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- The IOTA Tangle was restarted without problems by the IOTA Foundation yesterday.
- The hacker of the Trinity wallet has still not been identified or apprehended, but is being pursued by the FBI and the British, German and Maltese police.
The IOTA Foundation yesterday reopened the IOTA Tangle at 4pm UTC for value transactions and activated the coordinator. More than 100,000 value transactions, which had accumulated, were processed with a throughput of 80 to 90 transactions per second.
In a retrospective blog post, the IOTA Foundation gave another overview of the events. It confirmed once again that 8.55 Ti (8,550,000,000,000,000 IOTA), around 2.37 million US dollars, were stolen from a total of 50 user accounts as a result of the attack on the MoonPay integration. Further thefts after the coordinator was switched off could be prevented. As the statement further states, the hacker has still not been identified or apprehended (freely translated):
We continue to work with the FBI, as well as the UK, German, and Maltese police to identify and track the attacker. With the restart of the Coordinator, we are together actively monitoring for any suspicious activity.
Despite the heavy criticism, the IOTA Foundation emphasizes that it was the right decision to stop the Coordinator. It has been implemented as a temporary safety mechanism during the network’s maturing phase to be used in such cases until the IOTA Network will remove this central component with Coordicide. By temporarily disabling the coordinator, it was possible to ensure that no further MIOTA tokens were transferred out of the wallets of compromised users.
As far as the KYC procedure within the migration tool and the execution of a snapshot are concerned, both measures were waived, as the IOTA Foundation writes:
We have opted not to enforce KYC for that very small group and made the decision to accept the latest instance of those conflicting submissions. This means that there was no need to carry out a global ledger snapshot — a simpler and more preferable outcome.
Via Discord, Dominik Schiener, co-founder of IOTA, ruled out that the MoonPay integration will return to the Trinity wallet and declared “definitely not”. This should come as no surprise after IOTA co-founder David Sønstebø also expressed his anger towards MoonPay a few days ago and stated: “Am I angry with MoonPay? Yes, I am. But at the end of the day this doesn’t help (at least for now).”
Future developments of the IOTA protocol
During the last weeks several members of the IOTA Foundation emphasized that they will push the development of IOTA more focused than ever after the restart of the Tangle. As Sønstebø explained, the project is close to a major breakthrough:
Fortunately this will end well, but let’s not distract from the road ahead. IOTA is so close to blowing virtually all “competitors” out of the water
According to the blog post, Coordicide has made steady progress. The IOTA foundation published an updated white paper in January 2020 and the first version of the Coordicide alpha net in early February 2020. Later versions of the alpha net (GoShimmer) will follow in the coming months.
Furthermore, a proof of concept for Qubic is underway. Asked by a user on Discord about the release promised last week, Jonathan Shaffer from the IOTA Foundation said yesterday:
At the beginning of February actually, but the hack threw a wrench in it, plus some networking issues needed to be addressed before Eric [Hop] could provide some of his findings from the software side. The hardware/firmware is functioning correctly, albeit there is some black magic to get it to fit correctly in the PL fabric.
Just before the Trinity hack, the IOTA Foundation also announced the formation of Tangle EE Working Group in cooperation with the Eclipse Foundation. The founding members include 15 companies and educational institutions, including Dell Technologies, STMicroelectronics, Software AG, BiiLabs and the Calypso Network Association. This terrific announcement vanished as a result of the hack, but could play a large part in IOTA’s success in the long term.
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