Parity’s Ethereum segregation bug fixed, users recommended to update to latest versions

Parity, a popular client software for Ethereum network, has seen a serious bug which could have led to the segregation of blockchain into two independent ones. This has been directly confirmed as true by the development team.

A certain conditional check error in the code was the main reason why for some time, the full nodes of the network could accept invalid transactions, Parity representatives note. This code comes from EIP 86 - a proposal which the community found difficult to implement, but still used some parts from it later.

Reports explain that this bug was first found in the Ropsten testnet, but could have been used by malefactors in the main blockchain of Ethereum, too. The fix was relatively small and most mining pools are already using the latest versions.

Parity has had a great disaster in November 2017 when 513,774.16 ETH (then $160M, now $311M) became frozen (inactive and unreachable) due to the mistakes they didn’t fix in time. In this case, the disaster was prevented right when it was necessary to do.

Image: Andrei Linde, The Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe