The developers behind Bitcoin Core have released an update that patches a recently discovered vulnerability in the software that could leave Bitcoin exposed to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

The extremely dangerous bug could potentially knock out nodes, or even crash a segment of the Bitcoin network if exploited. The complicated and expensive exploit would need to involve processing a double-spend attack created by a miner with malicious intentions.

A miner would need to burn a block of at least 12.5 BTC, roughly $80,000 worth of Bitcoin, in order to exploit the vulnerability. Such an expensive sacrifice may have deterred would be hackers, however, the cryptocurrency community feared a competitor might have financial motivation to issue such an attack, harming Bitcoin’s long-standing reputation of being the most secure and hack-proof blockchain in cryptocurrency.

In response, Bitcoin Core developers quickly released Bitcoin Core 0.16.3 which includes the fix to remove the vulnerability from the software. According to a press release from the Bitcoin Core Project, the new update enables the software to “quietly reject” the invalid blocks created by the malicious miner.

Bitcoin Core devs implore “all network participants to upgrade to [the new software] as soon as possible.” Surprisingly, while the vulnerability was only discovered two days ago, prompting developers to take action, the vulnerability has existed since March 2017’s Bitcoin Core 0.14.0 software release.

Investor’s bitcoins were always safe, however, the exploit could have had a detrimental effect on the Bitcoin network. According to Bitcoin.org co-owner known as Cobra Bitcoin, the exploit could have crashed a “huge chunk of the Bitcoin network.” Such a widespread issue could forever harm Bitcoin’s reputation as the most secure blockchain in existence. Given the critical point in Bitcoin’s history the leading cryptocurrency by market cap is at, such a catastrophic network outage could have sent Bitcoin prices tumbling to new lows.