TL;DR Breakdown
- Verge network suffered a massive block reorg attack late Monday.
- The incident resulted in the loss of 200 days of transaction history on the network.
For the first time in 2021, a cryptocurrency has suffered a massive block reorg (or blockchain reorganization) attack. This starts with Verge (XVG), a decentralized open-source digital currency that offers private transactions. The cryptocurrency reportedly suffered a massive block reorg attack that wiped off lots of transaction history. The development team has acknowledged the attack and has launched a fix to address the incident.
Verge suffers a massive block reorg
As reported, the cryptocurrency network suffered a 560,000-block reorg late Monday. A blockchain reorganization attack usually happens when miners (with more hashing power) collaborate to remove previously confirmed blocks from the blockchain. The incident has resulted in the loss of 200 days transaction record on the Verge network, according to the report by a Coin Metrics researcher. This is the biggest block reorg attack ever witnessed with a top 100 digital currency.
However, the Verge team assured that the network would return to normalcy after releasing a fix in collaboration with miners.
The privacy-focused cryptocurrency is among the few digital currencies supported on Pornhub as a payment option. At the time of writing, Verge was trading at $0.02364 on Coinmarketcap, with a 3.95 percent price change over the past 24 hours and a market capitalization of $388.3 million. It seems the price of the cryptocurrency wasn’t affected heavily by the incident.
Blockchain reorg attacks
Verge isn’t the only popular cryptocurrency that has suffered a blockchain reorg attack. Ethereum Classic (ETC) underwent a similar situation last year. Precisely in August, a miner was able to inject about 3,000 blocks into the ETC blockchain at block number 10,904,146, which caused the network to become unstable, as Cryptopolitan reported.
It was believed that the attack possessed 51 percent of the hashing power, or other miners were offline, or they were mining ETC with a higher difficulty.
