Parity team tells how the heck it managed to freeze $160 million of ETH

A postmortem paper has been published on Parity’s website, it tells how the infamous Ethereum wallets freeze happened and what the team is going to do about it. The code flaw which led to more than one hundred million dollars of Ethereum becoming unavailable (or frozen, as the cryptocurrency media often prefers to describe it), was correctly detected by an external code expert on GitHub, but the team failed to interpret this correctly and did not impose measures necessary for prevention of this breach.

Even though the overall tone of experts indicates it would be hard to do so, the Parity team promises to work on Ethereum solutions which might provide means to recover those assets. Good news it that the Ethereum Foundation is going to help them. And, of course, the developers of Parity promised to pay more attention to security issues in the future:

“We deeply regret the situation and we are working hard on several Ethereum improvement proposals (EIPs), both contributing to previously existing ones and suggesting new ones that have the potential to unblock funds. These improvement proposals will also address general cases of blocked funds.

There is no timeline for when such an improvement proposal could be implemented; we will follow the will of the community and go through the regular EIP process like any other protocol improvement.

Parity Technologies will handle much of the development work around these proposals and work constructively with the Ethereum Foundation team and the community towards further protocol layer development.”

The freeze occured to the wallets opened after 20 July 2017. This catastrophe demonstrates that cryptocurrency services are still far from ideal.