For a few days, Verge (XVG) was once again the star on the markets, doubling in price to levels unseen since February. But the new gains may be in peril, as the enthusiasm for XVG is still uncertain. The major factor driving the price may be the upcoming partnership reveal, but that may not work all the way up to April 16, and the market price may see downturns.
Unfortunately, just as the hype for XVG was accelerated, there were indications of an attack against the network. Users noticed blocks mined faster than the usual time, indicative of an entity taking over with bigger hashing power.
The news crashed the price of XVG by more than 23% overnight, down to $0.052. Still, those levels have not wiped out all of the gains since last week. But XVG remains extremely vulnerable to unraveling, as the fears of the mining exploit lead to selling.
Malicious Miner Can Take Over Verge
The team confirmed it was a form of mining attack exploiting a vulnerability in the Verge protocol:
But despite the claims of the team that the attack is over, the block explorer is still showing transactions with block rewards coming in every few seconds. The XVG block reward is 1,560 coins. The Verge mining protocol has a vulnerability that accepts blocks with a fake timestamp, allowing malicious miners to submit blocks that are accepted on the main blockchain.
The Verge team will be planning a hard fork to fix the issue, for now with unknown results on the ownership of XVG coins. However, it is unknown whether the blockchain would be rolled back to an earlier stage before the exploit, or the hacker would be left with all the block rewards for hours of mining, while other miners’ blocks were rejected.
At this point, the vulnerability is still present, and anyone could over-mine XVG. The biggest fear is a big selling of coins on the markets. However, it is unknown whether the malicious miner has those intentions.
This article appeared first on Cryptovest
