SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – A bug went rampant on the Verge (XVG) system which allowed the tampering of block mining timestamps, according to a Verge developer by the name of Sunerok. This bug opened the doors for illegitimate currency to appear out of thin air.
Verge (XVG), the cryptocurrency focused on user anonymity and privatized transactions, saw its value plummet a whopping 25 percent on the 4th of April. This decline was brought on by an apparent hack that was made public, though developers were able to initiate an accidental hard fork as a solution.
Suprnova’s OCminer told Bitcointalk about the >51 percent attack that’s happening on Verge that exploits said bug into re-marking in the Verge code.
The numerous bugs found on the Verge code allowed one to exploit the feature by harvesting blocks with a tampered timestamp. When the said miner submits the mined block, he or she can alter the timestamp to an hour ago. This will result in the incorrect XVG code to actually think that the last block mined with the algorithm happened an hour ago.
This issue with the Verge coding only contributes to the increasingly negative reputation of Verge as it was only a few weeks ago when they had to endure their Twitter becoming hacked. Though it was reported that funds were not at risk, it was still a stain nonetheless.
Sunerok approached the recent debacle with a laissez-faire attitude in fixing the bug issue as he pushed through with an accidental hard fork.
OCminer responded by asking if Verge was aware that the fix they implemented was actually a hard fork. OCminer then continued that the blockchain snapshot they provided was not valid anymore and with the new fix, Verge’s current chain will not be applicable anymore.
Verge (XVG) twitted recently an update claiming that funds were only susceptible for 3 hours. They continued saying that they will be running additional redundancy checks to avoid further issues of this nature going forward.
Further analysis by Suprnova saw the hack stopping on the 5th of April, as noted in a post by Ocminer.