36.9 Million Fake ZANO and 1.8 Trillion fUSD Stablecoins Flood On-Chain! Zano Team Decides to Roll Back Blockchain by About One Month Due to Inability to Distinguish Fake Coins

Coin Circle (120bTc.coM): According to a report released by Zano officials on October 2, Beijing time, an attacker has illegally minted approximately 36.9 million ZANO tokens and up to 1.8 trillion FreedomDollar (fUSD) stablecoins over the past month by exploiting a vulnerability in the GatewayAddress.

Reviewing the entire attack path, the hacker paid only 100 ZANO (equivalent to about $553 at the time) as a registration fee to activate the gateway address on August 28, Beijing time, and successfully bypassed system restrictions the next day, minting approximately 18.4 million ZANO out of thin air. Since this abnormal output had characteristics on-chain indistinguishable from regular transactions, the usual internal risk control, AI-assisted testing, and bug bounty programs did not trigger any alarms. On September 25, Beijing time, the hacker repeated the trick, completing a second wave of massive minting. Zano spokesperson Quinten van Welzen revealed in an interview with Cointelegraph that due to the buying depth on major trading platforms, if the hacker were to sell off in large quantities, it would lead to an immediate market crash, and this liquidity constraint objectively compressed the space for large-scale cashing out.

Officially Forced to Implement a Month-long Rollback

Under the UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output) architecture, transaction records themselves do not have tags to verify authenticity. These fraudulently generated tokens have complete circulation and trading functions on-chain. Once they flow into the real market and are dispersed by the hacker to hundreds of independent addresses, it will technically become impossible to accurately separate the illegal chips.

The management thus found themselves in an extremely passive situation: if they maintained the status quo, tens of millions of fake coins would severely dilute the net asset value of real holders, completely destroying the protocol's deflationary economic model; if they only implemented targeted blocking, it was highly likely that they would not be able to intercept the already obfuscated laundered assets. Weighing the options, Zano decided to take extreme intervention measures, rolling back the entire blockchain's historical records by about one month, along with all legitimate transactions during that period, fundamentally erasing this batch of illegal liquidity supply.

Urgent Need for Restructuring Underlying Code Audit

To mitigate the impact of the rollback on innocent users, Zano has initiated an emergency safety net plan. The officials are gathering developer special funds, core team funds, and external donations, collaborating with trading platforms and payment service providers to restore the real balances of affected accounts. Relevant platforms will be responsible for replaying the canceled normal withdrawal instructions, while the project party will bear the responsibility for compensating the damaged assets.

Such operations have precedents in the industry, such as the 51% attack on Ethereum Classic (ETC) in 2018 and the theft of 60 million DAI from MakerDAO in 2019, both of which ultimately adopted similar rollback or restructuring measures. However, as a foundational network focusing on zero-knowledge proofs and strong privacy transactions, Zano itself is extremely difficult to accept external audits, and this incident has exposed a fatal design flaw in the cross-chain gateway module, necessitating a detailed root cause analysis (RCA) to clarify whether it is a protocol layer defect or a code implementation error.

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