Nanex Exchange Delists Haven Protocol (XHV) after Wallet Vulnerability Exploit

Nanex exchange, a small-scale marketplace with a handful of assets centered around the NANO (NANO) coin, saw a recent wallet hack, due to a vulnerability in the Haven Protocol (XHV) storage.

https://twitter.com/nanex_co/status/1032627085750218752

The Nanex exchange team stated that Haven Protocol failed to warn in time about a vulnerability in its wallet, which was inherited from the Monero protocol, the basis for Haven.

On August 23, the exchange noticed discrepancies:

“This afternoon Nanex’s monitoring systems reported that withdrawals for XHV were failing. After an investigation, it was discovered that the XHV wallet software was reporting insufficient balance upon attempting to withdraw despite all of our internal checks passing,” Nanex explained in a blog post.

The Nanex exchange updated the Haven Protocol wallet last on June 7 for a mandatory hard fork. However, the team was unaware of another update, aimed at patching yet another vulnerability inherited from Monero.

“Unfortunately, the Haven Protocol team only made a single announcement in their Discord that seemed to be specific to another exchange and never contacted us directly about a wallet update (namely, 3.0.1). We make it a requirement for all coins that we list that they contact us directly about any updates, especially in the case of exploits.”

Nanex also failed to notice the Monero exploit, which affected other coins, because Monero was listed after patching up its wallet. The Nanex exchange immediately discontinued XHV trading. The losses are estimated at around $36,541.12 based on XHV prices at the time of the exploit, but the exchange is still tallying up the balances, and further losses may be revealed.

The NANO digital asset also saw an attack earlier, when Italian BitGrail exchange was hacked, and 17 million XRB (the former ticker of NANO) coins were stolen.

XHV trades at around $0.57 as at 7:28 UTC on Friday, up more than 16% for the past 24 hours, amid a relatively high turnover of nearly $60,000, according to CoinMarketCap data. XHV will remain traded only on TradeOgre after Nanex delists it.