THORChain

Bitcoin price surge toward $40K boosts sentiment in KAS, RUNE, MNT and RNDR

Bitcoin’s recent rally toward $40,000 could further fuel traders’ bullish sentiment for KAS, RUNE, MNT and RNDR.

Bitcoin (BTC) finally broke above the formidable resistance of $38,000 in the past week and marched closer to $40,000.

The major tailwind for Bitcoin is the expectation that the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will approve a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund as early as January. Swan Bitcoin CEO Cory Klippsten said in an interview with Bloomberg that the window for the approval for the spot Bitcoin ETF “seems to have been narrowed to January 8th, 9th, or 10th.”

Crypto market data daily view. Source: Coin360

Several analysts expect Bitcoin’s price to soar after one or more spot Bitcoin ETFs are greenlighted.

Could Bitcoin’s rise near $40,000 boost buying in altcoins? Let’s look at the charts of the top 5 cryptocurrencies that may attract investors.

Bitcoin price analysis

Bitcoin rose and closed above the overhead resistance of $37,980 on Dec.

BTC/USDT daily chart.

Read more

THORChain mainnet halted amid new vulnerability reports

THORChain has once again halted its network, taking action as a precautionary measure while verifying reports on a potential network vulnerability.

Cross-chain liquidity protocol THORChain has paused its network due to new claims of a potential network vulnerability.

THORChain took to Twitter on March 28 to announce it has halted all trading amid reports of a potential vulnerability with a THORChain dependency that may affect the network. The decision was taken as a precautionary measure while the reports are verified, THORChain said.

The announcement came soon after social media reports indicated THORChain’s liquidity platform Nine Realms and the dedicated security team THORSec received “credible reports” of a potential vulnerability affecting THORChain. The THORChain network has reportedly been subsequently halted globally.

“Network preemptively paused by NO’s to investigate the report; updates will follow,” Nine Realms tweeted.

Amid the news, THORChain’s native token Rune (RUNE) has tumbled about 5%, according to data from CoinGecko. At the time of writing, the token is trading at $1.32, down 18% over the past 30 days.

Founded in 2018, THORChain is a decentralized cross-chain liquidity protocol that allows users to swap assets between different blockchain networks without using centralized exchanges. THORChain’s settlement layer currently offers swaps between eight chains, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB Chain, Avalanche, Cosmos, Dogecoin, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash.

Related: DeFi exploits and access control hacks cost crypto investors billions in 2022: Report

The latest halt on THORChain’s network is not the first. The network was paused in October 2022 due to a software bug causing “non-determinism between individual nodes.” The network resumed and became fully functional after 20 hours of maintenance.

In 2021, THORChain also halted its network after the protocol suffered a breach, with hackers stealing $7.6 million in crypto assets.

Magazine: Unstablecoins: Depegging, bank runs and other risks loom

In about eight hours after the initial announcement, THORChain reposted a halt update on Twitter, indicating that developers and the security team have managed to identify the disclosure as credible. “However, it would require a malicious node in the last churn,” the update said, adding that that THORChain has resumed trading because “no nodes can exploit the current vulnerability.” 


Modular blockchains could be the next hot crypto market trend in 2023

As the crypto industry recovers, a new generation of modular blockchains could replace centralized bridges and exchanges.

The public blockchain sector grew from less than a few million dollars in the last decade to a $1 trillion industry. However, one thing that the space has yet to achieve is a decentralized, secure interoperable solution.

Let’s take going from Ethereum to Bitcoin, the largest blockchain network, as an example. Historically, centralized exchanges have been one of the few safe, viable solutions for shifting from one chain to another.

BitGo, a centralized solution provider, provides the largest pool of liquidity for Ethereum users to gain Bitcoin (BTC) exposure via Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC). The BitGo IOU accounts for over 93.6% of the Bitcoin bridged to Ethereum. Users must rely on BitGo partner platforms like centralized exchanges or CoinList to exchange BTC and WBTC.

The dominance of WBTC exposes it to evident centralization and regulatory risks. RenBTC, a platform managed by Alameda Research, dissolved in December 2022 after FTX’s collapse, and the same might happen with BitGo. The recent regulatory crackdown on Paxos for issuing the U.S. dollar-backed Binance USD (BUSD) stablecoin could also eventually bring services like BitGo into the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s crosshairs.

The interoperability between smart contract platforms and other application-specific blockchains must also be developed. Sidechains and rollups on Polygon, Arbitrum and Optimism comprise 90% of the cross-chain bridge volume from Ethereum. Near’s Rainbow and Fantom bridges are the only independent blockchains with a notable total value locked on bridges with Ethereum.

Ethereum market share of bridges by TVL. Source: Dune

Several major crypto projects, such as Polkadot and Cosmos, implemented modularity from the ground up to build a secure, scalable cross-chain platform, with the ultimate goal being to establish an interoperable “network of networks.” However, Cosmos has yet to attract sufficient liquidity to its ecosystem, and Polkadot continues to stay in development.

The issue o bridge centralization

The 2021 hype cycle witnessed the emergence of a “multichain future” where various blockchain host specific functions but are joined together through interoperable solutions. The first generation of bridges was highly primitive and centralized, eventually making them hot targets for exploits.

The next generation of interoperable solutions operate as separate blockchains to include decentralization and enhance security. These include intermediate transfer tokens like THORchain’s RUNE (RUNE). However, the daily volume of transfers via THORchain has stayed below $20 million, suggesting that it has failed to pick up usage.

Threshold, which introduces a trustless and private portal for Bitcoin on Ethereum, will launch in Q1 2023. It will look to replace centralized providers like BitGo in bridging liquidity between Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Some other protocols focus on the interoperability between smart contract platforms.

LayerZero is an omnichain interoperability protocol that allows the development of applications like decentralized exchanges and lending protocols on top of it. These protocols can interact with monolithic chains like Ethereum, Cosmos Hub and Solana. Stargate is the first DEX built using LayerZero and has a liquidity of $324 million across Ethereum, Polygon, BNB Smart Chain and Avalanche.

Celestia is a layer-1 blockchain built using the Cosmos SDK. The platform supports smart contract execution but is only responsible for ordering transactions and making a blockchain’s data more accessible.

It aims to act as an intermediate layer between Ethereum rollups and the mainnet by compressing the rollup data for faster execution on the Ethereum layer 1. Celestia does not verify the block data but helps optimize the gas cost and speed of execution. This capability will extend to layer-1 blockchains like Cosmos, Solana and Avalanche.

The team will run an incentivized test in Q1 2023 to start public testing and reward testnet validators with a potential airdrop of native tokens.

Celestia testnet incentives announcement. Source: Celestia’s Discord

Related: ‘Multichain future is very clear’ — MetaMask to support all tokens via Snaps

Fuel Labs, the team building Fuel Network, also developed the Fuel Virtual Machine and Sway programming language, which enhances transaction speed. The team launched its second beta testnet in November 2022, and the public testnet is expected to go live sometime in 2023.

While the interoperable space remains underdeveloped and exposed to centralization risks, various teams are working on decentralized solutions that will launch in 2023. These protocols will securely bridge the liquidity across decentralized finance protocols and other layer-1 blockchains. On top of that, they will also help build a multichain future, where the user experience will be blockchain agnostic and protocols will interact with each other seamlessly.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the authors’ alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.

THORChain network resumes following 20-hour chain halt

The network was halted on Oct. 27 after the team said a bug had caused “non-determinism between individual nodes.”

Cross-chain exchange and proof-of-bond network THORChain announced it was once again “fully operational” after an outage of more than 20 hours

In an Oct. 28 tweet, the THORChain team said the network was “back online and producing blocks” and had reenabled trading. The network was halted on Oct. 27 after the team said a bug had caused “non-determinism between individual nodes.”

“Turns out to be string manipulation: code was pushing a cosmos.Uint (instead of a uint64) into a string, which causes the string to get the point of the big int instead of the actual value, causing the memo string to be different on different nodes,” said the THORChain team following the chain halt. “Didn’t see this in stagenet because the bad memo never gets written to disk/block, because it gets swapped immediately.”

A THORChain spokesperson told Cointelegraph that the chain had been halted for safety reasons but that it planned to “revert once the source of non-determinism is found.” However, token-swapping platform THORSwap reported during the outage that its platform was still allowing Ethereum and ERC-20 swaps.

Related: WhatsApp down again? Google searches spike after the outage

Other major blockchains have reported network outages affecting users. Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko said in September that outages — reportedly the result of low-cost transactions — had been the blockchain’s “curse,” with at least seven since its launch in 2020.

Following reports of the outage, the price of THORChain’s native token, RUNE (RUNE) fell from $1.57 to $1.49 — more than 5.6% — within 24 hours, but it has since returned to $1.55.

THORChain network halted following software bug

The team stated that the next steps were to find the source of the non-determinism, release an update, and restart the state machine, but there have been no updates since.

Cross-chain exchange and proof-of-bond network THORChain was halted earlier today as the result of a bug causing “non-determinism between individual nodes.”

At around 8:00 pm UTC, the THORChain team initially tweeted that developers were aware of a chain outage and were working to find the root cause of the issue.

Roughly four hours later, the team posted a further update noting that “consensus halts in a distributed state machine are from sources of non-determinism between individual nodes and prevent the ledger from becoming corrupted.”

It stated that the next steps were to find the source of the non-determinism, release an update and restart the state machine, and while noting that step one was close, there have been no updates since, suggesting the developers are dealing with a fair bit of a headache.

According to THORChain explorer, the network still appears to be halted at the time of writing. However, token swapping platform THORSwap provided an update of its own, noting that its platform is still operating.

“Update on the current halt of THORChain Swaps/LP. Funds are safe. Ethereum and ERC-20 swaps are fully functioning on ThorSwap via DEX Aggregator. Hang tight, THORChain devs are on the case!” it wrote.

THORChain infrastructure developers Nine Realms were unfazed by the incident, as it suggested that ironing out bugs is just part of the process of improving the THORChain network.

“Each halt is investigated immediately by a security team and core devs—resulting in protocol improvements. As the network matures: halt early, halt often,” it stated.

Cointelegraph has reached out to THORChain for comment and will update the story if a response is received.

Related: Network outages have been Solana’s ‘curse,’ says co-founder

THORChain isn’t the only one to suffer network issues this week, as Meta-owned messaging platform WhatsApp went offline to its 2 billion users for around 2 hours on Oct. 25. Whatsapp attributed the problem to a technical error, but didn’t go into any further detail.

THORChain’s native token RUNE is down 1.4% over the past 24 hours to sit at $1.53 but is still up 6.5% in the past seven days. Zooming out, the asset is down a hefty 92.7% since its all-time high of $20.87 on May 19, 2021, according to CoinGecko.

RUNE pumps 18% as THORChain deactivates non-native tokens

The variants based on BEP-2 and ERC-20 are being swapped out for the upgraded native RUNE token after THORChain’s long-awaited mainnet late last month.

Cross-chain exchange and proof-of-bond network THORChain has finally activated the killswitch that will progressively wind down support of the BEP-2- and ERC-20-based variants of the RUNE token. 

BNB.RUNE and ETH.RUNE, also known as IOU Tokens, are being swapped out for the upgraded and completely native RUNE token after THORChain’s long-awaited mainnet late last month.

Moving forward, these tokens will progressively lose their value over the next 12 months, as the project aims to foster the adoption of its fully unified variant of RUNE, enabling stronger asset interoperability.

Users who hold their IOU Tokens on centralized changes will have their tokens automatically upgraded to the new native RUNE. Those who keep their tokens in private wallets must create a new wallet supported by THORChain and then click an upgrade button to make the switch.

The THORChain team stated via Twitter on Monday that killswitch will go live at block 6,500,000 and that 1:1 exchange rates will “linearly tick down to 1:0 over the next 12 months” as the IOU Tokens become worthless.

The team previously stated in a blog post earlier this year that this move was part of a push toward further decentralization of its network, as it highlighted issues with having IOU RUNE spread across two separate networks:

“THORChain is extremely strict in having no 3rd party dependencies, preferring to manage everything in-house. There are no oracles, no off-shored security, and no reliance on external liquidity.”

“However, BNB.RUNE and ETH.RUNE has privileged access to the state machine’s ’mint’ function. Anyone presenting these tokens can mint fresh RUNE, as well as making THORChain’s state dependent on these two networks,” the blog post read.

The move from THORChain has coincided with a significant 18.6% bounce of RUNE prices to $2.61 over the past 24 hours. Measuring over a broader time frame also shows promising signs, with RUNE gaining 65.9% over the past 30 days, according to data from CoinGecko. However, RUNE is still down 87.5% since its all-time high of $20.87 on May 19 last year.

Related: Total crypto market cap reclaims $1 trillion as Bitcoin, Ethereum and altcoins breakout

Apart from enabling users to swap assets by liquidity pools across various networks such as Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum, Dogecoin and Bitcoin, THORChain also supports the trading of synthetic assets, which are tokenized derivatives that mimic the value of other assets such as stocks and commodities.

Under the recently launched mainnet, the project aims to provide enhanced security measures and network stability, greater decentralization, a new governance process, establish new chain integrations, wallet integrations, aggregator implementations and roll out a single-sided yield feature.