51% Attack

Monero (XMR) faces the risk of a majority attack shortly. Despite being a reputable alternative to altcoins for incognito transactions, the privacy coin could soon compromise its integrity. In light of recent efforts to kick out ASIC miners, new metrics continue to expose the susceptibility of Monero’s blockchain to a 51% takeover. A majority attack means a user (or a group of users) has pooled resources to usurp a blockchain by possessing more than 50% of its computing power.  Miners…

The privacy blockchain Verge (XVG) suffered a 51% attack in the late hours of Monday, February 15. The attack affected more than 560,000 blocks containing XVG transactions and led to a massive drop in the price of XVG.  Verge Suffers 51% Attack. Antoine Le Calvez, operations manager of analytical firm CoinMetrics, was the first to report the attack. Calvez noticed Verge's blockchain reorganization, often identified as a sign of a 51% attack. He explained that the CoinMetrics node had diverged from…

Firo, the privacy-backed crypto formerly known as Zcoin, is under a 51% attack. On 20 January, it announced the attack on its protocol on Twitter while stating the nature of the error. Firo pleaded with owners to hold off any transactions while the firm addressed the issue. A single miner took advantage of the attack and reorganized blocks on the network. Changpeng Zhao, Binance’s CEO, stated that the block rearrangement resulted in a rollback of over 300 blocks. Firo’s team…

The anonymous cryptocurrency, Grin (GRIN), is currently under a 51% attack. This was confirmed yesterday by Grin’s second mining pool, 2Miners, which issued an alert on Twitter. It is believed that a group of unknown miners now control 57% of the payment network hashrate. A chart from Grinscan data also shows that the share of hashrate controlled by this unknown entity has since increased to 57.4%. [caption id="attachment_20013" align="aligncenter" width="807"] Source: 2miners via Twitter[/caption] As a reminder, 51% of attacks…

This saying keeps repeatedly circling according to the strength of a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin in its network. The greater the number of individual contributors and supporters of the network, the higher its resiliency towards external threats. In the blockchain, there is a direct correlation between the number of participants and network security. There is strength in decentralization. The reason for the interdependence between participants and security, at least for Proof-of-Work coins like Bitcoin, is the amount of work put in.…