Some DeFi protocols have emergency freeze capabilities governed by security councils or multisig arrangements rather than a single company. Arbitrum's 12-member security council can execute emergency actions through a 9-of-12 multisig vote, which is how it froze attacker-linked ETH following the Kelp DAO exploit. The council members are elected by ARB token holders through the DAO governance process, creating a layer of community accountability that centralized institutions do not have. Whether this makes a protocol truly decentralized is genuinely contested in the industry. Some argue that any freeze capability undermines decentralization regardless of governance structure. Others argue that transparent, pre-defined, DAO-governed emergency powers are fundamentally different from discretionary corporate authority, and that the difference lies in whether the rules were publicly established before the crisis rather than invented during it.