Cross-chain liquidity protocol THORChain saw its network halted on Thursday as developers worked to resolve the issue.
In a Twitter update on Oct. 28, the THOR team said that developers were aware of the chain halt and had identified the issue to be related to a unique transaction type as opposed to anything to do with the protocol’s solvency.
THORChain-based decentralized exchange THORSwap said that the chain halt had not impacted swaps or the liquidity pool and that funds were safe. The team said that all ETH and ERC-20 swaps were fully functional on the DEX aggregator.
“Consensus halts in a distributed state machine are from sources of non-determinism between individual nodes and prevent the ledger from becoming corrupted,” said the THORChain team in a separate update a few hours later.
THOR said that the next steps would be to find the root cause of the issue and release an update that fixes it. Two hours later, developers said they had “clearly understood” the consensus issue behind the network outage and were in the process of shipping a patch to address it.
The bug in the code was related to string manipulation which had gone unnoticed on THOR’s stagenet – an improvised testnet that clones THORChain with real assets and allows new features before they are deployed on the mainnet.
“Didn’t see this in stagenet because the bad memo never gets written to disk/block, because it gets swapped immediately. Where at mainnet has a queue and therefore the swap to synth doesn’t get executed the same block, and the bad memo is written to the block,” explained the THOR team in a tweet.
