Zano Resumes Chain After Exploit, Restarting at Block 3,833,000

The project has initiated a new blockchain from block 3,833,000 because the Gateway Address vulnerability allowed the creation of ZANO and Freedom Dollar tokens, which compromised one month of network history. ZANO's core developers confirmed on Sunday that the selected block comes immediately prior to Hard Fork 6, where the Gateway Address feature was launched in August. In order to perform this recovery, it is necessary for miners, stakers, nodes, exchanges, and pools, etc., to update their software.

Gateway Addresses Were Designed for Exchanges and Payment Providers

As per the announcement by ZANO on X, transactions that have been verified during the problematic month are no longer part of the restored blockchain. It has been advised that all users retain their transaction IDs and trading history while reviewing the history of prior transactions. The rollback can not undo transactions that have been performed on external platforms to Zano. Transactions done using USDT, DAI, or any other tokens will not be affected by the chain restart, according to the project.

The implementation of Hard Fork 6 on August 26 took place at block 3,833,000 and introduced Gateway Addresses among other protocol changes to the Zano platform. It took the project over a year to develop the addressing scheme. The Gateway Addresses have been created specifically for exchanges, bridges, and payment providers who find Zano's usual system of unspent transaction output too complicated to incorporate into their platform. In contrast to regular Zano wallets, the newly introduced addresses maintain an account balance on the blockchain.

Before the update, service providers had to manually scan outputs, process incoming transactions, and control which outputs got spent during withdrawals. The Gateway Addresses should have allowed the service providers to get one balance while retaining the privacy offered by regular Zano transactions. There was a one-off fee of 100 ZANO for registration, which was burned permanently by the protocol. According to the Zano forum, there were at least two Gateway Addresses registered within the first week of the feature on the mainnet. 

The Zano restart follows other crypto networks taking similar recovery steps after major security incidents. In June, THORChain's network also restarted operations after a security check and upgrade period of over one month due to a hacking incident where $10.7 million (roughly Rs. 101.28 crore) was lost. THORChain stated that it restored its network, including trading, signing, swaps, and liquidity provider actions. The protocol announced that it had established the safety of most of its vaults using the KeyVerify protocol, while other legacy vaults were decommissioned in preparation for new vaults.