A coding error accidentally locked away a YUGE pile of Ethereum in an executable distributed code contract (EDCC), hitting the profits of Canadian crypto currency exchange QuadrigaCX - but not its customers.
Today on June 2, 2017, the largest Canadian exchange QuadrigaCX explained an irregularity for the process of sweeping the incoming Ether to the company's exchange.
QCX took full blame for the issues and mistake, & has promised that there's been no impact on account funding. In a reddit post, the company's official account stated:
"all withdrawals, including Ether, are being processed as per usual and client balances are unaffected." (Source at end of article)
As per data compiled by one reddit user - (source below) this bug has trapped 67,316.2838 Ether (approximately $14.8 million) in the SafeConditionalHFTransfer of the governing EDCC. QuadrigaCX's official statement explains that the mistake happened after a Geth upgrade. Older protocols of Geth, had made allowances for optional prefixes of 0x on Hex values, whilst the upgrade made the prefix mandatory. QuadrigaCX stated:
"Our code didn't prefix the Hex string with 0x and when we upgraded Geth from 1.5.3 to 1.5.9 on the 24th of May, the SHA3 function call failed and our sweeper process then called the contract with an invalid data payload resulting in the ETH becoming trapped."
QuadrigaCX stated that while the problem has negatively impacted the company's profits, a fix may come in the form of Ethereum Improvement Proposal 156, a small code piece that could be changed to give a solution to the issue of contracts holding ETH with no way to move them.
QuadrigaCX must now find a way to be content with this very pricy lesson:
Always. Validate. Inputs.
Related Reddit sources of info:
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https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6ettq5/statement_on_quadrigacx_ether_contract_error/
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https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6eruqb/if_your_exchange_is_related_to/diczqn0/
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