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Inside Qubic’s Selfish Mining Campaign on Monero: Evidence, Tactics, and Limits

Authors Suhyeon Lee , Hyeongyeong Kim

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LIPIcs.AFT.2026.28.pdf
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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Security and privacy → Distributed systems security
  • Computer systems organization → Peer-to-peer architectures
  • Networks → Network measurement
Keywords
  • Blockchain
  • Proof-of-Work
  • Selfish Mining
  • Monero

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Abstract

In 2025, the blockchain network Qubic conducted a mining campaign on Monero, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency. It publicly presented the campaign as a "51% takeover" and a demonstration of selfish mining. The episode provides a rare opportunity to test such claims in a privacy-preserving proof-of-work network, where pool attribution and private release decisions are difficult to observe. We combine Monero node measurements, Qubic pool observations, community-shared artifacts, and disclosed view keys to attribute blocks and identify candidate withholding periods. Rather than sustained majority control, we observe elevated orphaning and deeper reorganizations. Qubic did not follow a single optimized selfish mining strategy, instead varying between standard selfish mining and more defensive block-release decisions. Across the campaign, it gained no reward advantage over honest mining. Community monitoring and Qubic’s countermeasures reveal how real-world mining campaigns evolve in response to an active ecosystem. Overall, the campaign disrupted Monero without exhibiting a stable profit-maximizing strategy, leaving open disruptive incentives beyond direct mining rewards.

Cite As Get BibTex

Suhyeon Lee and Hyeongyeong Kim. Inside Qubic’s Selfish Mining Campaign on Monero: Evidence, Tactics, and Limits. In 8th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 395, pp. 28:1-28:19, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2026.28

Author Details

Suhyeon Lee
  • ShardLab, Seoul, Republic of Korea
  • Hashed Open Research, Seoul, Republic of Korea
Hyeongyeong Kim
  • Korea University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

Funding

  • Lee, Suhyeon: Suhyeon Lee received support from ShardLab.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Monero community for sharing artifacts and empirical observations that complemented our measurements. We especially thank DataHoarder (https://github.com/WeebDataHoarder) and Sergei Chernykh (sech1) for providing access to supplemental datasets and answering technical questions that helped us validate and refine parts of our analysis. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful feedback, which helped improve the paper.

Supplementary Materials

References

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