Ravencoin spent days trusting blocks nobody mined
Ravencoin has been accepting blocks that were never really earned. The first one landed at height 4,487,776 on August 7 at 15:44 UTC. It sat there, treated by vulnerable nodes as if the proof-of-work behind it had been done, and for close to three days nobody raised the alarm.
Public disclosure came on August 10. By then the tainted chain had kept extending, and every transaction confirmed after block 4,487,775 was suddenly in doubt. The network notice was blunt about it: treat anything after that block as at risk of vanishing.
| Date (UTC) | What happened | Block |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 7, 15:44 | First invalid block accepted by nodes | 4,487,776 |
| Aug 10 | Consensus flaw disclosed publicly | chain still extending |
| Aug 11 | Exchanges halt RVN; pools mine a clean chain | rebuild from 4,487,775 |
Two mining pools are rewriting the chain, and the developers are watching
This is the part that separates the story from an ordinary bug report. The rescue is coming from 2Miners and RavenMiner rather than from Ravencoin's own developers. Those two pools run most of the network's hash power between them, and they began mining a competing chain that drops the exploited branch and rebuilds from block 4,487,775.
The project did try to shape the recovery. It asked the pools to restart from a more recent point, which would have put fewer user transactions at risk. They said no. "That request was declined," the developer wrote, and the pools carried on with their own rollback depth. On a proof-of-work chain the hash power decides which history counts, the same lever miners held during the BIP 110 signaling fight on Bitcoin. Right now that lever is not in the hands of the people who write the code.
Ravencoin's upstream work had gone quiet, with no patched client ready when the exploit surfaced. The emergency build that does exist was published from a mining pool's repository, not the core project.
RVN hit a record low as exchanges pulled the plug
The token fell roughly 17% in a day to about $0.0029, dragging its market value down near $48 million on close to $10 million of volume. Across the past year it is off about 77%. Upbit slapped an investment warning on RVN and stopped deposits. Amsterdam-based Bitvavo suspended deposits and withdrawals outright.
None of this is new territory for Ravencoin. Back in 2020 a different flaw let an attacker mint fresh RVN out of thin air, far beyond what the protocol was meant to allow. By at least one accounting this is the third time the chain has broken consensus since it launched in 2018. The industry has watched teams sprint to undo damage before, from the 72-hour Resolv recovery to a recent hack where the Coinsbuy refund stalled at half the stolen $8 million.
What comes next rests entirely with the pools. If their clean chain overtakes the exploited one, close to four days of Ravencoin history gets erased, and anyone who was paid in RVN during that window may find the coins simply gone. Exchanges will keep RVN frozen until the two chains resolve into one, and holders are left waiting to learn which version of the ledger the miners choose to keep.
