When a hacker exploited a smart contract in 2016 and stole $50 million in ether, Ethereum developers had to “hard fork” their blockchain to recover the funds - in essence they created a replica of the existing blockchain, keeping it identical in every way except that the stolen funds were transferred to a recovery address. Such “fat finger” errors aren’t uncommon.īlockchain developers have in the past found ways to reverse transactions, but the solutions aren’t simple. In December, someone accidentally sold their Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT for 0.75 ether instead of 75 ether - $3,000 instead of $300,000. The downside to decentralization is no entity can instantly reverse human-errors like this.
PoS systems verify transactions by having token holders vote to approve them, where as PoW chains rely on the solving of computationally demanding cryptography problems - which is why those systems crunch so much more power.īlockchain infrastructure is mostly designed to improve decentralization, for instance, by allowing a network of people around the world to process payments instead of centralized institutions like banks. It’s a Proof-of-Stake blockchain, which is more efficient than the Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism used by Bitcoin and Ethereum. Juno is a blockchain which seeks to compete with Ethereum by being more scalable and efficient ( read: cheaper and less environmentally damaging). “This is a wake up call for validators,” he said. This transcation had 125 validators, Di Michele explained, but not one checked. Blockchains require “validators” to verify each transaction, encoded in “blocks”, so that they can be added to the chain. The programmer in charge for the transfer accidentally copied and pasted the hash number, rather than the wallet address.Įven more painful than the human error, Di Michele said to CNET, was the fact that none of the network validators caught the mistake. Hashes connect blocks to one another in the blockchain, and at a glance hash numbers can look very similar to wallet addresses. (This in itself was a big crypto news story.) The funds were to be sent to a wallet controlled by Juno token holders, who could vote on how it would be spent.īut a developer inadvertently copy and pasted the wrong wallet address, as reported by CoinDesk, leading to $36 million in crypto being sent to an inaccessible address.Īndrea Di Michele, one of Juno’s founding developers, explained to the publication that he sent the correct wallet address to the developer responsible for the transfer, as well as a hash number.
A community vote had decreed that around 3 million Juno tokens, worth around $36 million, be seized from an investor deemed to have acquired the tokens via malicious means.
That is the unfortunate place developers of the Juno cryptocurrency find themselves. If human error causes something to be sold for the wrong price or money to be sent to the wrong place, reversing it can be difficult or even impossible. One of the most painful downsides to the blockchain? It’s immutable. One of the key selling points of the blockchain is that it’s immutable: Once data is processed, once a transaction occurs, it can’t be undone.
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