Six months of activity missing from a blockchain! But how is it possible that such a thing happens? Yet it happened, and it happened in Verge, although these days the developers claim that it is a damage that can be fixed.
Verge's privacy-focused blockchain (XVG) has faced a major block reorganization, replacing transactions dating back to July 2020.
Despite potentially being billed as "the largest reorganization that has ever taken place into one of the top 100 cryptocurrencies in the world," analysts have yet to confirm whether the incident was caused by a coordinated attack.
Coinmetrics chief operating officer Antoine Le Calvez was one of the first to notice the reorg, sharing a screenshot on Twitter showing that at least 560.000 blocks disappeared on February 15.
Le Calvez suggested that the reorg may have been caused by a double spend, in which a number of XVG tokens are used simultaneously for two separate transactions. However, due to the extent of the incident, Calvez admitted that it will take some time for the developers to examine the data to establish the exact source of the reorg.
What happened to the tokens held by users?
As a result of this rollback, any user who received or purchased XVG tokens as of July 2020 may have lost their entire balance, with Deribit Insights researcher "Hasu" tweeting that "thousands of balances are simply evaporated ". A Verge investor tweeted that his wallet balance is now empty after the attack.
Despite the scale of the potential attack, Hasu believes it will be "fairly easy to remedy this situation", arguing that "the nodes will reject the attacker's chain and restore the previous one" (or so hopefully). Hasu said that the incident highlights the vulnerability of blockchains supported by GPU mining.
Is this the first time something like this has happened?
This isn't the first time a reorg has been suggested to fend off potential attackers, with Hasu referencing 2019 when Vertcoin caved in to a 51% attack. That same year, after the Binance exchange was hacked for over $ 40 million, Changpeng Zhao, the company's founder and CEO, pitched the idea of conducting a Bitcoin reorg to recover the funds, however, the idea came. quickly put aside.
An (unconfirmed) screenshot shared by Twitter user Crypto_Michael showed XVG consultant AlexanDre claiming that the source is linked to some nodes that wanted to fork. He also added that there was no 51% attack.
Over the past six hours, XVG has dropped nearly 15% of its value and here you can see its quotation in real time. This led it to come out of the top 100. A really unfortunate fact, especially for users who have seen months of transactions evaporate. Have you suffered losses? Let us know in the comments!
