THORChain Is Rebuilding After a $10M Exploit and the Plan Is Actually Interesting




 THORChain went down on May 15. A malicious node operator drained roughly $10.17 million from one of the protocol's vaults by exploiting a flaw in the GG20 threshold signature system. The network paused. Swaps went offline. And now, nearly two weeks later, the recovery is moving through governance, patches, and a live bounty window.

The governance proposal at the center of everything is ADR028. Node operators approved it, and the plan covers losses through Protocol-Owned Liquidity without minting new RUNE or diluting existing holders. That is not the standard playbook after a DeFi exploit. Most protocols either mint tokens to cover gaps or quietly walk away. THORChain is doing neither.

Patch v3.18.1 is already live on nodes. It fixes the immediate vulnerability and restores Rujira Network's borrow and repay functions. The next version, v3.19.0, is headed for stagenet testing before it gets pushed to mainnet. No launch date is confirmed yet.

One move that generated serious discussion: tss-lib, the core threshold signature library, has been moved to closed source temporarily. THORSec is running a full audit on it, and the team chose not to keep the repository public while remediation work is still active. Some in the community called it a contradiction for a decentralized protocol. The team says it reopens after the audit finishes.

The bounty window is live now. The exploiter can still return a portion of the funds while the protocol covers the rest through POL. Whether that happens is unknown.

DeFi users tracking the RUNE price are watching for the moment swaps resume. That is when the real market reaction will be visible. The recovery design keeps holders from taking an inflation hit, but the open question is how long stagenet testing takes and whether additional vulnerabilities surface before mainnet comes back.

For a full breakdown of the ADR028 mechanics, the tss-lib decision, and what happens next for the network, the complete analysis is at CryptoNewsLive.org.

The situation is still developing. More updates from THORChain's development team are expected once v3.19.0 stagenet results come in.

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