July 5, 2020 | AtoZ Markets – Rogue actors have reportedly exploited a blockchain vulnerability on the Ravencoin (RVN) network to print 315 million additional RVN tokens worth about $5.7M.
Ravencoin hackers minted about 1.5% of the total supply
The Ravecoin network announced the news of the attack via a Medium blog post on Thursday, July 2, 2020. According to the post, the CryptoScope team alerted Ravencoin to the incident. Both teams worked together not to release particulars of the vulnerability to prevent copycat attacks.
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Rogue actors were able to carry out the action as a result of a vulnerability in the Ravencoin protocol. As per the official report, the hackers minted about 1.5% of the total supply cap of 21 billion. This amounts to about 315 million “coins.”
A statement from the publication reads:
“The vulnerability does not allow the stealing of RVN or assets that you own and control, but the minting did create RVN that should not exist. We’ve discussed the impact of the extra RVN and what can be done. Because those RVN were transferred to an exchange and traded, they are mixed with other RVN and therefore any programmatic attempt at burning them, with miner and community backing, would cause irreparable harm to innocent victims.”
How will Ravencoin deal with the inflation bug?
The Ravencoin team proposed two solutions to the community. The first option was that since the hackers already minted 315 million extra coins, there will be 44 extra days of mining. Another option was to allow the original 21 billion coins to coexist with the new coins with halving occurring 44 days earlier.
As a result, the team has asked crypto exchanges and miners to upgrade to the newest Ravencoin version. Also, the network is also collaborating with law enforcement agencies.
Ravencoin has now joined the list of blockchain networks to suffer inflation bugs. In response to the Ravencoin incident, Casa co-founder, Jameson Lopp listed some altcoin networks that have suffered similar incidents. They include Stellar, Bitcoin Private, Verge, and Bytecoin. Lopp further said:
“Being open source is not a panacea for a project’s security. It must have a sufficiently large set of skilled active developers.”
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