Iota Lays Out Plan to Re-Enable Network After 20 Days Offline

For over two weeks now, the Iota network has been down, with MIOTA token-holders being unable to facilitate any transactions since Feb. 12.

The Iota Foundation has downplayed the severity of the hack, but a number of indicators suggest far more wallets might have been compromised than the Iota Foundation has so far announced.

"The vulnerability at hand was only within the Trinity Desktop wallet and was indeed caused by the Moonpay integration. There is no vulnerability in IOTA itself or the protocol. While it is an unfortunate event, the actions of the Iota Foundation show that we are serious about the project and its users."

In regards to the attack and the extent of the damage done, Harbor stated that because the Iota team was unsure of the severity of the attack - i.e., how many seeds were stolen from Trinity wallets through the vulnerability - the firm made the difficult decision to halt the coordinator to prevent the attacker from extracting more tokens.

"People less familiar with Iota have misinterpreted the fact that Iota currently has the coordinator, as an indication that the network is not decentralized. Currently, the Iota network is decentralized with several hundred nodes issuing and validating transactions. The confirmation process relies on milestones that are issued by the coordinator and validated by the entire network; in other words, the transactions' finality depends on this centralized component. However, all nodes verify all transactions and would not accept any 'wrongdoing' from the coordinator."

"A second serious vulnerability in three years looks very dangerous for holders and especially developers. So, I personally expect that many developers will avoid building products on Iota in the future despite all efforts from the Iota team to mitigate the problem."

Does the future look bleak for Iota?As mentioned earlier, since this latest security lapse came to light, Iota has lost a little over 40% of its value, and it remains unclear what will happen to the token's price once the network reactivates on March 10.MIOTA/USD price chart since Feb. 11.

Lastly, a whole host of experts have argued that if the Iota ecosystem had been decentralized - even in the event of the platform losing $2 million as a result of the hack - the network could have stayed switched on, and the Trinity wallet issue could have probably been fixed quite quickly.

One point of view is that with a decentralized structure, the Iota Foundation might have prevented the deep market crash it is facing right now - which could take an even bigger hit if token holders choose to sell off their MIOTA tokens once the network comes back online.

"With the removal of the Coordinator, Iota will fulfill its promise as the very first feeless, decentralized and scalable distributed ledger technology available. The feeless nature of Iota is important to the future of IoT.".