Pirate Chain Hit by Exploit: 20% of Supply Minted From Nothing
Someone just printed 20 percent of a privacy coin's supply out of thin air.
Pirate Chain says a transaction validation flaw lets an attacker mint about 39.8 million $ARRR without authorization, inflating supply by roughly 20 percent against a 200 million coin target. Two checks failed: the minting limit was bypassed and output scripts were parsed incorrectly. The new coins were quickly moved into the Sapling shielded pool, where they are much harder to trace.
The team now proposes rolling the chain back to its state at 20:00 UTC on October 14, discarding every block after the exploit. A non-KYC exchange flagged and froze the related deposits, and other exchanges and mining pools were asked to pause. The team says there is no sign that notary keys or the zero-knowledge cryptography itself were compromised.
A rollback on a live chain is a heavy ask of its community. For privacy coins like $ZEC and $XMR, it is a reminder that hidden supply is the hardest thing to audit. $BTC and $ETH holders are watching how this plays out.
Someone just printed 20 percent of a privacy coin's supply out of thin air.
Pirate Chain says a transaction validation flaw lets an attacker mint about 39.8 million $ARRR without authorization, inflating supply by roughly 20 percent against a 200 million coin target. Two checks failed: the minting limit was bypassed and output scripts were parsed incorrectly. The new coins were quickly moved into the Sapling shielded pool, where they are much harder to trace.
The team now proposes rolling the chain back to its state at 20:00 UTC on October 14, discarding every block after the exploit. A non-KYC exchange flagged and froze the related deposits, and other exchanges and mining pools were asked to pause. The team says there is no sign that notary keys or the zero-knowledge cryptography itself were compromised.
A rollback on a live chain is a heavy ask of its community. For privacy coins like $ZEC and $XMR, it is a reminder that hidden supply is the hardest thing to audit. $BTC and $ETH holders are watching how this plays out.