Great news Thorchads!!!After nearly 3 months of the chain halt resulting from multiple hacks, Thorchain is gradually coming back to life, first with BNB trading then other chains will follow much later. Let’s look at what has been done to reach this point.
Multiple external audits have been done with no critical issues detected. Internal audits have been done and critical issues patched.
A new “red team” has been installed comprising of professional white hat hackers. The core dev team have taken a back seat and become “blue team” which will be over seeing protecting of the chain from threats rather than looking for exploits.
Changes such as halting the chain when there is insolvency were made to the protocol to make it more resilient. When there is a large out bound transfer, the protocol will auto delay itself for up to an hour giving enough time for the community to block any pending attacks.
Changes were also made to the Bifrost to block smart contracts from interacting with the network.
A more pragmatic approach has been developed to properly handle the bounty program by immunefi.
I honestly can’t be happier. These changes are sure to have a great impact in making Thorchain more secure and unfuckwithable(a word I like to use), understandably that this is what should have been done, but it’s better late than never.
I’m super psyched about the part where the Bifrost is being blocked from interaction with smart contracts. This was the bane in the neck of Thorchain that led to the 2 exploits when they happened. The hacker faked the smart contract and the Bifrost was deceived into responding based on the fake contract leading to the exploitation.
I’m also excited about the new installed red team that will be actively looking for exploits in every dev update and trying to break things for profit, I mean, why expend so much resources in trying to break a code that could be easily detected by the network and stopped when you can try to break it for profit by offering your expertise and submitting the bugs?
I actually do feel more confident as an investor and user of the Thorchain protocol. While the chain might still not be perfect, it is sure closer to it and any other exploit will expose another loophole that will be dealt with professionally, no code is perfect, not one that involves multiple chains and ecosystems built into one system. It’s a grand flaw in mechanical engineering, but it can always be resilient enough to withstand attacks. This is the goal.
While Thorchain might have gone down in operation, the vision was alive in the entire community, the need was never ending in crypto and building never stopped with the dev team. Now Thorchain is back up running and stronger than ever. Full Multi chain layer 1 trading will commence shortly while Mainnet is still on track for launch by end of year.
What a time to be alive. Onwards Thorchards! 💪🏻
For more information check out the threads on Thorchain’s Lead dev’s Twitter account.