In his recent interview, Andre Cronje weighted heavily (https://x.com/therollupco/status/2078961843008397433?s=20) in favor of smart contract upgradability, contrary to what he said before. For context: Andre was one of the people who ignited the DeFi summer in 2020, started a bunch of projects (including Yearn) and invented ve(3,3) variant of ve-tokenomics launched in Solidly, now used by Aerodrome.

Is he right to bash on immutability? I think no, very wrong.

Smart contracts can be hacked if mistakes were made - you know that. But having them upgradable means a possibility of a *hack by modification*. Especially if your upgrades are controlled by an EOA or a multisig, not a DAO.

Smart contracts are not large in size, so one *can* secure them in a bullet-proof way. If you are not sure - you can (and should) apply formal verification - it is about to become much more accessible than before (again, thanks to AI). If you are *still* not sure - make an ability to freeze a smart contract so that everyone can just do some sort of a safe withdrawal via the simplest possible route, so you have an emergency plan in case you have some issue detected.

If you are a dev - use immutability as your way to protect from all sorts of key compromises or infrastructure compromises, simialar to what LayerZero experienced with Kelp bridging. Immutability is your friend, not enemy. Andre is wrong.


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