North Korea's Crypto Hack Playbook Won't Work on Canton Network, Says Digital Asset CEO

In brief

• Beyond the high-profile $290 million Kelp DAO hack, Wall Street firms are concerned about their fiduciary responsibility to prevent state-sponsored bad actors from interacting with their systems.
• Digital Asset's Yuval Rooz highlighted the Canton network’s “guardrail” design as a solution to infiltration, a feature that remains a point of contention for crypto purists.
• Rooz believes that Arbitrum’s 12-member security council didn’t do “a bad thing” by effectively freezing funds that Kelp DAO attackers had left exposed.

North Korean-linked hacking groups have sent a shiver down the cryptosphere’s spine amid mounting losses for decentralized finance projects, but those fears have grown just as intense on Wall Street, according to Digital Asset co-founder and CEO Yuval Rooz.

Even before Kelp DAO’s $290 million hack rattled confidence in DeFi last month, Rooz told Decrypt that the team behind Canton—a public, permissioned blockchain—had fielded questions from financial institutions about threats from the so-called Hermit Kingdom. North Korean hackers have stolen over $6 billion in crypto since 2017, per a report from TRM Labs.

“They have to make sure that bad actors cannot engage with their systems,” he said. “That’s what they’re responsible for from their fiduciary duty as a traditional organization.”

Because Canton allows participants to implement guardrails for subnets they create or digital assets they issue, Rooz is confident that North Korean-linked hacking groups would struggle to work within Canton’s ecosystem, despite their evolution from simple phishing attempts to months-long infiltration campaigns aimed at gaining privileged access to DeFi protocols.

Since the network debuted in 2024, crypto purists have chafed at Canton’s design, arguing that it’s not a “true” blockchain partly because participants can limit users’ control; however, allegations of centralization have cropped up recently within DeFi more broadly.

When Arbitrum’s 12-member security council to freeze $71 million in funds that Kelp DAO’s attackers had left exposed on the , for example, debate followed about whether the move compromised the fundamental, permissionless nature of DeFi.