Cardano blockchain split prompts FBI investigation while ADA token dips

Cardano (ADA), one of the popular blockchains, has experienced a so-called chain split. The co-founder of the project states that "the FBI is already involved," and a developer has taken responsibility for the incident.

In the incident report, Intersect, an organization overseeing the development of the Cardano ecosystem, stated that on November 21st, a chain partition occurred on the network’s mainnet, resulting in a temporary split in the blockchain history, where two separate blockchains existed for a short period.

Developers claim that the root cause of the split is a malformed transaction that exploited a bug in the blockchain’s code. During the split, block production on the blockchain slowed down.

"No user funds have been compromised. Most wallets require no user action," Intersect said, later adding that the network converged back to a single chain within 14.5 hours after the network's nodes were upgraded.

Meanwhile, the team also claims that even the FBI was notified about the incident involving the network, which has a $15 billion market capitalization and is ranked tenth among crypto networks by this metric, "because this is being treated as a serious cyber incident, not a prank."

A developer known as @KpunToN00b on X admitted their fault for "endangering the network with my careless action."

"It started off as a ‘let's see if I can reproduce the bad transaction’ personal challenge and then I was dumb enough to rely on AI's instructions on how to block all traffic in/out of my Linux server without properly testing it on testnet first, and then watched in horror as the last block time on explorers froze," they said.

However, Charles Hoskinson, a co-founder of Cardano, claims that it’s the Cardano team that "caught the guy."

"It was absolutely personal and now he's trying to walk it back because he knows the FBI is already involved," Hoskinson said, later adding that it was "a premeditated attack" that was in the works for months in an attempt to target Hoskinson's personal pool of crypto assets.

According to the co-founder, "it will take weeks to clean up this mess and even longer for the brand and reputation damage to be repaired."

Meanwhile, ADA, the native token of Cardano, dropped after the incident, which coincided with a broader market selloff, and is now down around 6%, demonstrating a weaker recovery compared to other major crypto assets over the weekend.

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