Monero Under a ‘51% Attack’ Threat by Mining Pool MineXMR

In an alarming development, members of the Monero community brought to light a single mempool that is reaching closer to holding serious domination over the entire network.

While the Monero team has not provided any update yet despite the community actively posting about it, this is how the phenomenon could affect the entire network.

Monero MineXMR Pool

The mining pool known as MineXMR is the topmost pool in the Monero miners community which collectively has over 12,851 miners generating 1.5 million kH/s. The amount of Hash Rate produced by them alone accounts for 44.2% of all Hash Rate.

Now the reason why this is alarming is that it is never good for any single miner or pool to gain more than 51% dominance in the Hash Rate as it makes the entire network vulnerable to a 51% attack.

A 51% attack is considered to be one of the biggest threats to a network in the crypto space because when a single entity holds such dominance, they also hold significant power in the decision-making as well as the validation of transactions.

The immutability of blockchain technology falls under risk in such a case.

In the case of Monero specifically, this could cause significant chaos amongst the investors. As it is the network has been witnessing reduced activity from its users.

Transaction activity has come down by 51% from its peak of 40k to just 19k at the moment.

To add further fuel to the fire, the volatility has been rising at a rapid rate standing at a 5 month high. This has led to the returns on investment dropping to a staggering negative 27.08.

Consequently, this could lead to investors backing out and the price falling further. XMR is already 64% below its all-time high of $484, trading at $177

Other 51% Attacks

Last year in august, Bitcoin hard fork Bitcoin SV (BSV) suffered a 51% attack after which the coin lost 5% of its value. 2 years before that another Bitcoin hard fork Bitcoin Gold went through a similar attack. 

Ethereum’s hardfork Ethereum Classic too was a victim of a 51% attack not once or twice but three times in the same month in 2020. The first attack hit on August 1, the second occurred on August 6 followed by the third attack on August 29.

Although neither of these three coins suffered fatal losses, it still doesn’t take away from the fact that such situations are not good for a network.