Polygon Quickly Fixes A Vulnerability Pulling Out $24 Billion Worth of MATIC Tokens Out of Risk

30. Dec 2021 Posted by Akolkar B on News

The Layer- 2 Ethereum scaling solution Polygon underwent a major hardfork earlier this month in December that helped to fix a major vulnerability/bug and save the project.

A staggering $24 billion worth of MATIC tokens were at stake if the bug wasn’t identified at the right or went unnoticed. The details of this vulnerability, however, were revealed for the first item by Polygon’s co-founder Jaynti Kanani on Wednesday, December 29.

“Considering how much was at stake, I believe our team has made the best decisions possible given the circumstances. Considering the nature of this upgrade, it had to be executed without attracting too much attention,” he added.

The latest blog post from Polygon noted that they had found this “critical” vulnerability in the network’s Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Genesis contracts and was highlighted by two white hat hackers.

Polygon further noted that the bug was resolved at Block #22156660 though an “Emergency For Upgrade” to the main net on December 5. However, one of the “malicious hacker” also managed to steal 801,601 MATIC ($2.04 million) before the team could push the upgrade.

The official blog post notes: “The Polygon core team engaged with the group and Immunefi’s expert team and immediately introduced a fix. The validator and full node communities were notified, and they rallied behind the core devs to upgrade 80% of the network within 24 hours without stoppage”.

The Polygon co-founder also noted that they fixed the issue behind closed doors as they have been following the “silent patches” policy introduced by the Go Ethereum (Geth) team last year in November 2020.

As per the report, crypto projects developers can report on the key bug fixes 4-8 weeks after going live due to the risk of getting exploited at the time of patching. Whitehat hacker “Leon Spacewalker” was the first to report this security vulnerability. The hacker has been awarded $2.2 million worth of stable coins.

Another white hat hacker dubbed “Whitehat2” will receive 500,000 MATIC ($1.27 million) from Polygon.

Polygon, the Layer-2 Ethereum scaling solution, has witnessed a strong network growth this year in 2021. As a result, its native cryptocurrency MATIC has also participated in the market rally this year. Last weekend, the MATIC price touched an all-time high of $2.80 with its year-to-date gains at a staggering 150 times.