Aug 17, 2018 ⋅ 2 min read
One of the key lessons to emerge from The DAO's breach was a call for an escape hatch. An escape hatch is simply a mechanism to stop the operation of a smart contract, perhaps revert it to a lower-level safety mode, when something nefarious seems to be taking place. The problem with an escape hatch, though, is that it may seem to be at odds with the "autonomous" nature of smart contracts. .   The simplest escape hatch could be implemented by having a cryptographic public key embedded in the contract, allowing only a person holding an appropriate secret key to activate the hatch and push the contract into "maintenance mode," from which it could be debugged and restarted, using the same key. An upgrade would be to make it a multisig or a shared secret key. Both of these approaches are undesirable in a DAO, however, because the parties holding the keys present a point of weakness.   A simple decentralized escape hatch (DEH) mechanism works better for DAOs. A DEH comprises of three components:
The implementation of the trigger is the sticky point. There are two, mutually complementary, options:
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