Users of the popular crypto-wallet parity are apparently once more affected by a serious bug. Ether worth 280 million US dollars has frozen.
Parity: crypto wallet "loses" millions
In July, unknown hackers managed to steal a $ 32 million vulnerability in the Ethereum client of the crypto-wallet parity. The responsible bug in the implementation of the multi-signature function had been patched at the time - now it seems that this patch has led to a new problem. All ether units in multi-signature wallets created with the application since July 20 are now frozen, as Heise Online reports.
Currently, millions of ethers worth millions cannot be transferred, Parity Technologies, a Wallet-based company, admits in a blog post. Parity has not yet mentioned any solution to the current problem. Currently, we are analyzing the situation and will report at a later date with new information, it says in the message.
The freezing of the ether units has apparently resulted in a sloppy implementation of a smart contract necessary for the multi-signature functionality or the underlying code library. Allegedly also unauthorized persons could take over the control over this contract and become the owner of Wallets. Because a user did so - supposedly unintentionally - a kind of self-destruct function was started, and the entire Smart Contract with code library was deleted.
Parity: No confirmation of the damage, no solution yet
How significant the damage is, the opinions of the industry observers are still diverging. Currently, a temporary loss of around one million ethers worth a total of nearly $ 280 million. $ 90 million of it allegedly belong to parity co-founder Gavin Woods. An official confirmation from Parity on the amount of the damage is pending.
A solution, how users can access their crypto-box again, does not exist yet. For example, one Reddit user discussed bringing back the ethers as part of a hard fork of the Ethereum Blockchain. Something similar was done when the blockchain project DAO went down, as Heise Online writes. At that time, critics at the measure had split off the currency Ethereum Classic.