A Code Bug Froze $280 Million In Virtual Currency

There has been a boom in digital currency this year with old players like Bitcoin surging to unimaginable heights and new entrants joining the field as well. If any of you follow digital currency then you would be aware that there was an issue with the Ethereum virtual currency yesterday. The issue was caused by an unpatched bug in the code that froze over $280 million in the virtual currency.

Parity, a digital wallet company, has warned users that their Ethereum funds might have been frozen inadvertently after a code contributor accidentally deleted the library that’s required to use multi-signature wallets created after July 20th. They’re the kind of digital wallets that require multiple signatures before funds can be moved.

The bug that was triggered by this converted Parity’s Wallet contract into a standard multi-signature wallet. This made every Parity wallet “suicide” and erased the guiding library code.

This is no minor incident. Many virtual currency observers are of the view that more than 1 million in ether has been frozen. The virtual currency has a value of around $280 so the amount that’s frozen now is $280 million.

For its part, Parity is claiming that these figures are speculative and that its users should not take them at face value. That doesn’t take away from the fact that there are a lot of Ethereum holders without their funds right now.

They might eventually get all of their money back but it’s going to take some time before the funds and unfreezed and users are compensated. This goes to show that no matter how popular a virtual currency is, it’s the code underneath that really keeps it all together.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Web
Tags: virtual currency, _cold