Secure onchain UI would have prevented Bybit hack — Dfinity founder

Dominic Williams, the founder and chief scientist at the Dfinity Foundation — a nonprofit organization that maintains and facilitates the development of the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) — recently told Cointelegraph that applications should be fully onchain to prevent the user interface compromise seen in the recent Bybit hack.

According to Williams, most decentralized applications and blockchain projects currently feature onchain tokenomics but rely on centralized web platforms, such as Amazon Web Services, for their infrastructure — which makes these applications and projects vulnerable to centralized security breaches. The Dfinity founder told Cointelegraph:

“The whole point of running software on the blockchain is it guarantees that the written logic will run against the correct onchain data. And you don’t get those guarantees with traditional information technology.”

“As an industry, we’ve lost our way. We started calling things onchain, which are built on Amazon Web Services, because they’ve got an associated token,” the founder continued.

Williams added that any code updates to a project or platform should be updated via a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) and subject to community review rather than a single developer pushing code.

Related: Inside the Lazarus Group money laundering strategy

The economic impact of centralized security breaches on crypto

The Dfinity chief scientist then turned his attention to the financial impact of the $1.4 billion Bybit hack on the crypto markets.

Williams said that the state-sponsored Lazarus Hacker group is adept at laundering money and that this money would be siphoned from the crypto markets and into other sectors of the economy — never to be seen again.

“This is ultimately one of the reasons that prices are crashing today,” the Dfinity founder added.

According to data from CoinMarketCap, the total crypto market capitalization is currently $2.8 trillion — down from a high of roughly $3.62 trillion recorded in January 2025.

Crypto prices declined sharply following the Bybit hack — the single largest crypto hack in history — amid macroeconomic uncertainty and eroding investor confidence in the nascent asset sector.

Bohdan Opryshko, Everstake’s chief operating officer, also told Cointelegraph that the Bybit hack had prompted institutional stakers to migrate from centralized platforms over cybersecurity fears.

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