Juno Blockchain Restarts Thursday Following Over 24 Hours Network Shutdown

Juno, the sovereign public blockchain based on the Cosmos ecosystem, will be back online Thursday after it remained offline for over 24 hours due to a malicious smart contract that crashed the network.

With users growing impatient by the day and expressing their frustrations online, Juno Network is finally scheduled to be back in operation from Thursday. The good news was shared online by Cosmos core developer Jack Zampolin via his Twitter account.

"Update on the Juno situation. We have tested the upgrade path and it is working. It's now time to set a restart time for @JunoNetwork. [The] restart will be tomorrow at 21:00 UTC. This should be early morning Asia, midday Americas, and Evening Europe. Long live, JUNO! Let's go, validators," the developer announced Wednesday.

While not fully disclosing the cause of the network's temporary shutdown, Zampolin noted that "the issue was a malicious smart contract exploiting a vulnerability in an old version of CosmWasm," which is a library that provides all modular code needed for building a contract.

Zampalin also said the team would include the latest security release when the upgrade version rolls out. "We will have a full post mortem of the issue here soon," he said. "In the upgrade version, we are also including the latest security release there," Zampolin noted in a tweet.

Malicious actors, for three days, made a trial-and-error work of sending more than 400 transactions to the smart contract, which eventually landed on a perfect combination of transactions that crashed the network, CoinDesk reported. The hacker reportedly exploited the blockchain vulnerability, which Juno will address through an upcoming update rolling out in the next few hours.

Juno made headlines last month when it came up with a very controversial decision and voted to revoke a whale's token. Juno Network's Proposal 16, which aimed to shrink one whale's holdings in the company dramatically, passed. This added more distinction to the power of a decentralized autonomous organization or DAO.

$JUNO, with a market capitalization of more than $1 billion, was trading down 6.10 percent at $22.13 with a 24-hour volume of $3,265,636 as of 3:07 a.m. ET on April 7 as per CoinMarketCap data.