THORChain resumes trading after $10.7M exploit and upgrades

THORChain, a major cross-chain trading protocol, has resumed full network activity after being halted for more than a month. The pause followed a $10.7 million exploit on May 15 that forced the protocol to stop trading, swaps, and liquidity provider actions.

In a post on X on Tuesday, the team announced that the network is back online. This includes trading, signing, swaps, and liquidity provider functions. The restoration comes after a series of security upgrades and verifications.

Key recovery steps and vault migration

On Sunday, the protocol said it had confirmed the safety of most of its vaults using the KeyVerify protocol. It also retired the remaining legacy vaults as part of a migration to a new set of vaults. THORChain called this upgrade the “most significant milestone” in its recovery process. It added that verification of every node’s keyshare was completed on Friday.

The exploit reportedly stemmed from a vulnerability in the GG20 threshold signature scheme. This scheme is used to secure protocol vaults by distributing key control among multiple node operators. According to the protocol, the flaw allowed a malicious node operator to reconstruct a full private key through what it described as “progressive key material leakage.”

Emergency patches and upgrades

An emergency patch was applied on May 20 to protect the remaining vaults. A larger upgrade followed on June 9, which included a fix for the exploited vulnerability. A subsequent upgrade on June 11 brought additional stability improvements and fixes to the KeyVerify protocol.

THORChain is one of the largest cross-chain trading protocols in the crypto space, enabling swaps between networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum. It has drawn attention from blockchain investigators because hackers have used it to move stolen funds between blockchains.

Plans for new integrations

With the recovery largely complete, THORChain outlined plans for new network integrations. The protocol said it will launch native swaps and vaults for privacy-focused cryptocurrency Zcash (ZEC) within the next two weeks, followed by Monero (XMR). It also plans to add support for the Bittensor (TAO) token in about six weeks after the restart.

The road to resuming full operations has been long, but the protocol appears to have addressed the core vulnerabilities. Whether users will fully trust the platform again remains an open question.

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