#数字货币市场回升 An AI-written code almost brought down the entire public chain.

Last Friday, the Cardano network suddenly exploded—a seemingly normal staking transaction directly split the chain. Here’s what happened: when someone delegated ADA to the staking pool, this transaction was indeed valid at the protocol level, but it triggered a long-dormant bug in the underlying codebase. The nodes diverged during processing, and the network was immediately partitioned.

The event report from the Cardano ecosystem organization Intersect shows that the culprit was that "distorted transaction"—it precisely hit the soft spot of the old code. Even more outrageous, the staking pool operator Homer J stepped up to claim responsibility, saying he used AI-generated code. AI writing code and crashing the public chain, this plot is surreal.

The good news is that users' funds are not lost. Intersect confirmed that retail wallets are basically safe, with no loss of funds. However, the community is in an uproar: some believe that Homer J's actions can be considered a "stress test" that helped expose vulnerabilities; Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson does not see it this way, as he directly characterizes it as an "attack on the network."

Hoskinson's reaction was intense, even bringing the FBI into it. He stated that such behavior affects the lives and businesses of millions of people, "it's like launching a cyber attack on a nation-state, trying to undermine the entire economy." It is still unclear whether the FBI has actually opened an investigation, but once this statement was made, the nature of the situation changed.

The market has not stirred up much of a ripple. The price of ADA has slid from $0.44 on Friday to around $0.40 now, which is a moderate decline. However, this could also be due to the overall downturn in the crypto market — since October, the market has experienced over $20 billion in liquidations, with $BTC, $ETH, and $XRP not being spared. This incident with Cardano is just a footnote in this round of turbulence.