Two weeks ago, after three software audits and three months of live testing, a cryptocurrency startup called MonoX introduced what it described as “the premier bootstrap decentralized exchange, Monoswap”.

In an announcement on 23 November 2021, the company declared:

MonoX will revolutionize the DeFi ecosystem by fixing the capital inefficiencies of current protocol models. With lower trading fees, capital efficiency, and zero-capital token launching — MonoX will expand the capabilities of DeFi.

DeFi, as you probably know, is an acronym for (or, for the linguistically strict amongst us, an ellipsis of) the term decentralised finance, and is typically used to refer to electronic trading that doesn’t rely on any individual company or government department for record keeping.

By using distributed ledgers known as a blockchains, a sort of community-operated bookkeeping venture where transactions are agreed and recorded by consensus, cryptocurrencies and digital contracts don’t need to be managed by a single authority such as a central bank or a payment card company.

Blockchain technology therefore brings lots of opportunity, as you are no doubt aware from the number of Why Not Inve$t In Our Brand New Cryptocoin Deal$ Right Now emails that are getting caught up in your spam filter these days.

And plenty of risk, too, as MonoX discovered almost as soon as it went live last month,

Despite the audits and the testing, MonoX seems to have made an interesting blunder in how it handled balance changes during transactions.

This has apparently already cost the startup a massive $31,000,000 in lost funds, thanks to an automated series of rogue transactions that the company failed to think of, and therefore didn’t program against.