Bitcoin's rival sees wallet worth $250 million frozen

Bitcoin's rival Ethereum hit a blockade when one of its wallets saw its users being logged out and its funds froze.

Cryptocurrencies are now valued over $200 billion

Individuals who created accounts after July 20 were suddenly logged out as the Parity Technologies wallet was frozen. The money involved in it ranged from $150 million to $280 million.

Vitalik Buterin had invented Ethereum because he thought that the “bitcoin community wasn’t approaching the problem in the right way.”

Other than Ether being strongly associated and tied to cryptocurrency just like bitcoin, it is also used by application developers to pay for transaction fees and services.

Update: Two duplicates found in list. Over $150m locked and 616k ether.

It has been called an extremely “horrendous blunder” which has raised a lot of questions on the vulnerability of the system.

Until yesterday, the Ethereum co-founder remained lull on this situation and said that he was “deliberately refraining” from commenting on the ongoing wallet debacle but today he broke his silence.”

I am deliberately refraining from comment on wallet issues, except to express strong support for those working hard on writing simpler, safer wallet contracts or auditing and formally verifying security of existing ones.

Venezuelans use bitcoin 'mining' to escape inflation

Meanwhile, Parity was quick to confirm the situation through a blog post as well as several tweets that they were going to get back with more as soon as the developers are done working on it.

We are working on confirming the exact details and will inform the community as soon as we have them.

This was more than 24 hours ago, and since then no one has heard from neither Ethereum nor Parity Technologies and that troubles the users as there seems to be no easy way out of such a situation where so much money is at stake.

This article originally appeared on The Next Web