The invalid chain grew by 13 blocks, equivalent to 32 minutes of transaction history.
The Litecoin Foundation recognized failures in emergency coordination between pools and developers
F2pool, one of the mining pools with the largest participation in the Litecoin network, published a statement on April 29 detailing how it responded in real time to the attack that on April 25 generated a fork of 13 blocks in the chain.
According to the firm, its systems immediately identified abnormal activity arising from invalid MWEB transactions and continued to operate on the legitimate chain under the current consensus rules.
F2pool is one of the oldest and highest hashrate cryptocurrency mining pools in the world, with active operations in Bitcoin, Litecoin and other networks. proof-of-work (proof of work). Your position within the Litecoin network made him a decisive actor during the crisis, given that the recovery of the chain It depended on the updated pools concentrating enough computing power to overcome the invalid chain.
According to the statement, starting with block 3,095,931, the firm extracted the blocks that allowed the valid chain to regain the advantage over the fork fake. The firm describes the process as a “13-block chase” that culminated in a reorganization natural towards the correct chain, and thanks its miners for keeping the hashrate active during the event.
F2pool’s account is consistent with the postmortem posted on April 28 by David Burkett, lead developer of Litecoin Core, detailing the technical flaws that enabled the attack.
According to Burkett, updated mining nodes were paralyzed when processing mutated MWEB data, allowing unpatched nodes to extend the invalid chain while attackers simultaneously executed a denial-of-service attack against pools with the fixed software.
Coordination between pools: key to recovery
The incident exposed a structural tension in networks proof-of-work: Security patches are not mandatory and their deployment depends on each operator updating independently.
According to the Criptonoticias report, the history of commits from GitHub shows that the consensus vulnerability in MWEB was privately patched between March 19 and March 26, 37 days before the attack. This, without the correction being massively demanded to all node operators.
F2pool’s statement does not address that gap in the disclosure process, nor confirmed losses on cross-chain exchange platforms that processed transactions on the invalid chain before the reorganization.
On this, Burkett’s postmortem, NEAR Intents rrecorded a loss of approximately 11,000 LTC after processing an exchange that was left unsupported once the chain was rolled back, while THORChain reported a smaller loss in similar circumstances.
The Litecoin network has been operating normally since the release of version 0.21.5.4. F2pool concludes its statement by noting that the event demonstrated the value of its miners’ continuous hashrate in preserving the integrity of the network, without commenting on the coordination mechanisms that, according to Burkett, will need to be formalized to prevent an unequal update window from being exploited again.