Here’s what happened yesterday: Nano account holders at Binance received an unexpected airdrop hours after Nano’s Boulton 17.1 node upgrade. It wasn’t in the books neither was Nano Foundation planning on issuing free Nano drops to network supporters. With each Nano retailing at around $0.772013 a piece before the disastrous, reputation-damaging airdrop, recipients couldn’t hide their joy with memes of different forms doing rounds in social media.

Boulton Ver 17.1 The Node Improvement Soft Fork

To understand the genesis, we must understand that Boulton Ver 17.1 was a necessary upgrade whose objective was to address among other things “address inconsistent peer connection.” According to the official explanation, the soft fork wasn’t contentious neither was their expectation of technical glitches.

Boulton 17.1, Nano said, would lead to more consistency and from GitHub these were enhancements and fixed bugs:

Implemented enhancements:

• List of rolled back blocks in block_processor [#1581]
• Check state blocks existence in ledger before verification [#1571]
• Lack of contact timestamping drops peers [#1536]
• Reduce UI lockups [#1482]
• MDB improvements [#1421]
• Expanding root to uint512_union [#1600]

Fixed bugs:

• Test node. block_processor_reject_rolled_back [#1594]
• Restore blocks_hashes. insert [#1569]
• update lmdb submodule [#1563]
• Fix crash when announcing votes [#1501]
• Disable pool_connection () for stopped bootstrap or bootstrap_client [#1500]
• Fix a possible thread stall [#1494]

The Binance Error and Double Spend Worries

From what’s publicly available, part of this double deposit issue at Binance was of the exchange’s making. Reportedly, the problem stemmed from Binance implementation where it is alleged that during Bootstrapping, it appears as if Binance node rolled back to a large part of the main chain. Since a large part was affected, previous deposit transactions were interpreted as “pending” forcing node execution and an inevitable deposit in all affected addresses.

All Binance node had to do was to request confirmation of newly pending send transactions, which was acknowledged and received as usual. However, this reception was not in the correct order meaning Nano temporarily hard forked. We can trace and look for evidence showing a temporary fork because the IDs of these deposits are not available on the Nano blockchain explorer. With further exploration, it is clear that the blockchain is okay and the block containing the double deposit remain unconfirmed.

Here’s evidence:

“here’s a block from a ‘double deposit’ https://nanocrawler.cc/explorer/block/6C1539F5AE3A803CA1E19EF423DECD5F0088299E87BE050DFFC519947C22DD76

It’s not a confirmed block. This means Nano’s blockchain is safe–this issue has absolutely nothing to do with the recent spam attack. “

In response to this, Nano got in touch with Binance asking them to suspend Nano deposit, withdrawal and trading. They went further assuring the community that there was no double spend and the issue “was localized to a small number of nodes that were not upgraded to v17.1.”

Everything is back to normal and users can deposit, trade and withdraw Nano from Binance.