Let me start of by saying we are not aware of any possible attack on the Vertcoin network, and if there was an attempt it has NOT been successful.

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s take a closer look at what’s going on.

We have seen possible selfish mining behaviour on the Vertcoin Network, where one pool kept finding many blocks in quick succession. This pool was also nearing a majority share of the network. While this behaviour does not seem to pose a direct threat to the network, it is better to be safe than sorry. This is why the behaviour is currently being investigated by the Vertcoin developers. I would like to point out that the Vertcoin team has a positive relationship with this pool, so while it is far from ideal, we do not expect any malicious behaviour at this point. I do encourage everyone to support decentralization by choosing pools wisely. The short term benefits of mining on the largest pool do not outweigh the long-term effects of this if the pool decides to act maliciously. You can find some alternative mining pools here.

I did really want to bring up this point because, although the Vertcoin network seems to be safe, we have seen extraordinary mining behaviour at other coins over the past few days. The recent events on those networks should encourage us to stay vigilant and constantly strive for greater decentralization as a community.

In case you’re wondering, I am specifically talking about Bitcoin Gold and Monacoin. A pool with majority hashrate performed a successful double spend attack against exchanges on the Monacoin network. Bitcoin Gold is also dealing with a dominant miner, who is renting hashrate at a rate of 0.12 BTC per minute. The situation turned into 51% attack on the BTG network and is still in progress as I write this.