VerifiedX said Thursday that a new version of its recovery Vaults is out with the layer 1 network's Mainnet 9.0.0 upgrade. According to a VerifiedX press release, a Vault lets holders of vBTC, a Bitcoin-pegged token the company calls self-custodial and redeemable for bitcoin at any time, pull back a transfer sent by mistake or by a thief before it settles.
The announcement comes a week after the Oct. 29 Binance hack, which drained roughly $6.4 billion across ten blockchains, according to blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs. Tether, Circle and others froze about $2.7 billion of it, TRM said, tying the theft to North Korea's TraderTraitor group. VerifiedX's release does not name Binance but it cites last week's record hack and the more than 18,000 Bitcoin stolen in it that could not be frozen.
Zero Knowledge Group founder Austin Campbell, commenting on the Binance hack, said on Unchained's Bits + Bips in an episode recorded Nov. 2 that crypto lacks protocols that say "if you're gonna move a billion dollars, there's a 24-hour, like, clock on that thing," adding in the same episode, "You don't just get to yeet that thing out the door."
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What a Vault Does
Think of it as a cooling-off window. The owner decides how long a transfer sits before it becomes final. During that time it can be called back, with the assets sent to a recovery address the owner sets. VerifiedX says consensus rules, not a custodian, enforce this, and that the same protection extends to VFX and other assets minted on the network. Vaults also support transfers time-locked to settle at a set date.
"Digital assets have operated under the assumption that if someone successfully obtains the authority to move an asset, the security battle is essentially over," said Jay Pollak, head of strategy at VerifiedX, in the release. "We don't think that is an acceptable end state for a financial system responsible for protecting potentially trillions of dollars of value."
Validators Watch Bitcoin Directly
VerifiedX says that on mainnet, it won't act on anything tied to Bitcoin until the underlying Bitcoin transaction has six confirmations, and VerifiedX validators each check that for themselves: they run a Bitcoin light client and confirm the block headers, the proof of work and that the transaction is actually in a block. VerifiedX says in the release that the result is that balances and UTXOs "come directly from the Bitcoin network, with no oracle, third party or off-chain attestation."
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