Parity Technology’s co-founders Gavin Wood and Jutta Steiner addressed the recent controversy that firm is facing after the loss of more than $230 million worth of Ethereum (at the current price of $449 per ETH) from their wallet.
Steiner assured that the funds were not lost but rather can be released with a protocol upgrade. Parity is also working on a protocol upgrade, and after the scheduled hard Fork in the next six months, the customers can access their frozen fund. Steiner reiterated: “There are discussions that the issue could be fixed in a general protocol upgrade…probably in the next four to six months.”
In the early November, it was revealed that due to the accidental deletion of some code by an anonymous user, 513,774.16 ETH in the 573 wallets created after July 29th had been frozen. The wallets were also containing funds from many ICOs.
Regarding the situation, Steiner explained: “A library that governs the logic of the wallets that people use had a bug, which was due to a delicate refactoring at the time when the tools weren’t yet that developed.” The situation became more convoluted when it was revealed that the vulnerability was previously flagged by another user, though the team did not take any step to rectify it.
Addressing these allegations, Steiner said: “There was an issue reported but it was not reported as a critical security flaw.” She also explained that the fix was more like a “nice-to-have” upgrade in the system.
Pointing towards the nascent stage of the Blockchain technology, she continued: “It’s really unfortunate but it points to the issue that this whole ecosystem hasn’t developed yet all the tools that are needed to safely deploy contracts.”
As the account freeze also impacted Gavin Wood’s own account, he explained that he is looking at it as a long time savings account as the funds can be released in the future.
He noted: “It is unfortunate...it does demonstrate the early stage and some of the difficulties with authoring software on the platform given the tools that we have.”
