There is never a shortage of drama or excitement surrounding the Verge cryptocurrency. Despite having made a lot of positive headlines over the past few weeks, Verge continues to stumble. Unfortunately, it is the second time an exploit associated with this project has been discovered. So far, over $1.7 million worth of XVG has been stolen, although the full impact remains to be determined.
Another Verge Exploit Causes Trouble
Earlier this year, it became apparent that the Verge blockchain had fallen victim to a massive exploit. At the time, hackers stole an undisclosed amount of XVG which was subsequently converted to fiat currencies through various exchanges. It is estimated that this theft involved 250,000 XVG, although that number has never been officially confirmed by the team.
While most people had assumed this would be the only exploit the Verge ecosystem would have to contend with, the reality is working out very differently. Instead, there is a new exploit which was discovered earlier this week. It seems hackers took advantage of the same weakness to steal another 35 million XVG, which is currently valued at just over $1.7 million.
Unsurprisingly, the two attacks share a few similarities. In fact, the attacks used the exact same exploit, which made the job a lot easier for the attackers. It is unclear why this exploit was not fixed the first time around, although various theories exist. Regardless, as these attacks should never be allowed to take place to begin with.
The exploit is the result of Verge network blocks being mined one second apart. This is a major problem for any cryptocurrency, especially the smaller ones such as Verge. Despite its high market capitalization, the recent hard fork wasn’t sufficient to prevent this attack from being exploited a second time. This was pointed out by a Reddit user shortly after the hard fork occurred, yet it appears few people took notice until it was too late.
it appears some mining pools are under ddos attack, and we are experiencing a delay in our blocks, we are working to resolve this.
— vergecurrency (@vergecurrency) May 22, 2018
While the Verge team has identified this issue as a “DDoS attack”, it seems a much bigger problem is lurking behind the scenes. A resolution to this problem is direly needed, and it seems another hard fork may be on the horizon. Suffering from the same issue twice in a few months’ time is unacceptable, especially for a project which is trying to take cryptocurrency mainstream by deploying an aggressive marketing campaign.
For the time being, it remains to be seen how this latest hack will affect the Verge price. If the 35 million XVG is quickly unloaded on the market, it will undoubtedly drive the project’s market cap down quite a bit. The previous incident didn’t have much of an impact in this regard, but the total number of coins stolen was a lot smaller as well.
