2026-10-03T22:41:34Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:27882 2026-10-02T17:40:23Z ddc:004 open_access

Inside Qubic’s Selfish Mining Campaign on Monero: Evidence, Tactics, and Limits Lee, Suhyeon Kim, Hyeongyeong Blockchain Proof-of-Work Selfish Mining Monero 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. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Suhyeon Lee and Hyeongyeong Kim 2026 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 395, 8th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2026) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2026.28 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-278821 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2026.28 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode