In a lengthy Twitter thread, Polygon co-founder Mihailo Beljic reacted to allegations of centralization. He also stated that the team was making progress in removing the multisig contract.
In response to worries about centralization, Polygon co-founder Mihailo Beljic wrote a series of tweets on the topic on February 15th. Beljic was addressing Justin Bons, the founder and CIO of CyberCapital, who said that Polygon was not secure or centralized in its current state.
Specifically, Bons said that it would only take five people to compromise the $5 billion or so that was on the network. He even went so far as to say that “This is one of the largest hacks or exit scams just waiting to happen.”
The Polygon smart contract admin code is a multisig contract, which increases security rather than decreases it, as Beljic points out.
Polygon has been utterly opaque “in terms of their operational security & cryptographic ritual around the creation of this multisig,” according to Bons, whose primary goal was transparency.
Beljic responded by saying that the development team was working to get rid of the multi-sig, and then pointing to a recent multi-sig transparency report that detailed the signers. Chris Blec’s critique of Polygon, which he disregarded and referred to as,
“an abusive person who has systematically harassed founders of Uniswap, Polygon and several other projects.”
Multi-sigs are utilized in the early stages of development to secure user funds, according to Beljic, who also reminded readers that it was employed in practically every scaling and bridging project. Some have suggested that the protocol should move to totally decentralized governance to address the difficulties.
Beljic and the Polygon team have stated that they intend to entirely decentralize the network by handing over the smart contract admin key to MATIC holders, but that this is a goal that will be achieved gradually.
Advocates of the Polygon network have also expressed their frustration, claiming that this must be the case but the transition will increase the risk of exploits.
In recent years, Polygon has been chastised. An issue that might have put 9 billion MATIC coins at risk was patched in December 2021. It’s also worth noting that the top 100 addresses account for 90% of the MATIC supply.