The distributed ledger blockchain platform Nuls announced Sunday in a tweet that thieves have stolen about $480,000 worth of NULS tokens in a hack.

The platform’s operators detected 2 million NULS transferred and 548,354 tokens, worth approximately $132,000, have already been posted to trading markets and traded away.

In order to combat the theft, the platform announced that it will be executing a “hard fork” — which is a direct code modification of the blockchain itself to change how it operates — that will destroy the remaining tokens, making them untradable.

“After the hard fork, the remaining 1451645.65303905 NULS that has not entered the trading market will be destroyed in a permanent freeze to prevent continued flow into the market,” read a statement on the Nuls Twitter account.

The permanent freeze of those tokens will prevent further losses to the community and make certain the thieves cannot profit from the theft. As for the tokens already sold and traded, new owners – potentially unaware they were stolen – will retain access.

Hard forks to blockchain systems are a controversial method of dealing with thefts. Blockchain technology acts as an indelible historical record of transactions, which is often focused on as a proof of trust in the system itself, these sorts of structural changes show that blockchain data is not completely unalterable.

The most famous case of a hard fork used to deal with theft is the Ethereum blockchain Decentralized Autonomous Organization hack. During that theft, hackers stole approximately $55.4 million worth of Ethereum currency. In response, the core developer team of Ethereum created a hard fork that restored the stolen currency and split Ethereum between the current most-used chain and what is now known as Ethereum Classic.

The Nuls developer team said the attack happened because of a security vulnerability in NULS version 2.2, which has been fixed. To protect against this vulnerability, and follow the hard fork, node operators and wallet owners will need to upgrade their software to the next version of NULS or lose access to their currency.

Since the announcement of the hard fork on Dec. 22, NULS has dropped from $0.249 a token to $0.235 a token. The stolen tokens only represent around 2% of all tradable NULS.

Nuls is an open-source enterprise-grade public blockchain platform designed on a modular architecture founded in 2017 by the Singapore-based company NULS Foundation Pte. Ltd. Its vision is to provide a public blockchain that can be customized to also run private blockchains to meet different industrial goals.

Image: Nuls Foundation