Bitcoin News

Story: THORChain Halts Trading After Suspected $10M Exploit Hits Multiple Chains

By Sakamoto Nashi

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What Actually Happened. Cross-chain protocols are hard to secure. That's basically the core problem here.

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THORChain Has Been Here Before. It's not the first time. THORChain got hit multiple times in 2021, taking significant losses…

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Why the Trading Halt Matters. Stopping the platform is a damage-control move, but it's also a trust move.

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What to Watch From Here. Three things worth tracking closely. First, the audit results.

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The tension between innovation and security in the decentralized finance realm is yet again thrust into the spotlight.

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THORChain stopped all trading after blockchain investigator ZachXBT flagged a suspected $10 million exploit. The pause was fast — probably within hours of ZachXBT's alert.

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Cross-chain protocols are hard to secure. That's basically the core problem here. Each blockchain runs its own security logic, and when you stitch four of them together into one…

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ZachXBT spotted it first. That's worth noting. Not an internal security team, not an automated alert that fired inside THORChain's own systems — an outside observer watching…

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The $10 million figure is what's been reported. Unclear yet whether that's the final tally.

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It's not the first time. THORChain got hit multiple times in 2021, taking significant losses across separate incidents that forced a serious rethink of its security architecture.

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Zoom out further and the pattern gets darker. The 2021 Poly Network hack drained over $600 million in what was, at the time, one of the largest DeFi exploits ever recorded.

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More context: Poland Passes MiCA as $96M Zondacrypto Probe Shakes Crypto Sector

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DeFi didn't fix that problem after Poly Network. It didn't fully fix it after THORChain's 2021 incidents either. And here we are again.

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Stopping the platform is a damage-control move, but it's also a trust move. Users watching a suspected exploit unfold in real time want to see someone hit the brakes — not keep…

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But the halt creates its own problems. Liquidity providers are locked out. Traders can't execute.

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