The North Korean crew laundering funds got stalled—not by compliance, not by law enforcement, but by a 10 ETH bug.
Let’s walk through it: On October 31, Ethereum had a reorg and lost a block. That block contained a 10 ETH deposit that THORChain had already recorded, so the same deposit got refunded twice. The system spotted something was wrong and urgently paused; swaps on 12 of its 13 chains were halted. Chainalysis said this happened to stall a big chunk of the laundering of funds stolen from Binance.
Then two narratives took off on the timeline. One was “THORChain simply works—the protocol detected the problem and stopped itself.” The other was “A reorg works better than a compliance department.”
Enough hype.
First, this was an accident, not a defense. Refunding twice was itself an incident; it just happened to coincide with the hackers waiting in line. Second, The Defiant reported that swaps had stopped, but outbound signing was still enabled on most affected chains. Third, once it restarts, it’ll still be the same old route. The hackers can wait—what do you think they’re in such a hurry for?
The most ironic part is that the moment this supposedly decentralized cross-chain router actually stopped the bad actors was when it bugged out. This shouldn’t be held up as a win for THORChain. The question to ask is: once it restarts, what do the nodes plan to do when the same funds flow through again?
#THORChain #BinanceHack