Cryptocurrency exchanges suspend ERC20 token deposits as another Ethereum smart contract bug is discovered

OKEx cryptocurrency exchange platform was the first to announce that it had decided to suspend ERC20 token deposits via an official blog post published on April 25. Other exchanges like Coinone, Hitbtc and Poloniex have also done the same. The batch overflow bug was discovered is affecting smart contracts that govern various coins. This week, the Ethereum community voted to stop the restoration of the Ether that ended up being locked in the Parity smart contract bug the in 2017.

It is not easy to develop an Ethereum-based token that is one hundred percent free of bugs. In a research published last year, some researchers claimed that they had discovered that 34,000 of the Ethereum smart contracts were vulnerable to bugs. The latest is the batch overflow bug affecting ERC20 smart contracts. I published a news article on the same yesterday where I reported OKEx had canceled ERC20 deposits as communicated in a blog post saying:

We are suspending the deposits of all ERC-20 tokens due to the discovery of a new smart contract bug – “Batchoverflow”. By exploiting the bug, attackers can generate an extremely large amount of tokens, and deposit them into a normal address. This makes many of the ERC-20 tokens vulnerable to price manipulations of the attackers.

The Smartmesh (SMT) is one of the ERC20 tokens that have been affected by this latest bug. It is listed on various exchanges including, Houbi, Hitbtc, OKEx and Gate.io. At the moment, the token’s smart contracts show openly the signs of manipulation where the token balance and the token value indicate figures running to over 30 figures. SMT tokens have in the last 24 hours been transferred from the smart contracts.