Arbitrum Security Council Uses Emergency Powers to Transfer Attacker’s ETH

CoinDesk reports that on April 21 (UTC+8), Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly, analyzed the move by the Arbitrum Security Council to transfer 30,765 ETH held by the Kelp DAO attacker to a secure address and freeze them via a technical solution. He noted that this transaction type is ArbitrumUnsignedTxType (EIP-2718 type 0x65/101)—a system-level transaction that cannot be signed by a regular EOA, but can only be injected into ArbOS by the Arbitrum Security Council. This action did not involve a chain rollback or historical rewrite; functionally, it is a state-level recovery: the attacker’s private key can still sign transactions, but the ETH at that address have been transferred by the chain itself. This operation also demonstrates the Security Council’s authority under “catastrophic emergency” scenarios as described in Arbitrum’s progressive decentralization documentation.