Key takeaways:
- Following reports of a possible vulnerability, THORChain, a decentralised cross-chain liquidity protocol, immediately suspended the network.
- According to THORChain the decision was taken as an act of caution while the claims were being looked into.
The decentralised funding protocol THORChain revealed on March 28 that its network might be susceptible to flaws. The project Pluto9r’s pseudonymous infrastructure expert and developer tweeted about the current status of the protocol, claiming to have heard “credible reports’ ‘ concerning it.
THORChain has not yet disclosed details about the bug that might have compromised the chain, with more developments to come. To prevent any possible financial damage, trading has been momentarily halted.
THORChain’s settlement layer presently permits swaps between eight distinct chains, including dogecoin, litecoin, bitcoin cash, avalanche, cosmos hub, binance chain, and ethereum.
The most recent halt on the THORChain network is by no means the first. The network was shut down in October 2022 due to a software bug that caused “non-determinism amongst individual nodes.” The network was restored and fully functional after 20 hours of repair.
According to statistics from CoinGecko, the native token of THORChain, Rune RUNE, has decreased by about 5% as a result of the news. At $1.32, the cryptocurrency is currently down 18% over the last 30 days in price.
THORChain re-posted a halt update on Twitter about eight hours after the original announcement, demonstrating that the privacy team and developers were able to recognise the disclosure as legitimate. The update added that THORChain returned to trading because “no nodes can take advantage of the present vulnerability,” stressing that it “would require a malicious node in the last churn.”
In October of last year, the PoS-based THORChain had to cease activities due to a “unique transaction type.” It clarified that causes of inter-node unpredictability cause consensus halts in a distributed state machine.
The significance of having a specialized safety unit and procedure established for addressing possible problems efficiently is highlighted by THORChain’s fast reaction and resolution to the situation given the current defi environment where well-known programmes like Euler finance are experiencing difficulties.
