In a controlled environment, L1 protocol Qubic has successfully reached over 51% hashrate to dominate Monero, the privacy-focused cryptocurrency known for its ASIC-resistant RandomX algorithm.
Led by Qubic founder Come-from-Beyond (CFB), the demo harnessed Qubic’s Useful Proof of Work (uPoW) framework to exceed Monero’s global hash rate, signaling the arrival of a new era in verifiable decentralized compute.
Come-from-Beyond (@c___f___b)
Question: Why do you think $XMR price won’t decline after 51% attack?
Answer: Because #Monero is unique, those valuing anonymity have no alternative to migrate to.
The demo was performed live and is being independently verified, with performance metrics showing Qubic’s compute outpacing Monero’s average network hash rate over a sustained window.
This time, the approach was “Selfish Mining,” a tactic that allows a mining pool with significant hashrate, as low as 33-40%, to gain a disproportionate share of the block rewards.
Instead of engaging in a direct hashrate war, Qubic withheld newly found blocks from the public. When the rest of the network was still trying to solve the previous block, Qubic was already working on the next one. By revealing their chain of withheld blocks at strategic moments, they would orphan the blocks found by other miners, essentially making their work worthless.
After several hours of this new strategy, orphaned blocks began to appear on the Monero network. An orphaned block is a valid block that is not part of the main, longest chain. When a miner solves a block and broadcasts it, other miners accept it and begin working on the next block. If a different miner solves a block at nearly the same time, two competing chains can form. The network ultimately accepts the longer chain, and any blocks on the shorter chain become “orphaned.”
Qubic’s approach turns AI compute tasks into globally distributed workloads that are rewarded and validated via a novel consensus mechanism based on usefulness, rather than arbitrary cryptographic puzzles.
This historic event is a profound wake-up call for the entire crypto industry, fundamentally challenging long-held assumptions about blockchain security.
The successful takeover demonstration by a smaller, $300 million market cap protocol over a $6 billion privacy giant proves that market size alone does not guarantee security. People should care because this wasn’t a malicious attack but a strategic validation of the theory that economic incentives, not just technical prowess, are the ultimate arbiter of power in any Proof of Work system.
The experiment provides a new blueprint for how protocols can interact, showing that compute power can be repurposed for useful tasks, and it forces the entire industry to re-evaluate what truly secures a decentralized network in a competitive landscape driven by profitability.
Chart of Monero network reorganization after Selfish Mining:
