THORChain suffered two back-to-back exploits on its ETH router. The first took all ETH out of the system through an offensive contract that was in front of the router. The second seized all of the economically important ERC20s through an offensive deal that was behind the router.
Well, the DeFi protocol has come a long way. On March 10 it was the third largest project according to Messari. But this does not guarantee long, faltering rides.
Sorry for the inconvenience?
THOR necklace to experience a 6 a.m. network outage in the early morning of March 19. However, it has since been restored. And all pending transactions are shown in subsequent blocks. This shouldn’t come as a total surprise, given the platform’s massive traction in 2022. In fact, the hard fork planned for the following Monday, it was expected to be delayed by six hours due to the outage.
THORChain tweeted that its network was recovering after a brief outage and that no funds were at risk at this time.
Unexpected stop after death.
The chain correctly stopped on an exception and a solution was pushed to a live network in record time.
From discovery to reboot in less than 6 hours with no tx lost.
Kudos to the community of developers and node operators for a great response. https://t.co/DBi67nn1Ks
— THORChain #THORFI (@THORChain) March 18, 2022
Chad Barraford, the core developer of THORChain, stated in a tweet on March 18 that the THORChain network had experienced an outage, causing it to stop producing new blocks. However, the core developers released a solution.
According to the root cause, the protocol was updated the same on March 19, it read:
Note: This is the best way to deal with these types of errors and Tendermint-Cosmos is designed to stop rather than block with corrupted data.
Stopping the chain will interrupt everything, allowing fixes to be made.
— THORChain #THORFI (@THORChain) March 18, 2022
Since the error was in the mempool and not in the ledger, a solution was possible. The node representing the block simply had to run the updated software to fix the error and continue. “So no hard fork needed,” the team added.
However, the network was soon online. That said, it had to catch up to the sheer volume of pending transactions during the outage. In addition, it pushed the team into the state machine with a maximum operation of 5000 tx/block with a run speed of 833 tx/sec.
Source: Twitter
The native token, RUNE, witnessed an impressive rise despite this obstacle. It ran out by 16% in just 24 hours; it traded just before the $13 mark. The community itself supported the protocol, regardless of the noise.
Ambiguous Statistics
It can be noted that the volume increased after the introduction of synths into the system. Actually, synth volume/TVL increased by 700%.
(Synths are derivative assets that exist in the Thorchain chain (tendermint/cosmos based) and are backed by tangible L1 assets in the liquidity pools.)
This increase was quite evident in the chart below which also showed a similar trend for development activities.
Source: Saniment
According to the stochastic oscillator, THORChain’s crypto was: oversold (<=20)†
Source: Santiment
As seen above, negative sentiment on the platform overwhelmed its counterpart. This explained the sales attribute mentioned above. Could this later become an obstacle for the protocol and its original token? Well, that remains to be seen.