So, a cryptocurrency business was rolled for $30m. Thing is, it wasn’t “hacked;” Someone just found an edge case in the code that defines the ‘smart contract’ inherent to the business model, and used it to “trade” a few Mono tokens for millions of dollars, draining their funds.
This thread digs into some of the technical details:
What I find interesting is that it illustrates the dangers of an article of faith in cryptocurrency: “there is no law but the contract, and that is good because the contract is unambiguous, executable code.”
For most normal people, “unhackable” implies that something is safe and secure. In cryptocurrency, it means that anything that possible and permissible are synonyms. You describe what is possible using code, and that is the law of your currency, full stop.
While it may comfort devs who trust the quality of their own pseudocode, in reality it means there’s no recourse for being scammed. If someone bankrupts your company via an unanticipated edge case in your shopping cart code, that’s on you. The system is working as specified.