The Verge (XVG) digital asset managed to survive with just a 20% price lost, down to around $0.055, after users noticed hours of rogue mining activity. The initial panic made the price slide by more than 20%, but since then, the asset stabilized.
Meanwhile, the Verge team switched to damage control mode, and now plans to make the network proof against attacks. An easy potential to perform a 51% attack, or take control of most of the hashing power, is seen as quite damaging of a coin’s trustworthiness. Given that Verge wants to position its digital asset for mass adoption, it now faces the challenge of proving its transactions are indeed tamper-proof.
But the real nature of the incident would be discussed tomorrow, when the team estimates the coins taken away by rogue mining.
The positive news mixed in may increase confidence in the project.
“What has happened ? Someone has found an exploit within the network and code of verge to allow them to process blocks extremely fast and get the rewards from them. Roughly 1560 verge per second,” explained one of the developers.
The reports on the mining incident vary between three and 13 hours of dubious activity. Blocks were produced up to once every second, for potential rewards of more than 5 million XVG coins an hour. However, it is uncertain how many block rewards the miner transferred, whether they would be kept in the event of a hard fork, or whether the hacker would manage to sell them at current prices.
The team considers a hard fork to fix the vulnerability, but it is unknown whether the mining would be rolled back, resulting in the creation of a few million XVG coins faster than the schedule. With a supply of 14.8 billion XVG coins, such an increase is a small fraction of total supply.
Coin balances are not affected, and neither is trading, where transfers are happening inside the exchange, and not on the blockchain.
This article appeared first on Cryptovest
