Pornhub’s Favorite Verge Token Suffers Block Reorganization

Pornhub’s favorite Verge token seems to have suffered from a block reorganization or possibly a 51% attack according to the data by Coin Metrics that we have in our crypto news today.

Verge was hit with what it seems was a 51% attack according to the CoinMetrics’ researchers and it contested the characterization as well. Verge had a $400 million market cap as of today while the data engineer Antonie Le Calvez pointed out that something weird was happening on the Verge blockchain:

 “Looks like $XVG (Verge) experienced a massive 560k+ blocks reorg.  The past 200 days worth of $XVG transaction history just vanished. This is likely the deepest reorg that has ever taken place in a ‘top 100’ cryptocurrency.”

The past 200 days worth of $XVG transaction history just vanished.

This is likely the deepest reorg that has ever taken place in a "top 100" cryptocurrency. https://t.co/ItFNBVZqbp

— Lucas Nuzzi (@LucasNuzzi) February 15, 2021

Verge was among the top 100 cryptocurrencies with a market cap of $400 million but it was apparently attacked with a 51% attack. In this attack, the malicious actor gains control over most of the hash power on the blockchain which can be used to reorganize the blockchain and to replace the legitimate blocks with double-spend funds.  51% attacks can be extremely profitable for some blockchains. Ethereum Classic also experienced a 51% attack last year with ETC Labs’ Terry Culver explaining that a combination of access to liquidity and low hash rate made the blockchain the perfect target for these attacks.

Verge however noted that this was not happening here. A pinned message from the Telegram channel administrator reads:

 “The official block explorer has been restarted and syncing now, the [database] was corrupted, and it looks like some malicious nodes attempted some [transaction] spam and failed at their goal of causing a fork, this is all the information I have currently, an official update will be coming soon, stay calm and be assured your coins are safe, and yes we will be communicating with the exchanges as soon as we have all the details, No there was not a 51% attack.”

Verge is Pornhub’s favorite token as it started accepting it in April 2018, making it the first cryptocurrency that the platform embraced. This was because XVG matched the website’s need for discretion while it was initially conceptualized in 2014 as a privacy-based cryptocurrency. Speaking of Pornhub, Visa and Mastercard cut off Pornhub and declined all payments from customers that wanted to subscript to the premium adult website channel and the move came in response after the New York Times reports that showed cases of children pornography and rape videos on their site. PornHub changed its policies in order to fight against the abuse and said it was accepting crypto payments as a default payment method.