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Zano rolls blockchain back a month after Gateway Address exploit
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- DeepHorus
Zano has restarted its blockchain at block 3,833,000, erasing roughly one month of transactions after discovering that Gateway Addresses allowed unauthorized ZANO and Freedom Dollar (fUSD) to enter circulation. The emergency rollback is painful but aimed at restoring the network’s fixed-supply promise. It also exposes the risks of simplifying wallet design for institutional integration.
The chain was restarted immediately before Hard Fork 6, the upgrade that introduced the affected Gateway Address feature. Rather than wait while illicit supply remained spendable, the core team chose to invalidate the entire period since the fork. That decision also removes legitimate transactions and forces every participant to align on a new canonical chain.
Node operators, miners, stakers, exchanges and other services must adopt the recovery update, according to the team, which announced the action Sunday. The rollback cannot reverse payments already settled on other blockchains, including assets moved through bridges. Zano said it is working to quantify losses and will publish a reimbursement and claims process, but no complete post-mortem was available at publication.
Gateway Addresses were developed to make bridges, exchanges and payment services easier to integrate by giving each service a single account-style balance. Before the feature, ordinary Zano wallets used transaction outputs, or UTXOs, which services had to scan, identify and select when processing deposits and withdrawals. The account model promised operational simplicity, but the reported flaw turned that convenience into a direct threat to supply integrity.
Zano has not yet disclosed how the vulnerability was exploited, who controlled it or how much unauthorized supply was created. The core team said the flaw affected both the native ZANO token and fUSD, a custom asset minted on Zano. That breadth matters because the incident was not confined to one application or token; it compromised systems intended to support multiple forms of value on the network.
Quinten van Welzen, Zano’s head of marketing and growth, argued that doing nothing would leave unauthorized coins in circulation without limit, dilute holders and violate the fixed supply. He also warned that retaining exploited value would encourage future attackers. The team’s trade-off was explicit: sacrifice a month of history and trust now, or accept lasting monetary damage.
Zano launched in May 2019 as a layer-1 blockchain centered on private payments. Its standard private transactions hide senders, receivers, amounts and asset types, while the network also supports user-deployed and minted digital assets. fUSD is one such token. The rollback therefore strikes at a project that has spent nearly seven years trying to combine privacy with flexible assets and exchange access.
Industry reaction was limited because Zano had not released a full post-mortem, leaving questions about the exploit’s code path, reach and prevention. Exchanges and bridge operators now face the harder task of reconciling on-chain balances and off-chain receipts against the shortened chain. Next, users will look for the promised claims framework, loss estimates and a technical explanation, while participants test whether the recovered network can regain confidence without another supply incident.
