- Ravencoin has burned 2.8 million RVN tokens in response to an exploit that saw extra tokens mined by hackers
- Flawed community code was behind the exploit
- Coin burn was preferred to other options such as moving halving date
Ravencoin has burned 2.8 million tokens to bring its supply back under control after hackers exploited a flaw in the mining algorithm. It was revealed last week that 2.8 million extra RVN tokens were created when a community code submission caused a vulnerability that allowed someone to engage in illegal Ravencoin mining beyond the stated ratio, but with Ravencoin burning 2.8 million of their own tokens the tokenomics are back where they should be.
Hackers Exploit Code Vulnerability
The exploit was revealed last week in a Medium piece by the Ravencoin team, which described how CryptoScope, developers of Solus Explorer, discovered the vulnerability which was used by malicious actors to mint RVN beyond the intended amount per block. In total, 2,803,989 RVN coins were minted, representing approximately 1.5% of the final 21 billion of Ravencoin tokens that will ever be minted. This represented about 44 extra days’ worth of mining on the cryptocurrency.
The tokens were shifted to an exchange and sold soon after they had been mined, earning the hackers some $52,000, and leaving the Ravencoin team with a decision to make about the extra RVN now in the supply. Various remedies were put forward, including bringing the halving forward by 44 days, but the Ravencoin team settled instead on burning the equivalent of what was mined:
Now the economics of Ravencoin are back to the way they were designed.
— Project Raven 🦅/ RVN / Ravencoin (@Ravencoin) July 5, 2020
Ravencoin Actions Praised by Community
The token burn was far from the perfect solution, but then no solution was going to be perfect, and at least this way the supply is back to what it should be. The resolution was well received by the community who felt that it was the most fair way of dealing with the situation:
Doing the right thing will become more easier. Examples like this will reinforce. #community
— ed devlin (@rvnflo) July 6, 2020
In the Medium post, Ravencoin said that the entire episode has been “difficult and embarrassing for the Ravencoin team” and were unable to explain how the faulty code got through their “hundreds of tests”. Thankfully for the community the situation hasn’t negatively impacted the Ravencoin price, and hopefully for the team and for fans of the project this is an aberration in an otherwise well respected project.
