Break-Glass Access via Smart Contracts for Emergency Care

A physical key or multi-sig held by a CEO creates a centralized attack surface and a governance bottleneck. Recovery is gated by human availability, creating a ~24-72 hour delay during an active exploit.

• Key Risk: Social engineering or physical theft of the sole key.
• Operational Bloat: Requires manual, off-chain coordination to sign.

To be trusted, a break-glass process must be verifiable. Legacy methods are opaque by design, hiding the key's location and access logs. This creates a trust deficit with users and DAOs, who cannot audit the emergency mechanism they rely on.

• Audit Gap: No on-chain proof of key security or inactivity.
• Trust Assumption: Users must blindly trust the key holder's integrity.

A static key cannot encode complex recovery logic. It's a binary all-or-nothing switch, incapable of proportional responses like freezing a single compromised module or executing a staged migration. This forces over-correction and systemic risk.

• Blunt Instrument: Cannot target specific vulnerabilities.
• Cost: Full wallet control transfer risks new attack vectors.

DAOs vote on-chain, but their ultimate safety relies on an off-chain key. This creates a procedural schism. Emergency action cannot be permissioned by the DAO's own token-weighted governance, violating the principle of on-chain legitimacy.

• Sovereignty Breach: Overrides the DAO's constitutional process.
• Coordination Failure: Slow off-chain signaling to key holders.

Traditional multi-sigs are still vulnerable to social engineering, legal seizure, or insider collusion. A single compromised signer can be a protocol's death knell.

• Key Risk: Centralized failure vector for $10B+ TVL protocols.
• Real Consequence: See the Parity Wallet or Sifchain governance attacks.

Encode recovery logic directly into immutable smart contracts. Anyone can initiate a pre-defined emergency action, but execution is delayed by a security council or decentralized network vote.

• Key Benefit: Removes unilateral power; forces public scrutiny during the delay.
• Implementation: Used by MakerDAO's Emergency Shutdown Module and Compound's Governor Bravo pause guardian.

Automate emergency responses based on objective, verifiable on-chain data. Trigger pauses or withdrawals if metrics like TVL drain rate, oracle deviation, or governance proposal velocity exceed safe thresholds.

• Key Benefit: ~500ms reaction time to exploits, faster than human committees.
• Example: Aave's Guardian can freeze assets based on risk parameters from Chainlink oracles.

Distribute emergency signing power to a geographically and jurisdictionally diverse set of entities (e.g., Oasis.app, Gauntlet, Figment). Require a supermajority attestation to a signed message, not a direct transaction.

• Key Benefit: Resilient to legal coercion against any single entity.
• Ecosystem Parallel: Similar to the Ethereum Foundation's ERC-4337 bundler network for decentralization.

When automated systems and committees fail, enable a last-resort recovery via a broad tokenholder vote. This is a nuclear option with a very high quorum (e.g., >50% of supply) and long timelock.

• Key Benefit: Ultimate legitimacy rests with the protocol's true owners.
• Trade-off: Slow (1-2 weeks), but ensures no minority can hijack the process.

Every break-glass action must emit immutable, detailed events. This creates a permanent, public record for forensic analysis and accountability, deterring malicious use.

• Key Benefit: Enables post-mortems and DAO sanctions against bad actors.
• Critical For: Maintaining trust after an emergency, as seen in Lido's curated on-chain reporting.