Steemit Is Now Fully Operational Again After Chain Halted Due to Bug

Steemit, a blogging and social networking website that uses its Steem blockchain-based rewards platform for publishers, took to Twitter today to announce to their fellow-Steemians that Steemit is back up and running and fully functional after having suffered from a bug in the curations reward curve.

Bug in the curations reward curve

According to a blog post from Sept. 3, Steemit is now fully operational again, as are all Steem applications leveraging their API. The chain halted over the weekend due to a bug in the curations reward curve, which was apparently unrelated to the previous halt or the so-called delegation bug.

Quick response to fix bug

The Steemit team was quick to develop a patch that did not necessitate a hardfork, but did require a replay of nodes that were used by steemit.com and other Steem applications like Steem Monsters. The post went on to say:

“The bug was the result of a subtle behavior in the new curation rewards curve that lead to votes being able to have a curation reward weight of -1, which when stored in an unsigned field resulted in a computed value of 2^64 - 1. When paid out, these votes were attempting to receive trillions in STEEM.”

The team concluded the post by apologizing for the inconvenience and promising that they will be conducting a retrospective, the results of which will be shared on their website.

Bug bounty program for Facebook’s Libra

As Cointelegraph reported on Aug. 27, the Libra Association has opened its bug bounty program to the public to address security concerns in anticipation of Libra’s 2020 launch.

Michael Engle, head of developer ecosystem at the Libra Association, said that they want to help their researchers uncover issues while the Libra Blockchain is still in testnet and no real money is in circulation.