About 12 days after launch, we had a sudden increase in the number of swiftnodes which got our attention. After @msg768 looked into the source of these swiftnodes, he noticed that they belong to the infamous smartnode exploiter. A quick research and query showed that the person had at least appx. 16 million SWIFTs. The information was shared with the community to ask whether we should fork the smartnode exploiter out or not. The overwhelming majority of the community agreed that we should and so we did.
As it can be seen in the transaction below which can also be viewed in details on the explorer, an unknown miner pays a smartnode which does not even have a 10K collateral. It has never had a 10K collateral which proves that this block was mined by a hacker/exploiter who also happens to be an early miner, because the 550+ swiftnodes that he created in a few minutes all within the same IP range too, were linked to early miners as well. And this shot is only one of the many similar transactions.
Anyone can follow where the rewards of this miner and also this smartnode end up! They end up creating lots of smartnodes some of which are still running and most of which were whitelisted and had received swiftcash as well. The quick query found about 16M SWIFTs linked to the same person which were removed from circulation in an emergency hard fork. Block 18,187 of SWIFT's blockchain was chosen as the new snapshot and about 1200+ addresses were excluded from the new airdrops unto a clean chain.
Identifying these addresses before the fork would have been very difficult and unfortunately none of the filtering rules had applied to these addresses but we are thankful for the smartnode exploiter's action of creating 550+ swiftnodes all at once, which caused us to pay attention to it and then find out that they belong to him. Furthermore, since we were and are not on any exchanges yet, that made the hard fork not only easy but also possible. Hard forking like this if we were listed on an exchange would be almost next to impossible, since the smartnode exploiter could potentially use exchanges to wash his funds unless the exchanges we were on decided to help us, which is usually not something you can expect from most exchanges!
Moving forward about 5 days ahead of the hard fork, the new chain has stablized and the old chain is dead. Listing on Escodex was postponed and is now in progress again. A copy of the old blockchain as well as the new snapshot were added to swift-files on github. We hope and believe to have targetted the majority of the coins owned by the smartnode exploiter. Our current total supply is appx. 285 million SWIFTs and within the next 48 hours, block rewards are going to increase 10 times! This is because as the original launch, we set the block rewards for the first 10K blocks to be little in order to give everyone enough time and chance to set up their wallets and/or swiftnodes.
If you haven't updated yet, make sure you do as soon as possible. All you need to do is to first download the new client from https://swiftcash.cc/wallets.html or build your own binary straight from the source which is available on our github, and then remove everything in your data directory except wallet.dat and swiftcash.conf and then make sure you add zapwallettxes=1 in swiftcash.conf before starting the new wallet. That's it! You shall be good to go! You can double check to make sure you're on the right chain by hopping on https://explorer.swiftcash.cc