Analyzing Recent Events from the Perspective of MPC Wallet Management

Recently, a well-known cross-chain bridge project encountered significant operational issues, sparking widespread discussions in the industry about multi-party computation (MPC) wallet management. After the project's CEO was taken away by the police, the team lost access to the MPC node servers, rendering assets inoperable. This incident revealed that merely adopting MPC technology is not enough to achieve true decentralized asset management.

Analysis shows that although the project uses MPC technology, there are still serious centralization risks in actual operations. All node servers operate under the CEO's personal cloud service account, which is essentially equivalent to a single signature Wallet. Clearly, the project team has significant oversights in the decentralized custody of MPC shards and emergency plans in extreme situations.

To fully leverage the advantages of MPC technology, improvements need to be made in the following areas:

1. Enhance transparency and prevent conflicts of interest. Introduce a trusted third-party MPC service provider to avoid a "black box" situation where the project party is both the service builder and the user.

2. Strictly implement the principle of decentralized custody. Ensure the decentralized distribution of servers, access permissions, and geographical locations to eliminate single point risks.

3. Develop contingency plans for extreme situations. Design social recovery mechanisms for emergencies, such as SOS mode, to achieve asset transfer while ensuring safety.

Some professional institutions have conducted beneficial explorations in these areas. For example, adopting a 3-3 multi-signature scheme combined with high-strength encryption and trusted execution environments; implementing multi-level private key derivation, balancing global control and hierarchical authorization; using online remote multi-active storage and multi-level offline cold backup, etc. These measures can effectively reduce single-point risk and improve system availability.

For emergencies, some institutions have also designed non-standard services such as SOS mode. This mode is inactive under normal circumstances and will only be activated under specific conditions to achieve emergency asset disposal. At the same time, to prevent abuse, restriction measures such as a delay in effectiveness and lock-up periods will also be set.

Overall, MPC technology provides new possibilities for asset security management, but having just the technology is not enough. Project teams need to make improvements in management concepts, process design, and risk prevention in various aspects to truly leverage the advantages of MPC and achieve safe and efficient management of assets.