The Stream Basis on Tuesday printed a technical autopsy detailing a protocol-level exploit that occurred on Dec. 27, when an attacker was in a position to counterfeit tokens on the community, leading to about $3.9 million in confirmed losses earlier than the exploit was contained.
In response to the report, the attacker exploited a flaw in Stream’s Cadence runtime that allowed sure property to be duplicated relatively than minted, bypassing provide controls with out accessing or draining present person balances. Validators coordinated a community halt inside six hours of the primary malicious transaction, whereas alternate companions froze most counterfeit property earlier than they could possibly be offered.
Stream mentioned the short-term halt positioned the community right into a read-only mode to sever exit paths and forestall additional duplication whereas the problem was investigated. Operations resumed two days later below an “remoted restoration” plan that preserved reliable transaction historical past and approved the restoration and everlasting destruction of counterfeit property via a governance-approved course of.
The Stream Basis, which helps the Stream community, mentioned no present person balances had been compromised, because the exploit duplicated property relatively than eradicating funds from accounts. A restricted variety of accounts that interacted with counterfeit tokens had been quickly restricted as a precaution, whereas greater than 99% of accounts retained full entry throughout and after the restoration.
Whereas the attacker generated a big quantity of counterfeit tokens onchain, Stream mentioned the overwhelming majority had been contained or frozen earlier than liquidation.
The Basis mentioned it has since patched the underlying vulnerability, added stricter runtime checks and expanded regression testing to forestall comparable exploits. It is also working with forensic companions and legislation enforcement and plans to strengthen monitoring and bug-bounty packages as a part of broader safety hardening.
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Stream’s post-NFT downturn
Dapper Labs, the creators of the non-fungible token venture CryptoKitties, introduced the event of Stream in September 2019 as a brand new layer 1 blockchain designed to handle scalability challenges going through shopper purposes akin to video games and digital collectibles.
Early success with NBA Prime Shot, an NFT platform for buying and selling formally licensed NBA video highlights, helped carry mainstream consideration to the Stream blockchain in 2020 and 2021. Towards this backdrop, the community’s FLOW token surged previous $40 in 2021, in accordance with knowledge from CoinGecko.
Stream’s momentum carried into 2022, the place the venture raised about $725 million from traders, together with Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Union Sq. Ventures, to help ecosystem growth.
As exercise throughout the NFT market cooled within the years that adopted, the FLOW token additionally misplaced momentum and has since fallen exterior the highest 300 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.
The decline accelerated following the Dec. 27 hack, when FLOW plunged by round 40% over 5 hours.
The token later slid to a low of $0.075 on Jan. 2 earlier than starting to get better. It was buying and selling close to $0.10 on the time of writing, up about 16% over the previous 24 hours, in accordance with Cointelegraph knowledge.
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