Monero’s privateness token rose greater than 7% regardless of its blockchain struggling an 18-block reorg that reversed round 117 transactions and triggered neighborhood considerations over the Monero ecosystem’s future.
The safety breach was dedicated by the crew behind Qubic, a layer 1 AI-focused blockchain and mining pool that amassed 51% hashrate on Monero and dedicated a six-block reorg final month.
The reorg began at block 3499659 on Sunday at 5:12 am UTC and completed at block 3499676 roughly 43 minutes later, according to sources who run Monero nodes and shared their command-line consoles on X.
Monero’s newest safety breach was additionally confirmed by cryptocurrency protocol researcher Rucknium on GitHub.
Surprisingly, the Monero (XMR) token traded comparatively flat whereas the reorg was occurring, and a bit of over eight hours later, it went on a 7.4% rally from $287.54 to $308.55, CoinGecko data exhibits. XMR managed to rise regardless of the broader market dropping round 1% on Sunday.
Crypto podcaster xenu — one of many first to report Monero’s reorg — suggested Qubic could have been attempting to implement mechanisms to “cease the bleeding” of XMR’s value.
The reorg — claimed by xenu as the most important within the community’s historical past — has prompted dialogue over how you can deal with the privacy-chain shifting ahead.
The repeated assaults spotlight how proof-of-work blockchains might be tampered with once they’re not sufficiently decentralized, hindering their use as a financial community.
“Personally, I do not contemplate the Monero community dependable at this level. I will cease accepting XMR for funds till this example is resolved,” one crypto pundit, Vini Barbosa, said on Sunday on X.
Monero could must centralize to curb Qubic’s affect
Rucknium stated it’s “extremely possible” that Monero node operators will begin briefly adopting Area Title System (DNS) checkpoints — the place nodes fetch trusted block knowledge from neighborhood DNS servers — as an answer to stopping the repeated reorgs.
Nonetheless, that comes at a cost to centralization, which some would argue has already been tarnished by Qubic’s more than 51% hash rate share.
That is what seems just like the 19 reorganization blocks in my monerod $XMR pic.twitter.com/30awmyqgCb
— Ʊɬɱʘ 🏴 a³ ɱ ᕮ 𐤊 ױ א ⛛ (@Ulmonan0) September 14, 2025
“If nobody within the Monero neighborhood takes the problem of block reorganization severely, then this Sword of Damocles will at all times grasp over Monero’s head,” Yu Xian, founding father of blockchain safety compay, SlowMist, posted to X.
Monero has thought-about options to forestall 51% assaults
Beforehand, the Monero neighborhood explored a potential overhaul of its proof-of-work consensus mechanism to make the community immune to 51% attacks.
Amongst these proposals included localizing mining hardware, switching to a merge mining algorithm, permitting XMR to be mined with Bitcoin (BTC) and different cryptocurrencies, and adopting Sprint’s ChainLocks resolution.
So far, no resolution has been successfully carried out, and Qubic nonetheless has important affect over the privacy-focused community.
Associated: Kraken pauses Monero deposits following 51% attack
Monero had a 10-block lock mechanism to guard transactions from reorgs as much as 10 blocks, however the current 18-block reorg exceeded that safeguard, Rucknium famous.
Regardless of the community breaches, XMR has held comparatively sturdy since reviews have been first manufactured from Qubic’s takeover round July 28 — falling solely 5.85%.
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