March 5, 20195min1245

A New Hope to Unfreeze USD 64 Million in Ether Arises

Parity’s co-founder and CEO Jutta Steiner hinted about a possibility to restore 500,000 frozen ETH (USD 63,6 million). According to her, the latest Ethereum Constantinople upgrade made this even more possible to accomplish.

Parity is a blockchain developer building decentralized web technologies such as Parity Ethereum client, Parity Substrate framework for building blockchains, the Polkadot network, which tackles blockchain interconnectivity issues, as well as other novel instruments.

A hack which occurred in 2017 led to the freezing of millions of dollars worth of Ethereum. A hacker under pseudonym “devops199” discovered a vulnerability in Parity’s multi-signature master contract and exploited it to freeze the funds. However, it seems the funds may finally be reimbursed, although it’s not clear when.

“The CREATE2 upcode that was added as a part of Constantinople hard fork doesn’t directly fix the frozen funds issue. However, it shows and appreciates that effectively the tooling that we had at the time when we created multi-sig wallet library wasn’t sufficient to prevent bugs from happening. So basically if that functionality CREATE2 existed at the time, there wouldn’t have been a vulnerability. So wouldn’t it be the right thing to do to also fix the issues that arose when we didn’t have the tooling?” Steiner said in the latest Fortune’s episode of “Balancing the Ledger.”

Parity developers have been trying to restore those 500,000 ETH for years. Now that the necessary hard work has been successfully implemented, Parity is a step closer to solving the longstanding issue. But what are the other steps that need to be taken?

“It doesn’t automatically mean all the teams that had stuck funds get the funds back. It still requires another hard fork where that particular state change is made, but it gives a much more solid argument to why it’s the right thing to do and recover the funds,” Steiner said.

Switching chains

While it remains unclear what exact course of action Jutta Steiner had in mind during the interview, one possible method that has surfaced the web recently is by utilizing Edgeware, a smart contracts platform and a parachain on Polkadot. It is set to launch this summer.

Fundamentally, Edge looks like a copy clone of Ethereum but with some differences in its governance structure. Thus, all EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) smart contracts can be reportedly moved to Edgeware. In this way, the stuck ETH would remain where it is, but all frozen funds would be reimbursed on the new chain.

“Each user will have their own lockdrop contract — unlike other launches where a single massive smart contract runs the distribution,” says Thom Ivy, a representative from Edgeware, as reported by Trustnodes. The lockdrop contract also looks at the Locked parameter in the smart contract, so the frozen Parity funds would qualify for receiving 91 million edge tokens for 500,000 ETH if the funds were locked for at least six months.

While this information remains to be confirmed, it is also unknown why users and dapp (decentralized application) developers would prefer to switch to a brand new chain with little infrastructure. However, the discussions of such event taking place have been going on for a while. For example, the Reddit user DCinvestor remains skeptical about community switching over.

At the moment, there is a new token sale being held to fund the further development of Parity’s Polkadot project. Steiner has affirmed the fundraiser has nothing to do with the frozen funds issue.
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Watch the whole interview with Jutta Steiner below:


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