EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

After a series of events due to software bugs plus accidental actions, more than $300 million in cryptocurrency has allegedly vanished.

The money in question was in the form of ether, which is stored in digital multi-signature wallets created by a company called Parity. The problem began when hackers stole $32m out of some multi-signature wallets. Alex Hern reports in The Guardian that as Parity attempted to fix the flaw, it accidentally created a new bug that caused one user to become the sole owner of all of the wallets. Ouch.

But wait, there’s more. It turns out, the one user, known as devops199, then tried to undo the damage. But, as Adam Clark Estes explains in Gizmodo, “…That simply destroyed all of the funds. More specifically, the bug caused a chain reaction of events that locked all multi-sig wallets in such a way that they can’t be unlocked.” Double ouch.

For now, the only possible solution would be a “hard fork,” which would require the majority (51 percent) of the currency’s users to pretend it never happened.

Read the full story at The Guardian.