CryptoBridge fixes “Make it Rain” feature

Few days back I wrote a piece about how Cryptobridge inadvertently did a KLKS “airdrop” (full article here) I estimated it was in the ballpark of $70KUSD, and it only impacted KLKS. Although in the comments of my tweet posting of this article. Some followers assure that this have happened to them but with other coins.

CryptoBridge has now officially written an article about what happened and how it was solved (full article here). They managed to recover most of those ~$70KUSD, the final “airdrop” was only for $8,255USD.

CryptoBridge brought to my attention on Twitter that they had released their clarification article and were kind enough to vent some of my concerns, which I will share with you:

1. “Withdrawals were halted immediately upon discovering the error that occurred.” According to them, they knew of the problem before KLKS team contacted them, if they had knew, none of the benefited by the “airdrop” would have been able to withdraw the funds. I could easily argue that they didn't know what happened until I made public my take on the issue.
2. Communication with KLKS team was very deficient, if they had acknowledged KLKS team the same day, they would have managed the issue faster and better. CryptoBridge accepted in our conversation in Twitter that they communicated poorly, and are committed to improve.
3. The most concerning part for me was that they admittedly reverted the unintended “airdrop”. In the true spirit of a Decentralized Exchange (aka DEX), they could not, and would not been able to revert a wanted, or unwanted transaction. This is the whole idea of a DEX, is to avoid exchanges, governments meddling in the wallets of users, so if funds were deposited, whatever the root may have been (intended/unintended), a DEX should not go out of its way to undo what was done, the solution was worse than the issue for me. What they should have done, is to absorb the cost impact of the “airdrop”, a la ETC, since is the true spirit and purpose of CryptoBridge as a DEX.

Proof of Transparency #1 Proof of Transparency #2

CryptoBridge admitted that they reverted most of the airdrops, because they could, and obviously because funds did not belong to the benefitted parties. They could do the transactions reversal because Bitshares has an OVERRIDEfunction, CryptoBridge argument is the following…

CryptoBridge is still largely in development, and it will not be fully decentralized until the federated gateways are deployed later this year. Please understand that there needs to be the need to recover from mistakes until we reach a stable state where we can turn this feature off in the Bitshares asset configuration, otherwise it could not continue to operate.

In summary CryptoBridge intends to be a fully trustless, decentralized, exchange, it is making headway towards it, but is not quite there yet. Until they move into “federated gateways”, and can prove to us that the unfamous Bitshares override function is disabled for good, CryptoBridge is still a DEX in the making, and I really wish they get there.

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