Anyone who moved Ravencoin since Friday may find the transaction has never happened.
The project disclosed a critical consensus vulnerability on Monday, saying it had been demonstrated and exploited, and that the network may erase several days of transactions to recover. RVN fell 20.4% on the day and its market capitalisation now stands at around $46 million.
What Broke
Ravencoin runs on proof-of-work, the mining model Bitcoin uses and which Ravencoin forked from in 2018. Under that system the version of the chain backed by the most computing power is the one the network treats as real.
The flaw broke that rule. According to the project’s notice, the bug caused invalid blocks to be accepted by vulnerable nodes, with the first known one appearing at height 4,487,776 at 15:44 UTC on 7 August.
Two mining pools, 2Miners and RavenMiner, control a majority of the network’s hash rate and have announced they are mining a chain that excludes everything from that block onward. If enough miners follow them, that chain becomes the real one and the network undergoes what the notice calls a deep chain reorganisation of roughly three days.
The fix, in effect, is to treat block 4,487,775 as the last valid block and rebuild from there.
The Developer Asked. The Pools Said No.
The most revealing detail in the notice is what happened next.
The developer who published it asked the pools to choose a more recent recovery point, to reduce the damage to users, services and exchanges. The request was declined.
That is the concentration problem stated plainly. Two pools between them hold enough of Ravencoin’s hash power to decide which version of the ledger is true, and when the project’s own developer asked them to soften the impact, they said no and there was no further step to take.
The concentration is partly a legacy of Ravencoin’s best moment. When Ethereum switched from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake in 2022, displaced miners moved to chains that still needed them, and Ravencoin’s hash rate jumped as they arrived. A small number of pools holding the majority is the bill for that inheritance.
What Holders Should Actually Do
The practical guidance is unusually blunt.
The notice says transactions confirmed after block 4,487,775 should be treated as at risk. Some may return to the mempool and be mined again, but that is not guaranteed, and exchanges should not assume reversed deposits or withdrawals will reappear or confirm a second time.
The recommendation to exchanges was to suspend RVN deposits and withdrawals until the chain state is stable. South Korea’s Upbit and the Netherlands’ Bitvavo have already frozen movement of the token.
For anyone holding RVN, the useful reading is narrow. Coins sitting in a wallet you control are not the exposure. The exposure is any transfer, deposit, withdrawal or payment made since Friday afternoon, and the honest answer on whether those survive is that nobody knows yet.
Not the First Time a Ledger Has Bent
Immutability has bent before. Ethereum’s beacon chain logged its longest reorganisation in years in 2022, and Ethereum Classic absorbed repeated 51% attacks that let attackers rewrite blocks.
The selling was immediate. The 20.4% fall wiped out months of range-bound trading between roughly $0.0038 and $0.0045, where RVN had traded since mid-June. Measured from its late-May level near $0.0055, the token has lost close to half its value.
The rollback has not happened yet. It happens if the pools’ chain wins, and on current hash rate distribution there is little standing in its way.
