Is Verge on the Verge of Collapse After getting Hacked & Losing 35M XVG Coins

Yesterday Verge got hit with a 51% attack again that resulted in the mining of about 35 million XVG coins within 2 hours. In the last 24-hours Verge price have fallen about 14%.

XVG price takes a hit as Verge gets hacked

The privacy coin, Verge (XVG) has suffered yet another attack that is affecting the credibility of the cryptocurrency. Last month, a mystery hacker dominated the network and minted Verge coins while preventing other users from making any payments.

Now, once again, the Verge network is attacked that is revealed to be a DDOS attack:

“it appears some mining pools are under DDoS attack, and we are experiencing a delay in our blocks, we are working to resolve this”.

In the aftermath of this attack, XVG price fell down to $0.045. Currently, at 31 positions as per Coinmarketcap, Verge’s market cap is $685 million. XVG suffered a great fall in its prices in the last 24-hours.

Reportedly, the attacker has used a modified version of the vector which was used last month to trick the blockchain. The hacker used two algorithms to fork the main Verge chain earning million of XVG tokens and block rewards in the process.

Scrypt and lyra2re algorithms were set to the same extremely small amount of difficulty level. The hacker used them interchangeably and was able to manufacture 25 blocks per minute meaning 18.250 XVG or $950 per minute.

The 51 percent attack happened for the second time yesterday where the attacker was able to allocate false timestamps on Verge blocks. This resulted in the minting of 35 million XVG coins ahead of schedule on an extremely low difficulty.

A Reddit user stated:

“It seems the attack is over, 35.000.000 XVG were generated in a few hours. But this also means there is still no fix, and this is possible at any time again. Meanwhile, the only official info out there is ‘mining pools are DDoS’d’.”

Also, read: VeChain (VEN) Making News with New Listing & Advanced Developments

51% Attack again, is Verge secure?

The usual timestamp of verge network to accept the blocks is up to 2 hours away from the latest block time. During the attack, the hacker submitted blocks with a fake timestamp which was older by one hour. Due to the reason that mining adjustment algorithm takes into account only the recent blocks, the difficulty level fell down to extremely low levels i.e. to about 99.99%. This enabled the hacker to mine 35 millions of XVG coins within 2 hours.

Charlie Lee, the creator of Litecoin also took to Twitter to comment on the attack with:

Verge mining is being exploited again. Someone has 51% attacked and taken over the Verge network again. PornHub transactions are being reversed! ?

Using 5 mining algorithms actually made it much worse. This is a great blog explaining what’s happening: https://t.co/euf76UdDHN

— Charlie Lee [LTC⚡] (@SatoshiLite) May 22, 2018

But Verge community didn’t like this and reacted.

For now, the attack has been stopped and XVG difficulty has been recovered. Moreover, no complaints of transactions rolling back have been reported. Mining bounty was actually the target here that are worth approximately $1.6 million as per market rate.

As of yesterday, there hasn’t been any preventive measure in place. However, an update has been shared with this tweet by AkashiroNL‏, who is XVG core tech support.

Small update about the 51% attack today. Developer is working on a patch. But something more awsome to look forward to is we will have a complete new codebase soon!!#xvg #verge @Xvghodlgroup #Vergecurrency #wow pic.twitter.com/grEIiv1o1M

— AkashiroNL (@Akashiro_NL) May 22, 2018

Now, the question is, Is Verge really secure? Some think the multi-algorithm mining application might be the issue. The fact that a 51 percent attack could be initiated is the cause of worry that needs to be handled.

What do you think of this 51% attack? Share your thoughts with us!