Charles Hoskinson Praises Cardano’s Network Design Amid ‘Poisoned’ Transaction Attack

Charles Hoskinson was all praise for the quick recovery of the Cardano network after a recent attack caused a temporary split in the blockchain. The situation was rapidly contained by engineers on the project.

Charles Hoskinson Comments on Cardano Network Attack

Charles Hoskinson said that this quick reaction of the network has proven how strong it is. He mentioned that in less than a day, the engineers were able to stop and trace the attacker. In addition, Hoskinson noted it was not an attack performed randomly. According to him, the person had been planning it for months.

Cardano works so fast that we forked, fixed, and caught the guy all in one day. He was quite active in the Fake Fred discord. It was absolutely personal and now he's trying to walk it back because he knows the FBI is already involved https://t.co/MNK6d7bEWv

— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) November 21, 2025

The attacker targeted Hoskinson’s personal stake pool, which basically caused problems across the network. This incident was temporary, and it impacted all users. Validators, for example, could not receive block rewards.

This, according to Hoskinson, will take a number of weeks to repair. He also added that a criminal investigation by the FBI has already started on the matter.

An incident report from Intersect said the attack occurred on November 21, 2025. Explaining it further, the report mentioned that this was due to a bug that involved a software library. The transaction took advantage of this bug. This allowed it to skip validation, thus leading the nodes to diverge in the first place. This made the Cardano mainnet split into two separate chains.

The incident occurred within a day of a similar event on the Preview testnet. This led to a swift action by the engineering teams at Input Output, the Cardano Foundation, and Intersect. Developers worked in a special war room to create and deploy a fix within hours.

Investigations Begin as Attacker Issues Apology

At the same time, Intersect confirmed that they had located the wallet tied to the questionable transaction. Since this incident may be an example of a cyber attack on a digital network, it has essentially become a criminal case. Authorities will most likely investigate the case further.

After the report was filed, the wallet’s owner apologized publicly. On X, he said his actions were not to make money. He said that he did not short ADA nor did he work with anyone else. Hoskinson shared that the event happened because of carelessness. He also stated that he accepts any consequences that follow.

Sorry (I know the word isn't enough given the impact of my actions) Cardano folks, it was me who endangered the network with my careless action yesterday evening. It started off as a "let's see if I can reproduce the bad transaction" personal challenge and then I was dumb enough

— Homer J (AAA) (@KpunToN00b) November 21, 2025

Intersect said that no user funds were lost. Since most of the retail wallets used parts of nodes that were not affected, most were safe.

This comes at a time when the network is preparing to launch the native token of Midnight. Charles Hoskinson also recently announced that NIGHT will go live on December 8, 2025. He made this announcement during his keynote speech at The Midnight Summit.