PANews reported on June 16 that according to The Block, Interchain Labs has confirmed that an individual who was later identified as being associated with North Korea contributed to the Cosmos code base while employed by the former maintainer between 2022 and 2024. The individual had limited access to the cosmos/IAVL and cosmos/cosmos-sdk code bases, and most of his contributed codes have been abandoned or excluded from the roadmap, and independent audits have found no risk vulnerabilities.

To support transparency, ICL will double the bounty for one month on the Cosmos HackerOne page for discovering vulnerabilities related to the participant's GitHub account. After ICL took over the development of the core stack, it implemented new security protocols, preventing further contributions, and the person was rejected for further positions. ICL has upgraded the security of all Cosmos core code bases and will deprecate related code bases in the future. This incident highlights the need for strict security procedures in the Web3 and broader technology fields.