Bitcoin Forum

I Accidentally Killed It’: Parity Wallet Bug Locks $150 Million in Ether
The Ethereum ecosystem encountered another black swan event this week with the activation of a bug in the multi-signature wallet software released by Parity Technologies. The bug resulted in multi-sig wallet users permanently losing access to an estimated $150 million in funds. Leading some people to compare the significance of the event to the infamous collapse of bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox.

Parity’s $150 Million Wallet Bug

“I accidentally killed it.”

With those words and a link to an ethereum contract address on Etherscan, Github user “devops199” revealed that he or she had inadvertently exploited a bug in the Parity Wallet library contract. Apparently, the user had turned the library contract into an ordinary multi-sig wallet and had become the owner of that wallet.

Recognizing what had happened, the user attempted to delete the code that had transferred the wallet ownership. However, because the wallet contained library contract code — and all Parity multi-sig wallets rely on that code for their internal logic — the deletion of the code permanently froze the approximately $150 million in funds stored in Parity multi-sig wallets.

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