Everything you need to know about the Verge (XVG) 51% attack
Verge(XVG), ranked 21st by market cap on CoinMarketCap, succumbed to a 51% attack. This attack is sort of a feat in the cryptocurrency space.
What is Verge cryptocurrency?
Verge (XVG) is a privacy coin which claims to be an improvement on the existing Bitcoin blockchain with an aim to provide individuals and businesses with a fast, efficient and decentralized way of making payments with anonymity.
What is a 51% percent attack?
It is an attack when a miner or group of miners are able to manipulate/modify the blockchain of a cryptocurrency by controlling more than 50% of the mining hash rate. This type of an attack is very unusual due to the extreme difficulty involved in acquiring the dominant mining hash rate. Public blockchains are fully decentralized and hence the only way of approving transactions is the consensus.
When a miner is able to achieve 51% mining hash rate then the particular miner can mine all the blocks and gain access to the coins and create fraudulent transactions. Attackers can also reverse transactions that were in the confirmation process when they gained control of the network, allowing them to fraudulently spend the same coins several times, a practice known as- double spending.
What has exactly happened?
According to various press and social media sources, a miner(s) was able to achieve majority control of the mining hash rate. The miner exploited a bug in the code to duplicate timestamps and created each new block using the same algorithm. The integrity of a blockchain relies on the fact that different algorithms are required to create new blocks. The attackers taunted the Verge Project Team by writing on a Bitcointalk forum post, which read: “Hey Verge Team, get some real developers and fix your code. We have found another 2 exploits which can make quick hashes as well.”
How much damage has been done?
It is said that the miner was able to steal 2,50,000 verge coins. Some even claim the stolen amount to be 3.9 million coins. The “Send Us ETH” army wasn’t far behind from exploiting the situation. They started posting on the official forums about a fraud compensation plan for the victims, which involved their usual modus operand of “send us some ETH and get bonuses”.
How did the Verge Project Team respond to this situation?
The response came from Verge team was as: “We pushed a quick fix and most pools have already updated.. we’re already working on a whole new block verification process. We’re kinda glad this happened and that it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.”
Actually, they accidentally initiated a hard fork to ‘resolve’ this issue!
How did the Verge prices get affected?
At the time of writing, the prices of Verge are down by 23.5%. The prices had doubled earlier this week due to the anticipation of a big announcement on April 16.
