Despite the ongoing threats to Monero’s network security, XMR surged 7% on Sunday.
Despite ongoing concerns about network security following last month’s 51% attack by Qubic, XMR has made a strong recovery, surging to over $300 for the first time since 2021.
The price rise comes even as Qubic continues to demonstrate Monero’s vulnerability, reversing as many as 118 transactions in the blockchain’s longest ever block reorganization.
A Monero block reorganization, usually referred to as a reorg, occurs when two miners find valid blocks at roughly the same time.
When this happens, both versions of the ledger get propagated, and the network is temporarily split until one version of the chain accumulates more work. This invalidates the other fork, whose transactions are discarded and resubmitted to the mempool.
While one or two-block reorgs are fairly common, researchers are concerned that the record 18-block reorg that occurred on Sep. 14 was the result of Qubic’s large share of Monero’s hashrate.
Qubic is a Monero mining pool that lets individual miners who contribute computing power share in the whole pool’s rewards.
On August 12, Qubic publicly stated that it had crossed 51% of Monero’s hashrate, accumulating more mining power than the rest of the network combined.
With their smaller total hashrate compared to larger blockjchain networks like Bitcoin, privacy coins are especially susceptible to such attacks. For example, in September 2023, a mining pool operated by ViaBTC gained over half the hash power of ZCash.
These events significantly undermined confidence in network security. With more than half of a blockchain’s hashrate, a majority miner could double-spend coins, or censor transactions by choosing not to include certain transactions in blocks.
Qubic’s team have repeatedly described their maneuver more as a stress test or “experiment” rather than a full-blown hostile attack. They suggest the move was intended to force the Monero community to consider the real threat of a 51% attack and prepare defenses.
While there is no evidence that Qubic has repeated another 51% takeover, blockchain security experts have blamed the recent block reorg on the pool’s continued control of a significant portion of Monero’s hash rate.
On a Github discussion thread where Monero developers have been discussing how to resolve the threat posed by Qubic’s 51% attack, a blockchain researcher with the handle Rucknium confirmed that the reorg invalidated 118 transactions.
