The Gate 1.7 million U theft incident has gone viral: What's even more terrifying than 'who's lying' is the 'endpoint breach' crisis Web3 is facing Over the past 48 hours, there has been a heated debate regarding the theft of 1.7 million units by a major player at Gate. The user insists that they did not receive the verification code or have their face scanned; Gate's internal review indicates that facial recognition, email, fund password, and 24-hour withdrawal protection have all been triggered normally. Both sides hold their own opinions, and the spectators are judging the case. But from the perspective of the entire Web3 industry infrastructure, we seem to have got the focus wrong. As a practitioner, after reviewing the evidence presented by both parties, I came to a harsh conclusion: most likely, neither party lied. Why? Because under current hacking techniques, once your device or operating environment is hijacked, your asset defense is left with only one layer of paper. This is called "endpoint compromise" in network security. The security dilemma of CEX lies in the fact that they have built a risk control network comparable to banks - remote login interception, withdrawal facial recognition, and 24-hour lock up protection. But the exchange's system can only verify whether the operation instructions are legal, and cannot penetrate the screen to confirm whether the person sitting in front of the computer is you. If a hacker hijacks a user's local session through a Trojan horse, or intercepts the underlying permissions of the device (or even uses AI to forge biometric recognition), in the eyes of CEX's server, all operations are considered normal requests from the "user themselves" in a legitimate environment. The platform's risk control engine executed its code logic perfectly, but the user's money was indeed gone. 5/This is the most terrifying place to ponder. Web3 has been shouting 'Mass Adoption', and we talk about BTC ecology, infrastructure, and more every day RWA， But our underlying security logic is still flawed: we are using a Web2 level fragile operating system to manage millions of dollars worth of "anonymous assets" in Web3. If an ordinary wealthy individual needs to possess the OPSEC awareness of a top tier influencer in order to keep their money; If a slight mistake in clicking on a Tg link or downloading a wrong plugin means losing everything, then the large-scale adoption of Web3 is a false proposition. What the industry needs is a lower level hardware level consensus, rather than allowing users and CEX to prove their innocence to each other after losing money. There is no luck in the dark forest. Three iron laws for all wealthy households: Physical isolation: The devices used for cryptocurrency trading must be physically separated from the devices used for daily viewing and chatting on social media. Hardware level authorization: The security items of large assets must be bound to physical hardware as the final withdrawal authorization, and cannot rely solely on SMS and email. Respect the environment: In Web3, once your endpoint environment gets dirty, the "I didn't do anything" in your eyes is just "fully automated backend execution" for hackers.