Polygon Co-Founder Addresses Centralization and Exit Scam Concerns

Polygon co-founder Mihailo Beljic responded to criticism of centralization in a lengthy Twitter thread. He also said that the team was slowly working its way towards the removal of the multi-sig contract.

Polygon co-founder Mihailo Beljic, in response to concerns surrounding centralization, posted a series of tweets on Feb 15 discussing the issue. Beljic was responding to the founder and CIO of CyberCapital, Justin Bons, who said that Polygon in its current state was not secure and centralized.

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 key is a multi-sig contract, which as Beljic notes, is to increase security, not decrease it. Bons, though, says that Polygon has been completely opaque “in terms of their operational security & cryptographic ritual around the creation of this multisig.” Transparency was his primary concern.

In his response, Beljic said that the development team was working to remove the multi-sig, and then pointed to a recent multi-sig transparency report, which provided details about the signers. He spoke of Chris Blec’s criticism of Polygon, which he dismissed and called,

“an abusive person who has systematically harassed founders of Uniswap, Polygon and several other projects.”

Beljic states that multi-sigs are used in the early stages of development to secure user funds and reminded readers that almost every scaling and bridging project used it. To address the concerns, some have said that the protocol must switch to completely decentralized governance.

What solutions amid criticism of Polygon?

To completely become decentralized, the smart contract admin key would have to be handed to MATIC holders. This would make it a DAO, but it would require extensive work.

Beljic and the Polygon team have noted their intentions to do so but said that it’s a goal that would gradually be reached. Supporters of Polygon said that this must be the case because there are greater chances of bugs occurring should the migration take place.

Polygon has faced some criticism in recent times. In December 2021, an exploit that could have put 9 billion MATIC tokens at risk was patched. It has also been noted that the top 100 addresses hold over 90% of the MATIC supply.