Vertcoin Cryptocurrency has faced Another 51-percent Attack

Ehteram N. December 1, 2019 - Last Updated: February 20, 2020

1 minute read

Vertcoin cryptocurrency has faced another 51-percent attack. This is the second 51% attacked faced by Vertcoin this year.

This incident occurred on Sunday, 1st Dec and 603 blocks were removed and replaced with 553 attacker blocks on Vertcoin’s main blockchain.

There were almost five double-spend transactions caused by blockchain reorganization and an amount of 125 VTC worth $29 was sent to the wallet address of the hacker. While explaining the incident, Vertcoin project’s lead maintainer, James Lovejoy stated:

Each of the double-spent outputs are coinbase outputs owned by the attacker and it is unknown to whom the coins were originally sent before being swept to an attacker address after the reorg.

James Lovejoy further said that the hacker almost used 0.5 BTC to perform this hacking activity and the total amount spent during this attack was 0.44 BTC. It means that this attack was not much profitable.

This attack had been seen coming by the Vertcoin team. Vertcoin lead maintainer elaborated that after the first attack, Vertcoin switched its proof of work algorithm to another mining algorithm known as Lyra2REv3.

According to James Lovejoy:

On Nov 30th 2019, a Vertcoin miner noticed a large upswing in hashrate rental prices for Lyra2REv3 on Nicehash. This was combined with workers connected to Nicehash’s stratum server being sent work for unknown (non-public) Vertcoin blocks. I contacted Bittrex, Vertcoin’s most prominent exchange, to recommend they disable the Vertcoin wallet on their platform once it became clear an attack was in progress, which they subsequently did.

This is not the first time that the Vertcoin cryptocurrency has faced such an attack. The crypto asset has already been suffering from 51% attack by hackers this year. Almost a year ago, Vertcoin got the first 51% attack in Dec 2018 and it caused several reorgs to cost users over around $100,000.

Though the crypto asset has been attacked twice in a single year, but the reason behind this is still not released.