Zano Restarts ZANO Chain at Block 3,833,000 After Gateway Exploit

Gateway Exploit Forces Month-Long Rollback

Zano, a privacy-focused layer-1 blockchain launched in 2019 with a hybrid proof-of-work and proof-of-stake design, has restarted its network at block 3,833,000, erasing roughly one month of transaction history after a Gateway Address vulnerability allowed unauthorized ZANO and Freedom Dollar (fUSD) tokens to enter circulation. In a recovery notice posted Sunday, the core team said the chosen block sits immediately before Hard Fork 6, the Aug. 26 upgrade that activated the compromised feature. Investigators found no compromise of wallet spend keys or the network's underlying consensus; the issue was confined to asset issuance through Gateway Addresses — an account-style balance system built for exchanges, bridges and payment providers that had struggled to integrate Zano's native unspent transaction output model. The project had spent more than a year developing the address system before deployment; registration carried a one-time fee of 100 ZANO, permanently burned, and forum records show at least two such addresses went live during the feature's first week on mainnet. The restart rewrites the chain from a point a month back, so every transaction confirmed in the affected window — legitimate payments included — no longer exists on the recovered chain. Users have been told to keep transaction IDs and trading records and to recheck earlier transfers before sending payments again. One limit stands out: the rollback cannot reverse payments already settled off Zano. Assets converted to tokens like USDT on other networks, including the TRON network, remain outside the recovery's reach. Zano's standard transactions conceal sender, receiver, amounts and asset types — a design lineage shared with privacy tooling such as Kovri — which will make reconciling erased records harder than on a transparent chain. The team framed the deeper rollback as the only way to strip the unauthorized supply from circulation, after initially describing a much shorter 24-hour recovery while the flaw's scale was still unknown.

recovery notice posted Sundayhttps://x.com/zano_project/status/2104133054880964919?s=20

MEXC Halts ZANO and FUSD Transfers

An emergency software release, version 2.2.3.600, appeared during the recovery, and node operators, miners, stakers, pools and service providers have been urged to install it and verify the published checksums. Ordinary wallet users can update without entering their seed phrases. Zano is restoring its own services — including the mobile wallet node and wrapping service — one by one, but third-party platforms must migrate separately, and users have been warned to confirm that any exchange, wallet or bridge has completed the move before sending funds. MEXC suspended ZANO and FUSD deposits and withdrawals at the project team's request, halting the spot trading flows around both tokens until the recovered chain is live. In a personal response to criticism, head of marketing and growth Quinten van Welzen conceded that a bug made it into Hard Fork 6 and went unnoticed for weeks, but argued the alternative was worse: doing nothing would have left unauthorized ZANO and fUSD in circulation without limit, diluting every holder and breaking the currency's fixed-supply promise. He stressed that developers cannot unilaterally erase history — the recovery depends on network operators adopting the update, with major mining pools carrying substantial weight — and confirmed reimbursement will draw on the development fund, team holdings and committed large-holder resources, with no additional ZANO minted. He called reconciling a month of payments between people complex. ZANO traded near $6.32 during the recovery, down roughly 12.85% over 24 hours, with market capitalization near $97.6 million and 24-hour volume around $64,000 — thin liquidity where any renewed FOMO or capitulation would move price sharply. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Binance.

response to criticismhttps://x.com/Mr_Kwibs/status/2104287693609832488?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Post-Mortem and Claims Process Pending

In our reading, the incident joins a cycle of high-value rollbacks: Cronos validators earlier restored a chain after an exploit, reversing roughly $111.2 million of affected value while $9.19 million stayed unrecovered, and Harmony once weighed a rollback that risked discarding more than 109,000 ordinary transactions. What separates Zano's case is that the technical post-mortem has not yet been published — the team has only confirmed the flaw sat in Gateway Address issuance, and on-chain records of the unauthorized ZANO and fUSD minting remain the primary verifiable evidence until the promised report lands. Until the claims process, the code review of related Gateway logic and the reactivation criteria are disclosed, this recovery is a restart, not a resolution.