THORChain, a Cosmos ecosystem blockchain dedicated to delivering cross-chain liquidity, started operations on Friday after being halted due to a software problem.
On Thursday, the THORChain development team tweeted that it was aware of an outage and that developers had “discovered the likely cause owing to a unique transaction type (nothing to do with solvency).”
A spokeswoman for THORChain said in an email to CoinDesk on Friday morning: “The network stop has been lifted as of 10:20 AM (ET) on Friday, and the THORChain mainnet is once again creating blocks. Trading will be halted until the outgoing queue is cleared. Trading will resume once all outstanding outbound transactions have been executed.”
A THORChain representative told Cointelegraph that the chain had been paused for safety reasons, but that it planned to “revert once the root of non-determinism is uncovered.” THORSwap, a token-swapping platform, said that it was still accepting Ethereum and ERC-20 swaps during the outage.
A Non-Determinism of Nodes
After the blockchain administrators recognized the outage of the THORChain network on Twitter on Thursday due to a software error, the network’s administrators claimed that solvency was unconnected to the halt and was caused by non-determinism between individual nodes. After confirming that the interruption had nothing to do with solvency, the company went on to tell its customers that they were working hard to find a solution as soon as possible.
According to a previously public update by THORChain, the company discovered the sources of non-determinism between nodes that were creating the problem four hours after the first alarm.
According to the researchers, consensus halts in a distributed state machine emerge from sources of inter-node non-determinism and protect the ledger from corruption. The network administrators outlined the steps required to resolve the problem, noting that they were almost there: finding the source of non -determinism, posting an update, and restarting the state machine.
After Running Back On, THORChain Claims It Was String Manipulation
After another three hours of waiting for the firm’s response, the team claimed that they had recognized the problem as string manipulation. According to their statement, the developers should have recognized the issue because the wrong message was promptly switched out and never inserted into the block. Because the block contained a queue that prevents the swap from synthesizing on the same block, the wrong memo was written in the block, which damaged the mainnet.
According to the company, the code was pushing a cosmos. Uint into a string (rather than an uint64), leading the string to get the enormous int’s point rather than its real value, resulting in different memo strings on different nodes. The erroneous memo is never written to disc or block. As a result, the statement missed this.
The chain was halted due to safety concerns, but a THORChain representative stated that the company intended to “revert once the source of non-determinism is discovered.” THORSwap, a token-swapping platform, stated that Ethereum and ERC-20 swaps were still supported during the outage.
Conclusion
Most blockchains do not experience chain halts; stability and consistent uptime are frequently noted as important advantages of decentralized networks versus centrally controlled alternatives. The THORChain outage lasted around 20 hours. Other big blockchains have had network failures that have impacted users. According to Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, outages — allegedly caused by low-cost transactions — have been the blockchain’s “curse,” with at least seven occurring since its introduction in 2020. The Cosmos SDK was used to build the independent blockchain THORChain, which would serve as a decentralized cross-chain trade (DEX). It employs an automated market maker (AMM) mechanism akin to early versions of Uniswap (Uniswap) or Bancor (BNT), with THORChain’s native token (RUNE) serving as the primary swap pair.
