Ravencoin under attack: critical consensus vulnerability triggers 19% RVN crash
The Ravencoin ecosystem is undergoing one of the most severe stress tests in its history. I have discovered that a critical error has emerged in the consensus protocol, causing a number of nodes to begin accepting invalid blocks. The first such block was recorded on August 7 at 15:44:01 UTC at height 4,487,776, indicating a targeted but systemic failure in the validation mechanism.
Chain conflict and miners' stance
Key pools — 2Miners and RavenMiner — have decided to continue mining an alternative branch starting from block 4,487,775, ignoring the chain where the vulnerability was exploited. This creates a real threat of a deep network reorganization lasting up to three days. Project developers urged the pools to choose a later recovery point to minimize damage to users and exchange infrastructure, but were refused. According to my data, these two pools control about 85% of the ~62% identified hashrate, giving them more than half of the network's total computational power — their position effectively determines the outcome of the conflict.
Risks for exchanges and RVN holders
Under the current circumstances, the Ravencoin team strongly recommended that exchanges suspend token deposits and withdrawals until the network stabilizes. I consider transactions confirmed after block 4,487,775 to be extremely risky: some of them may be rolled back to the mempool and re-included in the chain, but without any guarantees. Exchanges were separately advised not to rely on automatic restoration of canceled deposits and withdrawals. Already, Bitvavo has halted RVN operations, and South Korea's Upbit has stopped accepting deposits, adding warnings for trading pairs with the won, bitcoin, and USDT.
The market reaction was swift: over the past 24 hours, RVN has plunged 19.5% to approximately $0.0029. Market capitalization has shrunk to $47.2 million. Since the start of the year, the asset has lost about 58%, and 99% from its all-time high. This underscores the fragility of low-liquidity projects during consensus crises.
Historical context and conclusions
This is not the first such incident for Ravencoin: in 2020, the network already faced a bug that allowed attackers to mint about 21 million RVN beyond legitimate block rewards. Notably, in April, a similar deep reorganization occurred on the Litecoin network due to a zero-day exploit. These cases demonstrate the systemic vulnerability of PoW networks in the face of code errors and coordinated actions by large pools.
The Ravencoin team emphasizes that publishing details is a step toward transparency and risk assessment, not support for a specific rollback scenario. However, in my view, the current situation calls into question trust in the network: if pools continue to insist on their version of the chain, it could lead to irreversible losses for users and intensify regulatory pressure on the entire sector. Investors should exercise maximum caution until the conflict is fully resolved.