THORChain network resumes following 20-hour chain halt

Cross-chain exchange and proof-of-bond network THORChain announced it was once again “fully operational” after a more than 20-hour outage.

In an Oct. 28 tweet, the THORChain team said the network was “back online and producing blocks” and had re-enabled trading. The network was halted on Oct. 27 after the team said a bug had caused “non-determinism between individual nodes.”

“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,” said the THORChain team following the chain halt. “Didn’t see this in stagenet because the bad memo never gets written to disk/block, because it gets swapped immediately.”

The network is now fully operational after an outage of approximately 20.5 hours. Post-mortem will be released next week https://t.co/QxttVp6Qvy

— THORChain (@THORChain) October 28, 2022

A THORChain spokesperson told Cointelegraph that the chain had been halted for safety reasons but it planned to “revert once the source of non-determinism is found.” However, token swapping platform THORSwap reported during the outage that its platform was still allowing Ethereum and ERC-20 swaps.

Other major blockchains have reported network outages affecting users. Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko said in September that outages — reportedly the result of low-cost transactions — had been the blockchain’s “curse,” with at least seven since its launch in 2020.

Following reports of the outage, the price of THORChain’s native token RUNE fell from $1.57 to $1.49 — more than 5.6% — within 24 hours, but has since returned to $1.55.