Ravencoin Blockchain Rebuilt as Mining Pools Take Charge

Ravencoin's blockchain has suffered its third consensus failure since 2018, and this time it's not just the development team trying to fix it. The mining pools, which hold most of the network's power, have taken charge of rebuilding the chain after a critical vulnerability was exploited.

The issue, which allowed attackers to submit blocks without doing the necessary computational work, was first spotted at block height 4,487,776 on August 7. By the time it was fixed, around 96 invalid blocks had been created, and nodes running the standard software started crashing on restart.

The patch, v4.6.1.1-hf1, was written by 2Miners and released from their GitHub repository, as Ravencoin's development team had not published a fix. The pools decided to discard everything after block 4,487,776, effectively rewriting nearly three days of transactions.

This is the third time this year that Ravencoin has faced a major issue, with similar problems in September 2018 and May-July 2020. In each case, it was an outside party that caught or fixed the problem, rather than the development team.