The slowdown caused by Cryptokitties is not the only problem encountered by the Ethereum network in recent weeks. Funds have been frozen on the Ethereum blockchain due to a bug and a hard fork would be unavoidable to unlock them.
Back to the Ethereum Parity Fail
Last November, the Ethereum Parity portfolio had a serious problem on its network, preventing users from transferring funds from their wallet. Because of this, all Parity multisig wallets were frozen soon after, making a total of about 510,000 ETH, spread across 584 portfolios.
To reassure the "furious" users, the Parity Technologies team (the company that manages the portfolio) apologized before declaring that the frozen funds were not lost, and that they were at the helm. looking for the solution that would solve the problem. The team also said in the release ... that the bug was known!
A hard fork as the only solution?
A month later, and after doing some research on the subject, Parity has yet found a rather difficult solution to implement: a hard fork of the Ethereum network. It was via a recent blog that the Parity team announced the news to the Ethereum owners who were victims of the freeze. It reads:
"All these funds are irretrievable without change in blockchain status, optocode updates, or consensus rule changes. "
Parity offers 3 ways to implement the hard fork
Parity is asking for a hard fork to reverse the $ 230 million bug, while proposing three possible actions to change the state of the network.
Implement proposal EIP156 It would allow in some cases (contracts created without code, attacks replay, javascript library bug) to recover funds but this would only affect a minority of those with funds blocked. This solution does not seem appropriate because each of the multisig portfolios were created via code;
Set up a "specific recovery address". This solution is still very imprecise and would require work from those who propose it. It would have the advantage of covering a large part of those with frozen funds;
Make a hard fork pure and simple. This solution would have the advantage of being able to recover all the funds while correcting the flaws that led to the blocking of funds.
We deduce that in fine, Parity has not advanced much and the hard fork seems to be the only way out. If you want more technical details about the possible solutions, we invite you to read the Parity release.