The 51% Attack Saga Continues: Dogecoin Now in the Crosshairs After Monero's Network Disruption

Following its controversial move against Monero, Qubic has signaled fresh intentions to expand its attack campaign. The project recently announced through community consensus that Dogecoin (DOGE), currently valued at approximately $18.63 billion in circulating market cap, stands as the next potential target on its radar.

Monero’s Costly Lesson: How a $75M Bet Challenged a $5B Network

The Monero (XMR) incident from mid-August serves as a chilling precedent. Qubic orchestrated what many consider the first large-scale demonstration of economic-incentive-driven network manipulation. By deploying $75 million strategically, the project managed to seize temporary control of a significant portion of Monero’s computational infrastructure.

The attack leveraged an innovative approach through the “useful proof of work (uPoW)” mechanism, which allowed Qubic to rapidly aggregate substantial hashing power. At its peak, the project commanded 52.72% of the Monero network’s hash rate—crossing the critical threshold needed for consensus control. This dominance resulted in the reorg of 6 blocks with 60 additional blocks orphaned from the main chain. More alarmingly, within a two-hour window, Qubic mined approximately 80% of all Monero blocks, demonstrating the vulnerability of smaller proof-of-work networks to concentrated capital attacks.

Expanding the Attack Vector: Why Dogecoin Becomes the Next Focal Point

The decision to target Dogecoin raises critical questions about network security across the crypto ecosystem. While DOGE operates on a more established infrastructure than some Layer 2 solutions, its relatively lower individual transaction value and hash rate compared to Bitcoin makes it theoretically susceptible to similar economic manipulation strategies that proved effective against Monero.

Community voting within the Qubic ecosystem has formally designated this next phase, suggesting the project views its Monero experiment not as a one-off event but as the opening move in a larger strategic campaign.

What This Means for Network Security

These developments underscore a fundamental vulnerability in proof-of-work systems: when the cost of attacking the network drops below the value that can be extracted, security assumptions break down. The Monero precedent proves that sufficient capital can temporarily overwhelm even established blockchain networks, prompting urgent conversations about mining decentralization, hash rate diversity, and protocol-level defenses against such attacks.