Ethan Buchman, co-founder of the inter-blockchain communication (IBC) ecosystem Cosmos, made the announcement on October 13 that there is a “critical security vulnerability” that affects all IBC versions and Cosmos chains that support IBC.
Buchman made this announcement on the Cosmos Hub Forum, where he said that efforts have already been made to fix all important public IBC-enabled chains.
This update will be released in a week that saw numerous hacks that incurred costs exceeding $100 million.
Triggered by the BNB exploit
According to reports, the Cosmos team had communicated with major IBC project developers to ensure that the network was patched before the vulnerability could be exploited.
By 14:00 UTC on September 14, the patch would be made available via the Cosmos SDK so that developers of smaller projects can also upgrade their networks.
A third of the chain’s voters must have approved the upgrade before the patch can be applied without disrupting the network.
The core developers of Cosmos and Osmosis reportedly increased security audits following the $100 million cross-chain bridge exploit on BNB Chain on October 6.A flaw that had not yet been exploited was discovered by the audits.
Over $1B and 40 chains at stake
The manner in which the Cosmos team dealt with the vulnerability is still up for debate. The Total Value Locked (TVL) of the DeFi ecosystem could lose more than $1 billion if the serious vulnerability is not fixed.
This is because there are currently over 40 chains in the Cosmos ecosystem. Cronos, Cava, Thorchain, and Terra Classic are notable protocols that have millions of TVL locked in.
The TVL in DeFi protocols as a whole had decreased significantly over the past few months.It had decreased to less than $54 billion as of this writing, from approximately $140 billion in May.
Using daily trendlines, we could see that the price of ATOM was rising. Since the beginning of its rally, the chart showed that ATOM had increased by more than 210 percent.
ATOM was trading between $11 and $12 at the time of writing, a nearly 6% increase from the beginning of the trading period.
Despite the fact that ATOM was still in a bear trend despite the rally, given where the Relative Strength Index line was.
However, within the Cosmos IBC ecosystem, there have been relatively few instances of chain security breaches.
This year, the majority of cross-chain bridge hacks have targeted Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) blockchains. EVM exploits include the Ronin and Nomad bridge exploits, among others.
