Seraphim: I would like to take a moment to announce the official and final, ultimate release of the bridge in its complete form to bridge from these external networks on which the CHER tokens is represented as a synthetic form of the main and real Cherry token that is a native currency of the CHER network and the CHER network itself. So, before we had the route from these networks to the CHER network - now we have the inverse route.
We released, I guess, a preliminary version of the second route, this route from CHER network out, a few weeks ago. Immediately, a community member discovered a serious vulnerability. We'll try to describe how in a text format. But in short, it was due to an error in how we misrepresented the transfer. And these failure events can occur for a variety of reasons. But the particular attack vector was discovered. The attacker was not able to send balance that they did not have. And so they had maybe just enough to cover the transaction fee. But not the full amount they attempted to transfer. They transferred over I think 15 million Cherry tokens to the bridge. All these transfers have failed. Which means that they did not actually occur. Because the prerequisite, which is their balance, was not there and failed. But still; the bridge did not read that part of the state. It only read the extrinsic part.
The extrinsic actually succeeded because a transaction was successfully signed and included in a block. And then the transfer of the Cherry from the attackers address to the bridge failed. We therefore added this failsafe of not just an extrinsic detection, but also a system call to the systems palette. This security issue has been fully patched. The bridge as promised over many, many weeks is complete. Many of you used it in its original form, a few dozen transactions were processed prior to the attack. And they all completed. We then paused the bridge for a few days. The bridge has been operating for a few days now and transactions submitted in the interim have been processed. And any transaction that you send now will succeed. So that means that if you send a balance in excess of your account’s balance and an amount of Cherry that's in excess of your account you will not receive the same amount to your destination address in the destination network (as it should be). But if you make a transaction and the transaction is a success because you have the balance that you intend to bridge it should succeed.
So with that, I think the next step is to take some liquidity actions. We have begun the planning. You know, it does require some pre-planning as you may think. It is quite complex only to transfer all liquidity specifically in pancakeswap, which is one of our largest pairs, away from our pair with BUSD, which is a now-defunct stablecoin, to USDT.
In conjunction with this, we also want to sustain the short term liquidity flux that will occur as individuals bridge in or bridge out previously frozen coins or coins that were not liquidatable on the pancakeswap trading venue. We'll monitor all that. And we have a good strategy for that. We have a good plan. We'll implement that in the next few days.
Following that, as described in the past few AMAs and by chat also, the objective is now to preserve and revive the quite significant assets of Cherry, namely its brand, its website, marketing. These things are very low effort. But form the basis for our discovery and pursuits further. Over past year we pursued in excess of what we should and could. And let these assets, namely the brand community and so forth, falter. We ignored what we already had in pursuit of something more we did not achieve. We did not get more for a variety of reasons. Our partnerships seem to continually run into issues or get delayed. These are of course issues related more to industry dynamics than specifically to us. But nevertheless, they are all based on our ability as a team and community to communicate effectively what we built and all that hinges on our brand - these core assets that then allow us to take further action and expand our opportunities beyond just talking on Twitter and saying we were happy to announce this and things of the sort.
To summarize. The bridge is ready. And it is a very, very complicated piece of software. Frustratingly so. It seems like it's a few buttons. On the app side it required originally EVM compatibility, which is a monstrous task. But I'm glad we got that released a few months ago. And then once EVM compatibility was done then we had to update the formulae for bridge operations. And get them all right. There was an issue discovered. Now that I'm pretty confident that that's patched, here is nothing really else that requires our media attention. It will go a bit slow at times. We'll try to fix that. I was made aware that the polygon end of the bridge was a bit slow. We fixed that already. We'll try to make incremental improvements. But the bridge as a piece of software is complete. And it's now another piece in our ever-expanding Cherry Network arsenal which now includes a very stable relay chain, an Ethereum compatible parachain, and all the variety of palettes and features built into the relay chain. Like allowing parachain deployment, but also interchain communication through complex communication channels of both assets and state. Through things like XCM and other paradigms that I won't bore you with now.
We now have the right edition of the bridge which many demanded (and I'm going to go ahead and completely concur on this) as a statement that the token that was bridged into the CHER network could be bridged out. It was not a choice of manipulating the market and diminishing supply. Of course, that was a benefit. But it really was not intentional. But thankfully that's all. Behind us and hopefully we can move forward from that.
So our arsenal which fundamentally is technology is pretty stable. The next step we're iterating on, is the storage or storage capabilities. It's pretty strong. We have our own IPFS implementation. We're working with talented partners who are working with our storage functionality and we're observing how they use it and absorbing some of that experience into our team.
One question we are addressing is how do we compensate node operators? This is a very complicated question, one that is not solely technical but also has very significant technical implications, such as: one idea would be to meter throughput but the moment you meter and try to assign a value to throughput we then need to also assign some qualifying data to this throughput. If it's just DDoS attacks with just the same person, maybe the node operator themselves spamming themselves to simulate throughputs, we need a measure of you know quality. And if it's just storage then, well, we have this in effect already. How do we know that the storage is used properly if the storage is once granted not removed. So there's a variety of these economical considerations about how to compensate node operators as well as maybe on the front end - how do users of the storage pay whether by consumption whether by… anyway I can't list them all it's quite an in-depth conversation that maybe we'll maybe have some other time! But that's the technical focus. This is the arsenal we're building now many years in the making. It is as important as ever though interest for the business, for the industry, is maybe less I would say, by most measures it is less than expected, for sure less than during the environment in which we started and we set off with this mission. It is nonetheless a useful pursuit.
And even then there's nothing that comes close to the capability of Cherry. There is a Filecoin, Sia, there's the same incumbents as many years ago they have stagnated with technology that we thought was old and could be improved two years ago they have not. And over the past two years and change we have built a valid competitor valid product that once it's given it a chance hopefully we'll withstand the comparison, not just in technical form but also for enterprise applications.
We'll get to enterprise validation later. This is something we spent maybe now for sure too much time on the past few years. Now the point is: maintain the equity, rebuild trust in the team and amongst the community in the core ideals that tie us all together. And that is very simply done by curating our Twitter feed better, incentivizing activity on our other social channels and things of this sort. Thank you very much.