Zano's one-day rollback grew into a month-long rewind to before Hard Fork 6

The first plan unwound about a day ^[1]. The restart went to block 3,833,000, immediately before Hard Fork 6 ^[9], the height at which Gateway Addresses switched on ^[3]. From the August 26 fork to the September 25 announcement is 30 days, so the cut widened roughly thirtyfold from one statement to the next ^[1]. Neither report explains why. Two readings fit: the unauthorized minting started well before the final day, or the team stopped trusting any state produced under the new rules. Going back to the fork height itself, the one block known to predate every Gateway Address, suggests the team could not place the start of the minting any later.

The feature was built so bridges, exchanges and payment services could integrate more easily ^[4]. An ordinary Zano address shows no readable balance, and a service has to scan the chain and rebuild holdings from private outputs ^[5]. A Gateway Address instead carries an account-style public balance that an integrator can query directly ^[6]. Zano says the flaw in public Gateway Addresses affected asset issuance, including fUSD ^[7]. It has not released a post-mortem or said how much extra supply was created ^[10][11], and outside speculation that transactions mixing gateway and confidential outputs were the path is unconfirmed, Crowdfund Insider reported ^[12].

So Zano is giving up the whole live history of its integration feature, plus a month of everyone else's transactions ^[15], and is not patching forward with an unknown quantity of extra ZANO and fUSD still circulating ^[11]. On a chain that pays a fixed 1 ZANO a minute and burns every fee ^[13], the discarded window held about 43,200 ZANO of scheduled block rewards, 1,440 a day for 30 days ^[2]. Those rewards go with the blocks that paid them ^[2].

"Doing nothing meant unauthorized ZANO and fUSD in circulation without limit, diluting every holder and breaking the most basic promise a currency makes: a fixed supply," said Quinten van Welzen, Zano's head of marketing and growth ^[20]. "Restarting the chain from before Hard Fork 6 costs a month of history, and it costs trust, which we'll have to earn back," he said ^[22].

The sell-off came on the one-day plan ^[14][1], before anyone knew the cut would be a month. That was a price moving on a supply scare. The value of a ZANO now depends on whether the reset supply holds and on who absorbs the lost month, and the team says it will publish a reimbursement and claims process to settle the second question ^[17].

With fast adoption and a claims process that covers payments settled on other chains, holders get the fixed supply back for the cost of a month's reconciliation. Slow adoption leaves the network frozen until the majority needed to activate the upgrade is assembled ^[19]. The harder case is a claims process that leaves out payments already settled on other chains ^[16], which would put the cost of the feature's failure on the integrators it was built for ^[4]. I think that third case is where lasting damage to Zano's exchange relationships would come from, because claims are the only remedy for money the rollback cannot reach ^[16][17]. The view that Zano could not bound the damage more tightly is wrong if the post-mortem shows the minting began inside the final day.