THORChain Network Back Up After a 20-Hour Chain Pause

The THORchain network company reported a problem that had resulted in non-determinism amongst individual nodes, which led to the network being shut down. However, just recently, the proof-of-bond network and cross-chain exchange THORChain declared that following a more than 20-hour downtime, it was now “fully functioning.”

The THORChain team tweeted on October 28 that trade had been reinstated and that the network was “again up and creating blocks.” The company reported a problem leading to the network shutting down on October 27.

A Non-Determinism Between Nodes

The network’s administrators earlier claimed that solvency was unrelated to the standstill and was caused by non-determinism between individual nodes after the blockchain administrators acknowledged the outage of the THORChain network on Twitter on Thursday owing to a software fault. After stating that the downtime had nothing to do with solvency, the company went ahead to assert to its clients that they were attempting to find a solution as quickly as possible.

According to an earlier published update by THORChain, the firm noticed the sources of non-determinism between nodes, causing the problem around four hours after the first notification.

The researchers said that consensus halts in a distributed state machine result from sources of inter-node non-determinism and guard against corruption of the ledger. The network administrators listed the procedures needed to fix the issue, noting that they were almost there: locating the source of non-determinism, publishing an update, and restarting the state machine.

THORChain Claims It Was String Manipulation After Running Back On

The team reported that they had identified the problem as string manipulation after another three hours as traders and investors awaited the firm’s response. According to their statement, the developers should have noticed the problem because the incorrect memo was switched out immediately and never entered into the block. The faulty memo was written in the block, which impacted the mainnet since it contains a queue that prevents the swap from synthesizing on the same block.

The team had announced the halting of operations due to the incident and asked for patience from its customers as it prepared instructions while the fix was being delivered right away. After 15 hours of being down, the network was finally up and running shortly after which, the firm’s team provided an update.

According to the firm, it turns out the code was pushing a cosmos.Uint (instead of an uint64) into a string, causing the string to get the vast int’s point rather than its actual value, resulting in different memo strings on various nodes. The faulty memo never gets written to disk or block. Therefore, the statement didn’t see this.

The chain was stopped for safety concerns, but according to a THORChain spokeswoman, the company intended to “revert once the source of non-determinism is uncovered”. However, during the downtime, the token-swapping platform THORSwap confirmed that Ethereum and ERC-20 swaps were still supported.

More on THORchain

The Cosmos SDK was used to create the independent blockchain THORChain, which would act as a cross-chain decentralized exchange (DEX). It makes use of an automated market maker (AMM) mechanism similar to the early versions of Uniswap (Uniswap) or Bancor (BNT), with THORChain’s native token (RUNE) serving as the essential swap pair.