Blockchain Firm Bluzelle Uncovers a Critical Bug in Cosmos' Consensus Algorithm

Decentralized data network Bluzelle (BLZ) discovered a bug in the Tendermint consensus algorithm used by the Cosmos (ATOM) interchain protocol.

According to a Bluzelle announcement shared with Cointelegraph on July 6, the firm discovered a bug in Tendermint during its validators competition. The competition, which involved 220 participants maintaining a Tendermint-based a testnet, at one point saw the blockchain halt completely due to the bug.

The bug was already patched

Validators participating in the competition were unable to resume their activities even after the blockchain was restarted. Bluzelle sent an extensive bug report to Cosmos after the incident took place in June, and the issue was fixed on July 2. The firm’s chief technology officer and co-founder, Neeraj Muraka, said:

“Although our team’s uncovering of the bug threatened to derail our entire validator competition, it proved to be a valuable exercise for everyone involved. [...] A competition intended to incentivize validators to stake and participate in consensus suddenly became an impromptu bug bounty, with heads coming together to diagnose and resolve the problem.”

Bluzelle CEO Pavel Bains explained that — while Bluzelle is not a Cosmos sidechain — the network in question was built using the Cosmos software development kit and consequently uses Tendermint. Furthermore, he mentioned that once the upcoming Cosmos Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol is launched, Bluzelle will also use it to connect to other chains.

Bluzelle launched its main network in April. The company claims that this network combines some of the features of edge computing with distributed ledger technology. The Bluzelle blockchain is divided into swarms that can also be created based on their geographical location, allowing for lower computation latency.