TCU THORChain Updates (Apr 2024)

In this series, TCU aims to give regular condensed “state of THORChain” updates. Enjoy!

1. THORChain Turns Three!

2. Emergency Trading Pause Exercise

On 4-Apr, an Emergency Trading Pause Exercise was conducted to simulate and test response time for any nodes to “make pause”; which is one of the security safeguard for THORChain. The first node responded in two minutes. The nodes then “make resume” a few minutes later, concluding the exercise.

3. Streaming Swap Refund Bug & Call Pause Bounty

On 5-Apr, an 70 BTC -> ETH.WBTC swap was bugged, with the outbound being “donated” into the pool instead of being sent to the user. Eventually, 12 BTC value was arbed out, and 58 BTC value was accrued into the ETH.WBTC pool, of which the Treasury’s LP position accrued 50 BTC value. The Treasury also refunded the full 70 BTC back to the user. Team/community will implement higher signal-to-noise alerting systems, and nodes were reminded again to “make pause” whenever there are indications of any suspicious behavior.

A standing bounty of $50k is now implemented, for any party who is the first to notice suspicions transactions and alerts nodes to “make pause”: https://x.com/THORChain/status/1776854502542282774

4. ADR 013 — Synths Backstop

On 7-Apr, after some time of community discussion on Dev Discord, node were called to vote for their preferred option for Synths Backstop: https://gitlab.com/thorchain/thornode/-/merge_requests/3507/diffs

On 10-Apr, >50% of nodes voted for Option 1 (LIFO forced ejection), with no votes for Option 2 (Savers haircut). Devs will now work on implementing Option 1.

5. ATOM (Cosmos Hub / Gaia) Hardfork

On 10-Apr, the ATOM chain was paused for a few hours on THORChain for nodes to update for the ATOM chain hardfork.

6. Min Outbound Fee Multiplier Increase

On 11-Apr, it was noticed that due to a BTC outbound gas refund edge case, some parties were gaming it to gradually scalp BTC from THORChain. The Mimir MINOUTBOUNDFEEMULTIPLIERBASISPOINTS was adjusted to 300% to counteract this, but with the effect of raising outbound fees for everybody. Once this edge case is patched, the Outbound Fee Multiplier will be reset.

7. Outbound Delay Issues

Around mid-Apr, multiple outbound transactions were significantly delayed beyond the scheduled outbound block. This was alleviated with the v1.131.1 patch, pushed on 17-Apr.

Feel free to hop into the TC University Discord to chat about this, or any other THORChain questions that you may have.

Explore THORChain: Website, X, Telegram, Developer Discord.

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