The THORChain network went down on Thursday due to a software bug, according to the blockchain operators on Twitter.
The team stated that they are working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, and that the outage is unrelated to solvency.
Devs are aware of a chain halt and have identified the likely cause due to a unique transaction type (nothing to do with solvency).
An update will be posted as soon as there is more confirmed information.
— THORChain (@THORChain) October 27, 2022
A Non-Determinism of Nodes
The THORChain team issued another update four hours after the initial announcement, stating that the problem was caused by non-determinism between nodes.
“Consensus halts in a distributed state machine are from sources of non-determinism between individual nodes and prevent the ledger from becoming corrupted,” the team wrote.
The network operators went on to describe the steps needed to resolve the issue, which included locating the source of non-determinism, releasing an update, and restarting the state machine, noting that they were nearly there.
After another three hours, the team announced that they had identified the problem as string manipulation.
“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.”
When Will THORChain Restore Service?
The developers went on to say that they missed the problem in stagenet because the bad memo was swapped immediately and was never written in the block. However, it had an impact on the mainnet because it has a queue, which prevents the swap to synth from happening on the same block, resulting in the bad memo being written in the block.
The team also asked THORChain node operators to be on the lookout for instructions as the patch was being shipped right away. It has been more than 15 hours since the network went down, and there has been no word from the team on when it will reopen.
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