Legitimate Overrides in Decentralized Protocols

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 12 Feb 2026 (v1), last revised 24 Apr 2026 (this version, v2)] Legitimate Overrides in Decentralized Protocols Oghenekaro Elem, Nimrod Talmon Decentralized protocols claim immutable, rule-based execution, yet many embed emergency mechanisms such as chain-level freezes, protocol pauses, and account quarantines. These overrides are crucial for responding to exploits and systemic failures, but they expose a core tension: when does intervention preserve trust and when is it perceived as illegitimate discretion? With approximately $10 billion in technical exploit losses potentially addressable by onchain intervention (2016-2026), the design of these mechanisms has high practical stakes, but current approaches remain ad hoc and ideologically charged. We address this gap by developing a Scope \times Authority taxonomy that maps the design space of emergency architectures along two dimensions: the precision of the intervention and the concentration of trigger authority. We formalize the resulting tradeoffs of standing centralization cost, containment speed, and collateral disruption as a stochastic decision support framework, and derive three empirical hypotheses from it. Assessing the framework against 705 documented exploit incidents, we find that containment time varies systematically by authority type, that losses follow a heavy-tailed distribution (\alpha \approx 1.33) concentrating risk in rare catastrophic events, and that community sentiment plausibly modulates the effective cost of maintaining intervention capability. Using scope breadth as a practical proxy for blast potential, we also find that narrower interventions (Account/Module) do not underperform broader ones (Protocol/Network) on containment success and are slightly faster at the median, giving partial empirical support to the scope-blast hypothesis. The analysis yields design guidance for emergency governance and reframes the problem as one of engineering tradeoffs rather than ideological debate. Comments: 38 pages, 8 figures Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Computers and Society (cs.CY); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC) ACM classes: K.6.5; C.2.4; J.4 Report number: PARAMETRIG-TR-2026-001 Cite as: arXiv:2602.12260 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2602.12260v2 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.12260 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Oghenekaro Elem [view email] [v1] Thu, 12 Feb 2026 18:51:30 UTC (1,307 KB) [v2] Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:32:38 UTC (1,309 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-02 Change to browse by: cs cs.CY cs.DC References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)