Project Closure Announcement

To our community, followers and supporters,

This is one of the hardest messages we’ve ever had to write. After a lot of thought and discussion, we’ve made the painful decision to bring our project to a close. We owe it to our community to be open and honest about why we’ve reached this point.

When we, the community, took over this project after the original founders abandoned it in 2019, we had one clear goal: to build a private stablecoin that anyone, anywhere, could use to transact and communicate securely and privately. This goal came close to being realised, but we were faced with growing challenges that in the end we couldn’t overcome, despite giving it everything we had.

The most devastating blow came recently when our developers discovered a major exploit. Since the start of the Prüfung, this vulnerability allowed a potential 1.3 billion illicit XHV to be minted through at least 42 transactions that our developers found. This estimated figure doesn’t include the amount of XHV that could have been minted between August 2023 and the start of the Audit. The unknown amount, or part of it, would likely be audited if we continued, thereby inflating the supply even further. Over 94% of the known supply is now controlled by the attackers. Continuing the project under these conditions would only risk more losses while rewarding malicious actors. That’s not something the current team would want to be part of and allow it to happen.

The lack of resources has been an ongoing issue. Over the past two years, our small team worked tirelessly, mostly without compensation. We did it because we were driven and motivated by our community and the project’s vision. But the truth is, this level of dedication can only go so far without the funding and support needed to grow, develop, and secure the project in the long term.

After exploring every possible option, we, the Haven Oversight Committee and developers, concluded there’s no realistic way forward. Rolling back the chain to a pre-Audit period would have been one possible solution, however, we would have had to mint hundreds of millions of XHV to make exchanges whole. Even then, this wouldn’t have guaranteed a positive outcome, because the exploit has been active since August 2023 and an unknown amount of XHV could lie hidden, waiting to be audited even after a roll back. The privacy-centric nature of our protocol prevents us from identifying and locking the wallets or outputs containing any illicit coins.

This decision is heart-breaking, especially knowing how much this project has meant to all of us. The community’s belief and encouragement kept us going all this time and we can’t thank you enough for sticking with us through everything.

We firmly believe in the vision of privacy and decentralised finance. While Haven may not have achieved the ultimate goal, we hope it has laid the groundwork to build on what we started.

From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for being part of this journey.

Haven team
12 Dec 2024