Over 300 million dollars of Ethereum (ETH) has been lost.
If you have been living under a rock you might have missed it. The money, stored in the wallets created by the developer team Parity is frozen with no means of access.
How did this happen?
The wallets in question offered by Parity were multi-signature wallets. These are wallets which require more than one user to enter their private key before a transaction can be made.
Recently a bug in the wallets allowed hackers to make off with over 30 million dollars worth of ETH. In the subsequent fixing of this big to prevent further attacks, a developer going by the username of devops199 created an issue in which they became the single owner of all of the Parity multi-signature wallets created after the 20th of July. This issue occured when calling the initWallet function which made the caller of the function become the owner of the wallet.
You can read more about it in the statement from parity here
In an attempt to resolve the issue the code library that transferred the ownership to the single account was deleted.
Oops.
All this meant was that their was no way to access the ETH stored in those wallets. So the ETH is still there, it is just inaccessible.
Many in the Ethereum community have raised the possibility of a hard fork to render this a non issue and return the funds to their rightful owners. This is similar to what happened after the DAO hack
Given that ETH is the second biggest Crypto Currency by market cap the big question now is.
Is confidence in Ethereum damaged beyond repair?
Will this damage the push to develop and build apps on the Ethereum network?
What will happen to the price Will you still invest and hold? Are we going to see a Fire-Sale?
All I know is that it will be interesting to watch how this plays out.
I hope to see you in the comments :=)