A US court is suing a DAO for $71 MILLION. The same $71 MILLION the DAO recovered for the victims. A few days ago I posted about crypto not being as decentralized as people think and it turns out I was more right than I knew. On April 18 the KelpDAO bridge was drained for $292 MILLION. The attacker was Lazarus Group. North Korea. Arbitrum’s Security Council used emergency powers to freeze 30,766 $ETH on chain. Roughly $71 MILLION. Not to keep it. To return it to the people who lost it. Then on May 1 a restraining notice from the Southern District of New York landed on the Arbitrum governance forum. It was trying to seize that exact $71 MILLION. Not the hacker’s wallet but the recovered money. Funds already earmarked for the victims. The people trying to seize the money aren’t KelpDAO users. They are American families who sued North Korea in US court years ago after their relatives were kidnapped and killed by the regime. They won. The court ordered Pyongyang to pay them more than $877 MILLION in damages. North Korea has never paid a cent. So when Lazarus Group, which is run by the North Korean state, stole $292 MILLION from KelpDAO, those families saw an opportunity. Their argument is that the stolen $ETH is technically North Korean money and since North Korea owes them, the frozen funds should pay down that debt. The entire point of DeFi was that no single entity could walk in and say stop. Not a court, a bank or a government. Yet here we are. The court isn’t wrong for trying. The fact that it can try at all is the point. The second a small group of people had the power to freeze those funds, the system became something the law could touch. DeFi has spent a decade arguing it isn’t a bank. The first time it acted like one, the courts arrived.