RUNE Recovers 11% After Crash and Thorchain USD 8M Hack

Following another hack suffered by blockchain protocol Thorchain, and the sharp drop in RUNE’s price, the coin is now recovering.

The price of the native token crashed 23% in a couple of hours between July 22 and 23 (UTC). It has gone back up 11% since then. At 7:45, it’s trading at around USD 4.

It’s still down 13% in a day, and nearly 15% in a week. In the past year, the price appreciated 658%.

Thorchain confirmed in the early morning (UTC) of July 23 that it has suffered an attack that resulted in a USD 8m loss.

The team described it as “a sophisticated attack on the ETH Router,” with the hacker deliberately limiting the impact – and this was “seemingly a whitehat.”

Per the Twitter thread, the whitehat asked for a 10% bounty, which the post says will be awarded if the hacker reaches out. They should also be encouraged to do so, it added.

Due to the attack, the team decided to halt ETH Router “until it can be peer-reviewed with audit partners, as a priority,” they said, while liquidity providers (LPs) in the ERC-20 pools will be subsidised.

They added that “the treasury has the funds to cover.”

The team suggested that the attack is also connected to the Bifröst Protocol, which enables multichain connectivity by building a bridge between blockchains.

In another thread, it was added that the network will remain halted until all Bifröst can be reviewed.

They further explained that the 10% bounty program has been in place for three months now.

Per the latest tweet, the audit of the router is still in progress, with the report to be published soon. However, the team claims that “no issues causing fund loss was found.”

This isn’t the first time the protocol suffered an issue this month. Last week, Thorchain announced they lost some ETH 4,000 (currently USD 8.23m) in an attack.

Per a July 14 post-mortem, a whitehat discovered a vulnerability in the Thorchain router when dealing with ERC-777 tokens on July 9. Another issue then erupted when the ETH router was patched and deployed to testnet. Ultimately, however, the routing was upgraded and the trading resumed, said the post.

The website also still states that “the ETH exploit has been identified and a fix has been merged.”
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