Zano erases a month of chain history to purge counterfeit ZANO and fUSD
The privacy-focused layer-1 restarted at block 3,833,000 after a flaw in its Gateway Addresses feature let attackers mint unlimited tokens. Legitimate transactions from the period vanish too, and cross-chain payments cannot be clawed back.
Illustration · generated, not a photograph
Zano, a privacy-focused layer-1 blockchain, has wiped roughly a month of transaction history from its ledger to stamp out counterfeit tokens created through a software flaw. The network was restarted Sunday at block 3,833,000 — the point immediately before Hard Fork 6, the upgrade that shipped the feature now identified as the source of the trouble.
According to the Zano core team, the bug in Gateway Addresses allowed unauthorized ZANO and Freedom Dollar (fUSD) to enter circulation without limit. Rolling the chain back removes those forged balances, but it also discards every legitimate transaction made in the intervening weeks, and there is no mechanism to reverse payments users sent to other blockchains during that window.
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Making the recovery work depends on widespread adoption: the team says nodes, miners, stakers, exchanges and other service providers all need to install the updated software for the new chain to take hold. Zano has not yet published a technical post-mortem, but committed to a reimbursement and claims process to account for losses incurred by affected users.
Quinten van Welzen, Zano's head of marketing and growth, defended the drastic step. <!-- TO-OUTLET-QUOTE --> "Doing nothing meant unauthorized ZANO and fUSD in circulation without limit, diluting every holder and breaking the most basic promise a currency makes: a fixed supply," he said. In his view, tolerating the exploit would signal to future attackers that stolen coins keep their value — something, he argued, no project can survive.
Gateway Addresses were built as a convenience for bridges, exchanges and payment processors wanting to integrate with Zano. The feature lets these operators manage funds through a single account-style balance, closer to how conventional blockchains handle balances. Before the upgrade, Zano wallets worked differently: funds were tracked as individual unspent transaction outputs, meaning services had to scan the chain themselves to detect incoming deposits and choose which outputs to spend when paying out.
Launched in May 2019, Zano focuses on private payments, with default transactions hiding the sender, recipient, amount and asset type involved. Alongside its native ZANO token, the chain supports user-created digital assets — Freedom Dollar is one of these, circulating as a token on the network.
Van Welzen acknowledged the reputational cost of the restart. <!-- TO-OUTLET-QUOTE --> He told Cointelegraph that restarting from before Hard Fork 6 “costs a month of history, and it costs trust, which we'll have to earn back.” But, he added, “it restores the supply everyone signed up for, and it leaves a path to rebuild. Which is better than 7 years of hard work left to die. We know it hurts. But not doing it would have hurt more.”
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