The major hack may be the worst attack to hit the NFT community in its history, with millions of dollars in potential losses.
The way I read the article, the "worth millions" is the sum of the ransom demand.
The funny part is that the exploit is in the "smart" contract, ya know the thing that the blockchain keeps secure by forbidding any updates or patches.
Well, just because a company holds the ledger of who owns what doesn't make it impossible to police, governments order companies to do stuff all the time, that wouldn't stop, but it would make it more difficult to police.
You claim that "governments order companies to do stuff all the time", but how does that apply to an entry in the blockchain, which we've agreed is the authority on who owns property. The hint is: a company couldn't change an entry in the blockchain, even if the government ordered them to do it.
To make the dumb idea of tracking peoperties on the blockchain there needs to be admin tools to restore the NFT to the proper owner.
If the NFT gets transfered to someone else illegally, there needs to be tools to add another entry to the chain with a note saying that the NFT was stolen, and this new change restores the ownership to the lawful owner.
there needs to be admin tools to restore the NFT to the proper owner.
The whole point of the blockchain technologies is that they're (supposedly) immune to state interference. What's on the blockchain is the "truth". The state wouldn't have any power to restore the proper owner of the NFT / house because they chose to trust blockchain instead of having control over the database.
If states can "restore ownership to the lawful owner", they can also seize people's cryptocurrencies.
That's why no state would ever have house registries on a blockchain that they didn't control. And if they did control it, there's no point in using a blockchain when they could just use a traditional database.