Ravencoin Mining Pools Plan to Erase Three Days of Blockchain History

How an Attacker Bypassed Ravencoin's Proof-of-Work Check

Ravencoin uses a mining algorithm called KAWPOW, which requires miners to solve a hard mathematical puzzle before the network accepts a new block. Inside each block header sits a field called nHeight — it is supposed to record the block's actual position in the chain. A bug in Ravencoin's validation code meant the software never confirmed that the nHeight value matched the block's real position.

An attacker found this gap and began exploiting it at block 4,487,776, produced on August 7, 2026, at 15:44:01 UTC — a Friday. By writing a false value into nHeight, the attacker could skip the full KAWPOW computation that honest miners must complete. That made crafting fraudulent blocks far cheaper than producing legitimate ones, letting the attacker flood the chain with invalid data at very low cost.

Ravencoin's development team confirmed the attack in an official notice posted on the project's X account. They released emergency patch version 4.6.1.1-hf1, distributed by mining pool 2Miners as a hotfix. The patch sets block 4,487,775 as a hard checkpoint and rejects every block from height 4,487,776 onward. Network operators were asked to install the update immediately to stop the attacker from extending the invalid chain further.

Two Pools Now Hold the Recovery Decision

Two mining pools — 2Miners and RavenMiner — control a majority of Ravencoin's computing power used to mine new blocks. No source has published an exact percentage, but Ravencoin's own network notice and reporting by Decrypt both describe the pair as dominant. That concentration matters enormously: whichever chain these two pools build longest will become the chain the Ravencoin protocol recognizes as official.

The two pools began constructing a replacement chain starting at block 4,487,775 — the last valid block before the exploit. Under Ravencoin's rules, the longest chain always wins. If the pools' replacement chain grows longer than the current one, every block mined after 4,487,775 on the old chain gets discarded automatically, and the transactions inside those blocks vanish from the ledger as if they never happened.

Ravencoin's developers asked the pools to begin their replacement chain from a more recent block, which would have preserved more transactions and reduced disruption for users. The pools declined, according to CoinDesk and Decrypt. Ravencoin's official notice explicitly stated it 'does not constitute support for any rollback or recovery solution,' drawing a clear line between the project's position and the pools' independent decision.

Exchanges Suspend Services as Transactions Face Reversal

Ravencoin's official notice told all users and exchanges that every transaction confirmed after block 4,487,775 should be treated as potentially reversible. That covers roughly three days of activity — from Friday, August 7 through the weekend and into Monday, August 11, 2026. Anyone who received RVN, sent it, or used it to transfer a digital asset during that window could find those records erased from the official ledger.

Ravencoin publicly requested that exchanges suspend RVN services to protect users from sending funds that might vanish in a reorg. Several major exchanges complied. Checking live market data shows RVN fell sharply as news spread — multiple sources recorded a drop ranging from approximately 17% (CoinDesk) to approximately 20.4% (Decrypt), with RVN's market cap sitting in the sub-$50 million range throughout the event.

The price move correlates with the market reacting to uncertainty, but no source establishes a direct causal link between the exploit announcement and the drop. What is documented is that a meaningful share of exchange activity in RVN became untrustworthy for roughly three days. That kind of uncertainty — where already-confirmed transactions might disappear — is among the most disruptive outcomes a public blockchain can experience.

• Bitvavo halted RVN deposits and withdrawals
• Upbit suspended RVN services
• Bitget paused RVN transactions
• KuCoin issued a user advisory explaining the reversal risk

Ravencoin's Debt to Bitcoin and Its Own Security Record

Ravencoin launched in January 2018 as a fork of Bitcoin, copying its open-source code and then modifying it for a specific purpose: a blockchain built to issue and transfer digital assets representing real-world or virtual property. A fork inherits Bitcoin's transaction format and accounting model. But each fork must secure its own network independently — it cannot rely on Bitcoin's miners, developers, or security audits to protect it.

This is not Ravencoin's first consensus-level crisis. In 2020, attackers exploited a separate vulnerability to mint approximately 315 million RVN that should never have existed. That incident is documented in public records and multiple cryptocurrency publications. The 2026 KAWPOW exploit follows the same pattern: a validation check that should have been enforced was not, and an attacker found the gap before the developers did.

The mining difficulty mechanism is what makes producing a fraudulent block costly on any Bitcoin-derived chain. When an attacker bypasses the proof-of-work requirement entirely — as happened here — that cost disappears. The economic protection these blockchains rely on collapses when a code path lets someone skip it. That is the structural lesson of both the 2020 minting attack and this 2026 exploit: every validation rule must be enforced without gaps.

The Three Days of History That Mining Pools Could Erase

As of August 11, 2026, the replacement chain built by 2Miners and RavenMiner had not yet overtaken the current Ravencoin chain. CoinDesk used conditional framing — 'could roll back' — because the reorg had not occurred at publication time. Whether it succeeds depends on how quickly the pools accumulate enough blocks to surpass the existing chain and whether other miners join them or continue building on the old one.

If the replacement chain wins, the Ravencoin ledger will show no record of anything that happened between blocks 4,487,776 and the point where the new chain reaches parity. Merchants who accepted RVN, users who withdrew from exchanges, and anyone who transferred a tokenized asset could find the network treating those events as though they never occurred. The mining economics behind this dynamic apply to any proof-of-work fork of Bitcoin.

The situation highlights a well-known tension in proof-of-work blockchains: the parties with the most computing power make the final decisions, even when those choices differ from what the software developers prefer. Ravencoin's team asked for a less disruptive path; the pools chose a different one. Three days of transactions now wait for the longer chain — and the version of history it records — to emerge.