Privacy-focused Cryptocurrency Monero Suffers a 51% Attack, Qubic States the Incident Was a Technical Demonstration and Not a Malicious Attack

BlockBeats News, August 12th, IOTA co-founder Sergey Ivancheglo's project Qubic rapidly accumulated a large amount of Monero mining power through the "useful Proof of Work (uPoW)" mechanism, soaring from less than 2% to over 27%, briefly becoming the largest Monero mining pool. It openly stated its goal to reach over 51% to test network security.

On August 12th, Qubic briefly controlled 52.72% of Monero network's hash rate (about 3.01 GH/s). Once surpassing 51%, Qubic can reject blocks from other pools, leading to chain reorganization, double-spending, or transaction censorship.

The Monero community has launched resistance and defense actions. Qubic stated that this was a technical demonstration and not a malicious attack. Ledger CTO posted that Monero seems to be facing a successful 51% attack. The Qubic mining pool has been steadily accumulating mining power for months and now controls most of the network's mining power. A significant chain reorganization was observed this morning. With its current mining power, Qubic can rewrite the blockchain, execute double-spends, and censor any transactions.