Cardano suffers a universal dApp exploit, is the ride over for ADA?

The Cardano community witnessed a huge exploit in the Cardano network, as revealed by the founder of Canonical, a firm specializing in Plutus smart contracts, Jonathan Fischoff. Fischoff released a public announcement on the matter, claiming that the exploit has been affecting the dApps on the network since mid-October.

The dApp exploit

The nature of the dApp exploit, and the technicalities weren’t revealed by the announcement (due to security reasons) from Fischoff, and he further added that “this [explot] doesn’t impact UTXOs.” UTXOs is a verification system that is mastered by Cardano and records the movement of assets via “unspent outputs.”

“Since Mid-October, every Cardano dApp with publicly accessible smart contract code has had a similar exploit in their initial smart contract,” said the announcement.

Fischoff also bought to attention in his article that solving this exploit might lead to a decrease in the efficiency and working of smart contracts on the Cardano network, which were integrated recently via the Alonzo testnet. Smart contracts, which come under British and Welsh laws, are a major part of dApp development, and if the efficiency is reduced, the developers might have to redefine the entire smart contracts structure.

“Additionally, mitigating the attack has ramifications around the design and efficiency of smart contracts, which can lead to considerable amounts of redesign if you are not aware of the design constraints early on,” said Fischoff’s report.

Cardano community unfazed

On the other hand, the Cardano community is unfazed as Reddit users claim this to report from Fischoff to be a FUD or a joke trying to bring ADA prices down. Furthermore, some users had praised the efforts of Fischoff, thanking his report for revealing the exploitation before any of the users or developers lost control of their ADA tokens. 

As of 3:26 a.m. UTC, the price of one ADA token stands at $1.25, and as per data from CoinMarketCap, the token is 59.74% low from its all-time high investors’ witnessed on Sep 02, 2021, at $3.10.