New vulnerability could prevent Ethereum soft fork

Rage Comment : The DAO project received a lot of financial support from people at the beginning, and its growth rate was amazing. However, when everyone was looking forward to it, the problem of funds being stolen occurred. The Ethereum community is also urgently looking for a repair solution. The most effective solution is currently considered to be a soft fork, but it has been resisted by many people because it will modify the original Ethereum. However, the community recently discovered a new vulnerability, which caused this seemingly most promising solution to fail. So will it choose a hard fork with a smaller impact range, or sit and wait for death? No one can predict it at present.

Translation: Annie_Xu

After The DAO lost funds, the ethereum developer community proposed many alternative fixes, but a newly discovered vulnerability has caused the most viable solution to fail.

Originally, the soft fork could have blacklisted Ethereum addresses to prevent these addresses that stole funds from making any transactions, but in fact it exposed attack vectors that had not been detected before.

In an Ethereum Foundation blog post, developer Felix Lange explained that the hacker attack would slow down mining and hinder legitimate transactions.

“A number of viable options are being considered. The community could vote against the soft fork, thereby avoiding any negative impact until a better solution is found.”

The DAO was launched at the beginning of the year as the first large-scale distributed autonomous organization with no management structure. Its purpose was to use investors' Ether for new Ethereum-based projects.

After raising $150 million, someone exploited a vulnerability in the software and transferred some of the funds to another DAO under their control.

Some have argued that the DAO’s encryption prevented the attacker from accessing the funds until July 14. However, Lange recently wrote in a blog post:

"While we are still looking for new initiatives, there is no rush to block currency trading."

Previously, Ethereum miners, transaction validators, and people competing to build blocks on the platform participated in the soft fork vote.

Ethereum is about to fork

Fabian Vogelsteller

Although Lange proposed two temporary solutions to the vulnerability, Fabian Vogelsteller, lead developer of Ethereum’s distributed applications, expressed a different opinion on Twitter.

“Since the soft fork was not strong enough, there were two options left: a hard fork that would only affect The DAO, or do nothing.”

A hard fork would restore the Ethereum blockchain to its original state and clear transaction records, but some members of the community have objections to this, fearing that the move would undermine people's confidence in the reliability of the network.

If nothing is done, there will still be many people who oppose it, because this will allow people who use The DAO code to transfer funds to profit from it, harming the interests of the organization's 23,000 token holders.