shocking risk exposure: the core wallet of the FLOW team was hacked, with 29 million tokens stolen. The hacker then sold 16 million of them, instantly draining market liquidity. The project team’s emergency response was also unexpected—directly suspending the entire chain operation.

This reveals a harsh reality in the industry: when a protocol is entirely controlled by the project team or a few private key holders, the so-called decentralization promises often turn out to be illusory. Your asset security is actually tied to the team’s operational capabilities and security awareness. Once this link is compromised, the chain can be halted, and prices can drop to zero, leaving holders with no choice but to watch passively.

This incident highlights some vulnerabilities in current protocol designs. In contrast, some emerging protocols are beginning to rethink this issue. For example, they adopt dynamic hedging and over-collateralized asset pools to diversify risk, rather than relying on single-point control multi-signature wallets; or introduce layered liquidity mechanisms to ensure that even in extreme market shocks, redemption rights are always protected by buffer layers, preventing a vicious cycle of "pool dry-up and price collapse." The common goal of these improvements is to shift security from dependence on humans to mechanisms and mathematics.

The FLOW incident may serve as a wake-up call for the entire industry—what should true security be based on?