Ethereum Upgrade, A Step Closer to Recovering Frozen Funds, Parity CEO Explains

parity-wallet-ethereum

If Ethereum blockchain had the features it now has, the devastating freeze of ether tokens on Parity would have been prevented, said Jutta Steiner, the CEO of Parity Technologies in an interview recently.

In November 2017, about 513,774 ETH (valued then at $152 million) belonging to Parity Wallet users was frozen after a bug on multisig wallets was exploited. A user had mistakenly destroyed the multisig library by triggering the vulnerability which turned the library to his wallet and then destroying it.

In an interview with Fortune, Steiner said that the features added in Ethereum’s latest upgrade which launched on February 28, would have prevented the ‘Parity Freeze’ and helps the case for it to request the recovery of funds lost before the feature.

She was referring to Create2 Ethereum (ETH) feature which was added to the latest planned hardfork of the Ethereum blockchain. Create2, which has had its share of controversy, reportedly allows a contract to be created at an address that can be determined beforehand by different parties. This is unlike the original Create function in which addresses of new contracts to be created are determined by the creator’s address and a random number (nonce) associated with it.

“If that functionality Create2 had existed at the time,” Steiner said, “there wouldn’t have been a vulnerability, basically.”

A New Push to Reverse Parity Incident and Unfreeze ETH

Steiner notes that for the funds locked away to be recovered, there has to be another hardfork which specifically reverses the incident. The company has pushed for the recovery of the frozen ETH in the past.

Last April the Ethereum community voted on the matter and 55 percent of the community voted against implementing a hardfork to unfreeze Parity’s wallets, not without great controversy though.

However, with the introduction of this new feature which makes the error impossible, their case for reversing the incident is now strengthened.

She explains:

“So if you think now, okay, we introduced and sort of fixed the tooling, then wouldn’t it be the right thing to do to also fix the issues that arose when we didn’t have the tooling?”

Parity To Take Advantage of Polkadot Protocol?

Polkadot, which lost $98 million out of an initial $145 million it raised in a 2017 ICO to the Parity freeze, is reportedly planning to raise funds up to $60 million through a second toke sale. The project which was developed by ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood and overseen by Parity Technologies and the Web3 Foundation is a blockchain interoperability protocol that can run Ethereum smart contracts and DApps.

Since it is a Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchain, that require ETH to be locked in smart contracts in smart contracts to mint its native Edge tokens, it could provide some usefulness for Parity’s locked tokens.

According to Fortune, Steiner doesn’t believe that the potential recovery of the frozen funds would affect the token sale which could increase the project’s valuation to $1 billion. “That’s nothing that’s being done because of the frozen funds issue, really,” she said.

Solomon Sunny is the market reporter for Smartereum, one of the global leaders in Ethereum, blockchain and currency news. He produces technical price updates on digital currencies and writes recent developments about blockchain.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.