A zombie blockchain — THORChain presents itself as a cross-chain liquidity network. This one hasn’t had an easy life so far. Indeed, this liquidity has been the target of several attacks and had to be put on hold on October 27th. Eventually, it was put back online.
THORChain paused then restarted
On October 27, the teams of THORChain made a surprising announcement via Twitter. Indeed, they stated that the network had been pausedfollowing “a unique type of transaction».
“The developers are aware of a chain stop and have identified probable cause due to a unique transaction type (nothing to do with creditworthiness). An update will be released as soon as there is more confirmed information. »
Finally, a few hours after the first announcement, the developers announced that they had found the cause of the problem. Thus, the chain found itself blocked following a problem of consensus between the nodes.
“Turns out it’s string manipulation: the code was pushing a cosmos Uint (instead of a uint64) into a string, causing the string to get the point of the large int instead of the actual value, causing the memo string to look different on different nodes. »
After identifying the flaw, the developers have released a corrective patch. Subsequently, after approximately 20 hours at a standstill, THORChain was relaunched on October 28 in the late afternoon.
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THORChain: a fragile network?
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time THORChain has been in the news for the wrong reasons.
In July 2021, the protocol had been the target of an attack resulting in the loss of 5 million dollars in cryptocurrencies. Following this attack, the network was put on hold while the flaw was corrected.
While the teams thought they were out of the woods, the protocol fell victim to a second attack ten days later. Thus, on July 26, 8 million dollars were stolen during this malicious act.
At the time of this incident, the hacker had lectured THORChain, asking the developers not to relaunch the protocol until it had been audited.
Following these attacks, THORChain teams initiated a programme de bug bounty in partnership with ImmuneFi.
Fortunately, in the case of the most recent case, no loss is to be deplored on the protocol.
Hacks and various exploits are still regular in the ecosystem. Of course, the attacks do not only target DeFi. In effect, the Deribit exchange platform recorded a $28 million hack.
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